Kamal Quadir and Naeem Mohaiemen

CellBazaar: A Market in Your Pocket

In the late 1990s, there was much prognostication about the sub-computer future.
It would put leapfrog theory into action, allowing developing economies to catch
up with industrialized nations in one generation. But despite all the publicity and
investment, usable sub-computers have not become the holy grail. Only the edu-
cated middle class has adopted them. The mass of people, especially in the rural
and suburban regions of developing economies, have not. The issues extend
beyond expense and availability, because no usable technology has been developed
for these potential users. We often hear media-friendly examples, like the fisher-
man who checks the weather forecast on the web. While these stories amuse peo-
ple at conferences and NGO forums, the truth is that such users are rare. Most of
the applications on computers have little utility for a sub-literate mass population.
CellBazaar began with a classroom observation that looked at this weakness
and the corollary of opportunity. Simply put, the mobile phone has become the
ubiquitous computing device in developing countries. The meteoric growth of
mobile phone users in emerging economies has superseded all analyst predictions
and future scenarios. The mobile phone has replaced the computer as the fastest-
growing technology. Allowing people almost everywhere to stay in touch with fam-
ily, friends, and customers, and fulfilling myriad other needs, the mobile phone has
become the essential technology. In countries like Bangladesh, the adoption curves
have been astonishingly rapid, displaying classic “hockey stick” patterns. To take
full advantage of this opportunity, we launched the mobile phone based market
called CellBazaar in Bangladesh.

This case study is jointly written. Kamal Quadir describes the founding days, Quando
CellBazaar moved from classroom to startup. Naeem Mohaiemen writes about the
marketing and technology challenges as the company matured through market pene-
tration.

Kamal Quadir (kamal@cellbazaar.com) is founder and CEO of CellBazaar. Earlier,
he interned at Insight Venture Partners in New York, led the Business Development
Division of Occidental Petroleum’s initiative in Bangladesh, and worked for New York
City’s Chamber of Commerce.

Naeem Mohaiemen (naeem@cellbazaar.com) is Vice President of Business
Development and Marketing at CellBazaar. He worked on digital media and conver-
gence projects in New York at Mercer Consulting (Marsh & McLennnan), HBO, E
Time Warner Cable.

© 2009 Kamal Quadir and Naeem Mohaiemen
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Kamal Quadir and Naeem Mohaiemen

MARKET IN YOUR POCKET

In developing countries, the limits on communication technology hinder business.
People must travel great distances to get market information. Isolated and unin-
formed, farmers, traders, and businesspeople have little information, and thus no
power to bargain with middlemen. CellBazaar was devised to solve this problem.
Using this platform, everyone gathers market information so they can make smart
business decisions. In the process, they provide a birds’ eye view of the entire mar-
ket for both sellers and buyers. Those who lack the capital to set up a brick-and-
mortar business can do so using their mobile. Individuals emerge as creators of
micro-markets, and the prices in the overall market eventually converge. Outliers
are eliminated simply because quick comparisons make it clear that they are charg-
ing above-average prices.

CellBazaar works on four synchronized platforms: SMS (texting), which works
on all phones); WAP (wireless application protocol), with an easy, graphic inter-
face; Web (viewable by a global audience); and IVR (interactive voice response),
which allows users to call to hear the latest news. More new platforms are being
added, as the market rapidly adopts newer mobile phones. CellBazaar generates
revenue from the data usage on all these platforms and dramatically increases the
use of simple airtime minutes, as buyers and sellers talk to finish their transactions.
As m-commerce matures in the developing world, CellBazaar hopes to have an
already trusted platform and a growing user base.

The CellBazaar service allows people to buy and sell over mobile phones.
Nearly 22 million GrameenPhone users can buy any agricultural product, ad esempio
rice, pescare, or chicken, as well as large-scale purchases like an apartment, land, or car,
and consumer goods such as a television or refrigerator. People can also offer serv-
ices, like tutoring. The service is run by the customers: they post items for sale,
delete items after they are sold, adjust prices if items fail to sell, and do much more
besides.

