Starting and surviving a startup: What young entrepreneurs should know

Due to limited job opportunities and a desire for independence, many students in Bangladesh are turning to entrepreneurship. What was once an unconventional choice is now a growing trend, with students running everything – from small online businesses to software ventures.

The romanticised image of a startup founder – the wunderkind with world-changing ideas who has investors lining up to back them, and an inevitable rise to unimaginable wealth – may be appealing. However, it doesn’t always hold up in real life.

For a student, building something tangible from an idea is far from glamorous. It comes with low capital, family pressure, and constant scepticism. Two founders with different entrepreneurial journeys share their experiences to shed light on what it takes to build something that lasts.

Shuvo Rahman, founder of Alice Labs, has navigated the challenges of building a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, raising venture capital, and scaling across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and South Asia. On the other hand, Tahmid Hasan, founder of Pashe Achi Initiative, built a social enterprise during the Covid-19 pandemic that moved from emergency relief to sustainable livelihood creation.

Start with a real problem, talk to customers

According to Shuvo, ideas should begin with people. “Don’t start with a product; start with a customer. Find five people who have a specific problem and serve them manually before you write a single line of code. This costs nothing and tells you everything,” Shuvo advises.

It’s how MyAlice—a core product of Alice Labs—itself took shape. “MyAlice worked partly because the problem was something I lived with and the pain was completely visible to me,” Shuvo shares, highlighting how firsthand experience sharpens a founder’s understanding of real-world challenges.

To check whether a problem is worth solving, Shuvo suggests a simple rule of thumb: “When you describe the problem to someone in the target market, do they immediately say ‘Yes, that’s exactly our situation’, or do you have to explain why it’s a problem? The more you have to convince people they have a problem, the harder it gets.”

For business-to-business (B2B) startups, validation needs to be even more concrete. Tahmid also emphasises starting with people, though his focus is grounded in community realities rather than market validation. He suggests that founders need to spend time studying what people actually need, how they live, and how to communicate in ways that make them feel seen and valued. Field visits can help in this, allowing founders to learn how to connect and work with people from different backgrounds.

Tahmid’s motivation came from what he witnessed firsthand during the pandemic: “What pushed me to act was seeing the vulnerability of the urban poor. How suddenly people lost even the ability to meet basic needs.”

Be clear about your direction

It is essential to choose a clear market early. “Be deliberate about which market you're building for and commit to it fully,” Shuvo urges, stating that founders often underestimate the value of local insight.

At the same time, aiming for a global market is just as valid. “If your instinct is to build for a global market, don't let anyone talk you out of it. The internet doesn't care where your office is. What matters is whether you understand your customer deeply,” adds Shuvo.

“Founders who are half-building for Bangladesh and half-building for the world end up not really winning in either,” Shuvo comments. “Pick your market, understand it better than anyone, and go all in.”

Don’t wait for perfect conditions

Tahmid shares that when they started, there was no clear roadmap or defined end goal, only the determination to support the underserved community that pushed them. He adds that impactful work can begin with limited resources and uncertainty.

Shuvo admits he spent a lot of time worrying about whether his idea was right. Later, he realised that the idea isn’t the hard part. What matters more than getting everything right at the start is simply getting things done.

High trust and shared values also help the team stay steady when the going gets tough. “For me, it was friends from the same department coming together at the time of need,” Tahmid recalls. “I think trust and commitment among individuals are needed to carry on an initiative as such.”

Tahmid’s work began with limited resources: a small group of committed friends, volunteer labour, a clear understanding of community needs, and strategic use of social media.

In the early stages, social capital is more valuable than financial capital. “As a student in Bangladesh, you have access to faculty members, alumni, and university communities; those are doors that a founder in other areas would have to cold-email for months to open. Use them aggressively,” Shuvo notes.

Tahmid’s experience reflects this in practice: “We tapped into all of our networks, and people came forward to help as if it were their own initiative. Our strongest network came through the Department of Economics at Dhaka University, where we all studied.”

Build for longevity

Shuvo reflects on an early period of uncertainty, when the sustainability of the idea itself came into question: “There was a period, where we were burning through whatever runway we had, and merchant retention wasn't where it needed to be. The question was brutal: are merchants paying us because this is genuinely critical to their business, or just because it's nice to have?”

“The shift in thinking came from realising that emergency relief is necessary, but it cannot be the end point for everyone,” Tahmid explains. While food and financial support help people survive, building stability requires continuity of livelihood.

“Where possible, we tried to disrupt markets through online platforms,” Tahmid adds. “For communities especially close to our hearts, such as Bangladesh’s rural artisans and street booksellers, maintaining continuity was essential to ensure they would not fall off the radar.”

Expect challenges, but keep going

“When health risks were severe, and we did not know what we were dealing with, we really struggled to decide whether we should be going out and putting our families at risk,” Tahmid says.

For Shuvo, one of the most exhausting realities is the emotional burden of leadership. “People talk about the hustle and the sleepless nights, but what nobody tells you is that the hardest thing is making consequential calls, on people, on product direction, on whether to keep going with incomplete information, and then carrying the weight of those decisions alone,” he says.

Even with support systems in place, that burden remains heavy. Understanding the non-linear nature of progress would have made those periods easier to handle. Shuvo adds, “There are long stretches where nothing seems to be moving, and then things shift very quickly. If I had understood that rhythm earlier, I would have panicked less during the quiet periods.”

What separates startups that last from those that don’t isn’t some novel idea. It’s