Over the last year, CellBazaar has grown rapidly; it now has 1.5 million users
and averages 90,000 hits a day (including page views and SMS messages). Its reg-
istered seller base is 51,000, and its unregistered user base is 30 times that size. IL
diversity of products posted has resulted in constant innovation and change. Come il
company grows and matures, it appears set to be the first Internet model startup
in Bangladesh’s history, with global media interest, local imitators, overseas expan-
sion plans, and international-standard management and staffing.

Kamal originally designed CellBazaar at MIT as a graduate student. The proj-
ect received the MIT “Ideas for Development” award, Slate magazine named it one
of its “10 Faces For The Future,” and it was one of 25 recipients of MIT’s Tech
Awards 2007 for Applying Technology to Benefit Humanity. In 2008, CellBazaar
received three major international awards—from the GSMA in Spain, Telecom
Asia in Thailand, and Manthan in India—resulting in increased interest in inter-
national expansion partnerships.

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CellBazaar: A Market in Your Pocket

But CellBazaar has faced challenges. Some are the traditional obstacles in any
emerging economy: poor infrastructure and little culture of entrepreneurship.
Other problems have come from the unexpected rate of technology adoption: plat-
forms often take off faster than expected. The CellBazaar case offers valuable les-
sons to new technology entrepreneurs entering emerging economies.

FROM CLASSROOM TO REALITY

IO (Kamal) often tell a story about a newspaper item that appeared in the early
1980S: in the remote Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) area of Bangladesh, people
would trade a basket of oranges for a box of matches. Reading this item was an eye-
opener for me. It was a live demonstration of how lack of road access created an
incredible premium for something as banal as a box of matches (usually given
away free at road-side tea stalls in the capital city of Dhaka). In fact, the CHT
region is so isolated that it only received mobile phone connectivity in 2008. It was
a classic case of market failure due to lack of communication, informazione, E
infrastructure. This simple lesson manifested years later as I began developing
CellBazaar’s business plan.

After working in the energy and finance industries, I spent the years between
2000 E 2003 jump-starting Bangladesh’s animation industry. The country had
no digital animators, so I trained the first set. Recruiting raw talent from the coun-
try’s art schools and also from untrained backgrounds, I trained them from scratch
in digital animation. My own interest in the fine arts was invaluable in this process.
Many of my trained animators went on to form their own animation shops; some
are now receiving contracts to produce animation for Hollywood films. Through
this experience, I also faced for the first time the concept of “pioneer’s penalty,"
which CellBazaar would also experience and overcome. Being the first to bring a
new class of product to Bangladesh can be exciting, but it is also difficult, as it
means building the foundations as well as the company.

In 2003, after helping to train the first batch of local animators, I went to MIT
to complete an MBA at the Sloan School. My plan was to take a break from the
emerging markets and explore new technology projects in the U.S., particularly
through the Massachusetts technology corridor. My ongoing assumption, partial-
ly influenced by the challenges of the animation industry, was that countries like
Bangladesh were not yet ready to reap the full benefits of the technology revolu-
zione. The “digital moment” had not fully arrived in the developing world, in spite
of donor-funded efforts such as the sub-computer and the fabled use of the
Internet in fishing villages.

While at MIT, I started a class project at the Media Lab re-investigating the
technology sector in Bangladesh. During my two years back on a college campus,
many changes came to Bangladesh. While computer projects funded by donor
agencies had produced meager results, another trajectory was sweeping the coun-
try. As of 2005, the personal computer was struggling to cross the million mark in
Bangladesh, but the mobile phone had crossed the 10 million mark; e da 2008,

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it would reach 47 million. But only a fraction of this available new capacity was
being utilized. One analogy I often make is that a mobile phone has computing
power roughly equivalent to the basic computers NASA used in 1969, but very lit-
tle of that power is being used. The average mobile user in Bangladesh is only stor-
ing numbers, making calls, sending SMS messages, downloading ring tones,
exchanging files, and changing his or her “wallpaper.”

Seeing this untapped potential, I looked for a matching market demand. IL
most obvious unfulfilled need was market and trading information. The trans-
parency was minimal in market pricing in every sector, from agriculture to elec-
tronic devices, from housing prices to repair services. Middlemen and intermedi-
aries ruled this scene, inserting themselves into the value chain, preying on less
knowledgeable buyers and sellers, and adding a layer of price inflation that bene-
fited no one. CellBazaar was designed to be a marketplace on the mobile phone,
reaching a mass population, which would remove the intermediary and give buy-
ers and sellers direct access to one another. By creating an interlinked, multi-indus-
try marketplace that millions could view at the same time, the project would also
push sellers toward transparency and push prices toward convergence, so that mar-
kets would always be fair, equitable, and workable.

At this stage, the project was still in “blue sky” mode. The mockup I created for
my class project showed state-of-the-art visuals, images of sellers and products,
advanced GUI, a star-rating system, and more—all contained within a screen that
looked like the (as yet unknown) iPhone screen. The project received an MIT Ideas
Award for its contribution to ideas of technology and development, but I had no
idea whether the technology infrastructure in my native Bangladesh was ready for
all this. I went home on a look-and-see mission: to survey the lay of the land and
estimate when the local market would be ready for the project.

BUILDING FROM SCRATCH

Back home, I soon discovered that things were moving faster than I had expected.
Although news of business and technology developments did filter back to the
Boston campus via online news services, nothing could match my sudden on-the-
ground, real-time, lived experience. To my surprise, I found that in the two years I
had been in the U.S., the mobile market had turbocharged beyond my business
school classroom calculations: the hockey stick curve had sharpened. More impor-
tant, mobile phones were starting to trickle down to the “financially constrained”
(FC) sector. Two points became clear. Primo, the business scene was more than ready
to absorb the CellBazaar concept and the window of opportunity was immediate.
And second, we should quickly expand my MIT business plan to incorporate the
FC sector, especially the untargeted agricultural sector.

Dropping my plans to take a job with a private equity firm in the U.S., I regis-
tered CellBazaar as a U.S. business and moved into rapid-action mode. I raised the
necessary capital from Omidyar Network, Barred Rock Capital and Gray Matters
Capital in the U.S. Soon we had registered the company as a Foreign Direct

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CellBazaar: A Market in Your Pocket

Investor—a process that is normally quite byzantine in Bangladesh—had filed a
patent application with the Bangladesh patent office, and had signed an exclusive
partnership (until spring 2009) with GrameenPhone, the country’s largest mobile
operator, con 60 percent of the market share.

The decision to sign this exclusive partnership with GrameenPhone was a
complex one. The concept of exclusivity is not well understood in Bangladesh, Ma
it goes to the core of our two-pronged market strategy:

In 2005, the local market was flooded with “value added services” or “content
providers.” Often dismissively referred to in the shorthand of CP, these companies
provide many different variations of ringtones, “wallpapers”, videos, and weather
forecasts. In a mass market, these were considered simple add-ons for the mobile
companies. From the beginning, CellBazaar wanted to be taken seriously as an
equal partner, and exclusivity was a necessary first step.

In a war for market share, telephone companies in developing countries rap-
idly find themselves competing, using incentive packages that include rate cuts,
free minutes, free SMS, and more. The result has been a race to the bottom, con
no company attempting to differentiate itself by aiming upward. CellBazaar decid-
ed to offer a differentiating service that would become so essential to people’s lives
that subscribers would consider switching carriers to use it. In order to prove this
concept—that a service partner could be powerful enough to drive customers to
switch providers—we had to be in an exclusive partnership.

After positioning, patents, and partnerships, we faced another major challenge:
building up a staff and management team. Bangladesh’s oversize population is a
remarkable phenomenon: 150 million people, with an average age in the early 20s,
live in a country the size of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. Dhaka, the capital city, È
unofficially home to 15 million people, which would make it the world’s most
densely populated city. But this population explosion is also an economic asset: In
its analysis of the “Next-11” countries (“Dreaming with BRICS: The Path to 2050,”
2003), Goldman Sachs identified this bulging population as potential consumers.
Ancora, startups face a challenge: in this huge population, there are few trained man-
agers, especially in high technology.

FDI regulations encourage foreign firms to hire local workers, to encourage
knowledge transfer and build local capacity. This policy makes sense from the
point of view of long-term sustainability—and I was committed to building up
local expertise for the long term. Nel frattempo, courses at MIT had taught me about
the value of intellectual property: it was essential that the in-house team under-
stand, control and modify the code. But Bangladesh had no established workforce
with experience in building mobile phone applications that have intense database
needs and are integrated into e-commerce. We hired a Danish-U.S.-Bangladeshi
joint venture to jump-start the application development, but the long-term solu-
tion had to be local.

To go more local, we hired young computer science graduates who were rela-
tively inexperienced but showed problem-solving potential. Here we encountered
another challenge: as a startup truly using a U.S. modello, our key recruitment plat-

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form offered a mixture of salary and equity. While employees in Silicon Valley
understand the potential payoff from equity, the model is unknown in Bangladesh.
No equity success stories are inspiring bootstrap innovators. Ancora, we hired a hun-
gry young group of programmers and technology innovators. Sometimes it felt
like a garage startup: we interviewed Employee #2, currently our chief pplication
developer, in an ice cream parlor as we had no office at that time. From that sim-
ple beginning, the technology team has advanced to interfacing as equals with
members of foreign technology teams who have ten years of experience.

The other area of major hiring was the marketing team; here the challenges
were different and equally daunting. With the advent of the mobile phone sector
and galloping growth, Bangladesh has a large pool of marketing graduates who are
eager for jobs. Given the large pool, the salary pressures are lower than in technol-
ogy. Bangladesh also has an established hierarchy of Ivy League style schools (NSU,
BRAC University, eccetera.), producing graduates, some of whom we hired. We made a
surprise discovery about the nature of marketing in this setting: these graduates
had been trained for a world of meetings, memos, marketing plans, and forecasts.
In other words, office-based, paper-generating planning work. But for a startup
like CellBazaar, marketing needed a grassroots, roll-up-your-sleeves, guerilla mar-
keting approach. We needed marketing people who could interact with common
people at all levels, especially those of working-class and agricultural backgrounds.
In this arena, urban language and a visible middle-class background were actu-
ally a hindrance: they created a wall of separation from the man on the street.
Rapidly recognizing this challenge, we completely changed our strategy. Now the
focus was on staff with street smarts and savvy talking skills; people from non-Ivy
schools were ideal here, as they could integrate easily and mix with people of all
backgrounds. This shift in strategy created a twin-track marketing team, with the
smaller staff of office-bound workers learning to work smoothly with a larger staff
of “street marketers.” This successful experiment also generated startup energy and
entrepreneurial speed for CellBazaar in the early days.

A RAPIDLY EVOLVING MARKET

As we launched CellBazaar in Bangladesh, it took off rapidly. Infatti, we discovered
that people were eager for software and platform innovations that we hadn’t yet
planned. We also had blind spots as to how fast the market would change—but we
managed to adapt quickly, constantly adjusting our product strategy.

When we first launched CellBazaar in 2006, we assumed that SMS-based
phones would continue to dominate the market for another few years. Only a few
people had WAP/Internet enabled mobiles with graphic interfaces; high-end
smartphones were a rarity. Our forecasts said it would take several years before
most people had Internet-enabled phones. Our initial launch focused only on an
SMS-based application; our plan was for the technical team to continue modifying
that application for another year or two, and then we would launch the second-
generation applications on WAP and the Web.

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CellBazaar: A Market in Your Pocket

In the early days of CellBazaar, we would go to partner meetings and deliber-
ately use only a low-end mobile phone. We were trying to demonstrate that the
product was available to the masses, with even the cheapest phones. Often a com-
pany CEO would bring out a high-end phone (In 2006, still a rarity) and ask why
we did not have a similar phone. We would respond that most people could not
afford such a phone (then retailing at upwards of 35,000 Taka/U.S. $500), and we wanted to reach a mass audience. But by January of 2007, the handset market experienced a seismic shift, and suddenly high-end phones were proliferating. Here the younger members of our team, especially the most recent graduates, served as an early warning system. We started seeing trends from two ends of the market. The tech team spread news of the rapid increase in graphic-enabled phones, which were status symbols in the college and teenage market. Nel frattempo, the marketing team heard news of second- hand Internet-enabled phones spreading in the sub-middle class market. At least five complex, interlocking factors help explain this rapid penetration, especially into the financially constrained segment: • Nokia began a major foray into Bangladesh, identifying it as a major consumer market for high-end, prestige phones. Its successful blitz campaign used very unconventional methods for Bangladesh, including road shows with fashion models, celebrity endorsements, and aspirational ads featuring western users at play. • The status-symbol phones, especially the sliding N95, E95, and Music Express, became hits in 2007. • The iPhone arrived as the first celebrity phone, Bangladesh-based hackers man- aged to unlock it in record time, and the press was intrigued. • Cheap clone phones flooded into Bangladesh from China’s grey market; soon look-alike phones were retailing for as little as Taka 8,000 (about U.S. $120),
while the Nokia originals retailed at Taka 30,000 (about U.S. $430).

• More and more local youth were joining networks to trade video clips, E
then wanted video-capable phones—Internet capability was an accidental
bonus.

Contradicting our cautious estimates, more than 25 percent of the country’s
user base had Internet-enabled phones by early 2007. This led us to change our
strategy rapidly, and fast-track the WAP and Web platform. In startup mode all
over again, the teams worked around the clock to meet intense deadlines and we
launched the WAP and Web applications by mid-2007. Now we could access the
growing market simultaneously from net-enabled mobiles as well as computers.
People were using all three platforms to access the same synchronized database,
which vastly increased the complexity of our data management challenges. IL
technical team experienced a few hiccups and growing pains, but their trial-by-fire
produced a seasoned team: in six months they had matured well beyond their
years.

The fast-track gamble paid off: three months after the launch, more people
were using the WAP platform than the SMS platform and we had ten times the

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traffic. The Web platform took off in early 2008, partially due to our ubiquitous
bumper sticker campaign. By the end of the first quarter of 2008, WAP and Web
usage were roughly even; both were getting about 20 A 30 times the traffic of the
SMS platform. We learned that once a consumer has access to a net-enabled
phone, they will never go back to using CellBazaar on the SMS platform. The ease
of use and speed of the GUI platform makes it unbeatable.

This experience led us to a wholesale change in our revenue models, as some
things arrived sooner than expected. In particular, we are now testing targeted
advertising (linking an advertiser to a specific product search) on the WAP plat-
form. Although targeted advertising was theoretically possible on SMS, it lacked
graphics and animation, and would never have been able to command premium
rates. Based on this experience, in fall 2008 we launched a fourth platform, using
interactive voice recognition (IVR). This fit with an overall trend among cell phone
companies of covering all platforms, and also of earning higher revenues by being
easier to use. Because the IVR is in Bengali and requires no typing, it was the next
logical step after WAP and Web.

Right now, our sources of direct revenue are SMS fees (per SMS), IVR fees (per
minute), WAP browsing fees (per kilobyte), and targeted advertising. Inoltre,
we have several channels of indirect revenue, including the voice revenue generat-
ed when a person makes a phone call to complete a transaction (GrameenPhone is
now researching the number of minutes generated and amount of revenue to share
with CellBazaar). A popular consumer item can generate calls from up to 30
callers, and if they begin to negotiate over the price, the calls can last from five to
ten minutes. In addition to these existing revenue channels, we see many addition-
al sources of revenue that we are currently offering for free. We intend to make the
service as popular as possible, and build up a national critical mass. Once the
CellBazaar service becomes absolutely ubiquitous and an essential daily tool (cioè.,
a consumer can no longer imagine doing a buy-sell transaction without us), we
can gradually charge fees for add-on services.

INVENTING TECHNOLOGY BUILDING BLOCKS

Even though we created a top-tier technology team, and brought the entire devel-
opment in house by month six, we faced many challenges, mainly because we
found ourselves to be the first at the gate for many features. That meant we had no
local expertise to turn to, no one who had implemented anything similar. Nor
could we import expertise, given the country’s restrictive laws regarding short-
term work visas.

In this context, the Internet became a boon for our in-house technical team. UN
combination of chat groups, bulletin boards, Usenet groups, hacker forums, E
Skype calls brought a virtual team of tech experts into our office. Aided by the
“geek core” emphasis on collaborative work, and also by the fact that this was a
startup based in Bangladesh, many technologists from northern countries donat-
ed time and expertise. This was crucial for trouble-shooting many of the new

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CellBazaar: A Market in Your Pocket

issues we faced. To give a taste of these challenges, here are five key issues we faced
and solved.

Building WAP. The WAP version of the application had to support a large vari-
ety of WAP-enabled handsets, from many providers, as well as the cheap clones.
Because Bangladesh has no local standards, there were (and continue to be) many
variations in phone settings, none of which we could control from our end. Over
time, we had to fix problems through trial and error, which is extremely time-con-
suming.

Synchronizing all platforms. We had to synchronize all the data collected via an
SMS, WAP, or Web platform. But these three platforms were connected via differ-
ent gateways, and each had completely different environments and platforms.
Moreoever, we had no documentation for many of these new environments.

Recruiting bug testers. There is no local demand for bug testing, and no out-
sourcing market for them. Thus there was no local pool of testers, especially not
for mobile phone applications. So we had to recruit computer science students and
train them from scratch. After months of training, they became capable testers.
Naturally, as often happens in technology, the premium training they received
from us made them lucrative hires for other companies that are now setting up
shop. So the pool of bug testers has a high turnover rate, another form of pioneer’s
penalty.

Adding animation and images. After we launched the WAP platform, it became
crucial to start adding visually appealing graphics and animation. Most of the ani-
mation capability in Bangladesh used flash technology for broswers screens, so no
one had experience animating for mobile phones, where the files have to be made
ultra-light. Here too we had to train the first practitioners.

Integrating the local language. As most people here find English challenging, we
try to introduce bilingualism whenever possible. We managed to do some of this
on the WAP platform, but faced challenges. The existence of competing software
houses in West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh means that there are competing
standards on Bangla software. Lacking a universal standard, we had to create our
own. We worked closely with CRBLP (the Center for Research on Bangla Language
in lavorazione) of BRAC University to design a program that could convert the non-
standard text into standard Bangla. Even then, we also had to build an in-house
image converter, to guarantee that all mobile phones would be able to display the
Bengali fonts.

MARKETING TO THE MISSING MIDDLE

After we launched the service, finished troubleshooting all the bugs, and added
new platforms, we finally began to concentrate on the most basic step in building
an audience: marketing. We created Above the Line marketing agency to produce
television and radio commercials and print ads. We also used many types of grass-
roots marketing: we gave out bumper stickers and educational booklets, and visit-
ed regional and local markets, rural community information centers, and college

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fairs. We had one-to-one sessions with customers, and relied on word of mouth.

In the mobile phone landscape in South Asia, one trend is obvious: using “city”
or “smart” language to market to all audiences. Most marketing targets what is
identified as the “shopping mall” generation; Infatti, a category of Bollywood films
even targets this niche. People increasingly use “Hinglish” (Hindi and English
mixed into a hybrid urban language), and the same trend has rippled through the
advertising scene in Bangladesh. The prevailing wisdom is that rural and mofussil
(suburban) youth live an “aspirational” lifestyle: they want to copy their presum-
ably sophisticated city peers. One advertising executive told us, “If city populations
love it, everyone else will follow.”

CellBazaar decided to defy this conventional wisdom, ignoring advice from ad
gurus. We felt that the core audience to be served is the rural population, for three
reasons.
• CellBazaar can have a far greater incremental impact on the lives of these peo-
ple than on city dwellers, so their usage and loyalty will be stronger. To cite an
example we often use, a city teenager may use our service to buy a cheaper
mobile phone, but a villager may use it to find an entirely new market for his
product and thus increase his income.

• The vast majority of Bangladeshis are non-urban; they are a growing majority

of mobile phone users.

• We feel that once a product is branded as “city” or “educated,” it actually alien-

ates and distances the non-urban population.

When some consumers first see marketing that uses the elements “SMS” or
“.com,” they decide this is a product for the urban middle class and the young
urbanized generation. In fact, those who benefit the most from CellBazaar, by
being able to buy and sell (effectively setting up their own shop), are the working
class, the financially constrained, and the self-employed. But they are usually the
ones who mistakenly think “This is not for us.”

Marketing to rural people is a delicate matter in any culturally sensitive nation.
Language, accent, enunciation, regional touch, profession: all of these have rural
versus urban biases. If we handled any of that with an insensitive touch, we would
alienate the audience and leave ourselves open to charges of “exploitation.” Because
agencies and executives from urban backgrounds create most of the marketing
assets, they also have to consider issues of “authenticity,” even for a company in the
high-tech sector.

In order to maximize our conversation with the target audience, we created a
popular character called Shamsu Hawker. Genial and smiling, Shamsu is the
Bengali everyman. Riding on a train, he would talk about selling newspapers
(“hawker” is the name of this profession) and explain how CellBazaar allowed him
to expand into the business of buying and selling used TVs. Shamsu was the per-
fect blend of village optimism, entrepreneurial zeal, and a sense of humor. By put-
ting him on a train, we signaled that CellBazaar could be reached anywhere, even
in the remotest village. Once the commercials aired, the character gradually
became well-known and then popular.

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CellBazaar: A Market in Your Pocket

Our next phase in marketing will be to start talking with city audiences. Here
the challenge will be to extend our brand identity authentically without alienating
our village customers. It is a delicate balance, and many traditional companies
(especially those selling household products) have stumbled when expanding from
a rural base into the cities. Managing the crossover properly will be our next chal-
lenge—in line with this, our newest commercial shows a city family selling some
household goods so it can buy newer replacements.

CellBazaar currently has a staff of 22. We have always believed in keeping the
team small and not adding overhead. The most successful of our campaigns have
involved grassroots street marketing, using unconventional devices, lingua, E
partners. The majority of the marketing is carried out by a small team using pro-
prietary tools, one-to-many networks, and grassroots word-of-mouth techniques.
In this way, we leverage a small headcount into a big and contagious impact.

PIONEER’S PENALTY

One challenge for CellBazaar has been the sharp learning curve, called the “pio-
neer’s penalty.” Because we offered the first such service in Bangladesh, we had to
tackle basic issues of mobile literacy. As phones become cheaper, and clone phones
arrive from China, more Internet-enabled mobiles are reaching more financially
constrained users, who sometimes have trouble activating the phones’ features.
We discovered three challenges in people’s attitudes towards technology:
• Technophobia. People sometimes fear technology. But when our marketing

teams interact with individuals and explain the service, users learn very quickly.
Così, human contact and one-to-one or one-to-many teaching is essential.
• English perception. Although very little English is required to use our service,

people perceive that advanced English is required.

• Generation. Many people see new tools on mobile phones as something mainly
for young people. Because of the ubiquity of ringtones and video clips, people
automatically assume some association with entertainment rather than under-
standing the phones’ other values.

In addition to overcoming these biases, we have to train people in the basic
functions of their phones. Beyond dialing and storing numbers, many people do
not explore the majority of their phone functions. To return to the metaphor we
used earlier, millions of people have a NASA computer in their pockets, but they
are severely under-utilized.

Before we teach people how to use CellBazaar, we teach them the basic tools of
mobile phone technology: what screen icons mean; how to type words, numbers
and symbols; and how to use navigation buttons, shortcuts, search functions, eccetera.
To simplify such training, we began designing educational booklets—which soon
became our most ubiquitous marketing material, passing from hand to hand. IL
process also taught us more about communications. Our first booklet was 12 pagine
long, and came in four different colors, each with different examples geared toward
separate demographics: rural, professional, teenager, elderly. We soon discovered

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67

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Kamal Quadir and Naeem Mohaiemen

Quello, rather than responding favorably to their niche, consumers were getting
bewildered by the choices. The length of the booklet also intimidated them: Essi
looked at our marketing outreach people as if to say, “Do I have to read all this?"
Learning from that experiment, we became efficient about text, cutting the
booklet down to three pages, and finally two alternate versions: a take-away two-
page version, and a leave-behind one-page version. Amazingly, we lost no essential
details in the transition from 12 pages to one: we got better at saying a lot with a
few words and pictures, and trusting that the reader would learn intuitively.
Readers only needed the audacity to believe that they could use the market, make
money, find goods, and complete transactions. They could keep their old habits
(going to the same market location, shopping on designated days) and comple-
ment them with new habits (browsing, checking prices, starting conversations) A
harness the service’s full potential.

Having learned all these functions, consumers will easily pick up new features
as they are added to mobile phones. In the future, as all mobile phones are trans-
formed into full-fledged computers (per esempio., Apple’s iPhone), the CellBazaar user will
be trained and ready to do anything with mobile devices. We foresee that in the
future, each “super” user of CellBazaar will be able to start their own digital-based
commodity training hub. We already have a model: after Korea set up garment fac-
tories in Bangladesh and trained its workers in Korea, the first batch of Korean-
trained garment workers went on to start their own garment factories in
Bangladesh within a couple of years.

LESSONS FOR FUTURE ENTREPRENEURS

With increasing global attention to the concept of businesses driven by mobile
phones, CellBazaar has gotten invitations to expand into other countries. We think
similar developing countries are the best place to expand the concept, particolarmente
those with a strong mix of agricultural-consumer-industrial products. To do so, we
will need like-minded and innovative partners in the new destination countries. In
initial talks, we have found that in addition to our technology, another valuable
intellectual property is the many pieces of explicit and implicit learning we have
gathered through our launch and ongoing operation in Bangladesh.

During a recent visit to Delhi to attend the Manthan Awards (“ICT for
Development”), we were struck by the amount of energy and expectation the
Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry had focused on the
rural market. Reaching this group via a buying-selling market on the mobile phone
is a core part of CellBazaar’s strategy and vision. In Delhi, we found that vision
shared by many others—from mobile payment solutions to rural cyber-cafes to
complex database engines.

While the rural market is our focus, and is one reason why Indian companies
have shown an interest in our story, it is also important to focus on the realm of
the possible. When PowerPoint presentations end with idealized images of a
farmer, alone and unaided, accessing all the pleasures of ICT data, we risk having

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CellBazaar: A Market in Your Pocket

hype overtake reality. The reality is that bringing mobile- or computer-based ICT
to farmers will require one last mile of work, and it will involve some kind of
human translation or help.

We also see our work as laying the groundwork for others. Though we were
teaching mobile computing so people could start to access CellBazaar, the trained
consumer can use any new application that appears on the mobile. Realizing this,
we began to partner with state and private institutions that were also interested in
training the masses in technology, in order to develop infrastructure. We have
begun partnerships with the SME (small to medium enterprise) capacity-builder
Katalyst and with the rural cybercafe program Community Information Center.
We are eager to move to the next stage: more macro-level public-private partner-
ships that will help CellBazaar grow and reach thousands of additional users.

In Bangladesh, the adoption curve in rural markets has been slower than in
urban centers, but we remain committed to continuing to target this sector, as that
is where consumers get larger incremental benefits through mobile-based com-
merce. In developing countries, telephone operators need to start considering their
consumers as producers. Buying and selling (trading) through the mobile is one
way that consumers become a profitable sector for phone operators. It is a win-win
solution, and the vast rural sector is where such opportunity remains untapped.

So we have reasons for hesitating about those over-idealistic visions of a farmer
instantly accessing all the wonders of ICT. This vision is indeed possible, but it will
not happen instantly. Much grassroots-level hard work and many public-private
partnerships for technology education will be essential. Micro-entrepreneurs who
build small businesses play key roles, as they can spread the service through word
of mouth, motivated by their own small profit potential. But rather than over-opti-
mistic projections or blue sky scenarios, what is needed most is realism, stamina,
off-the-beaten-path innovation, constantly evolving next-generation technology,
and long-term vision.

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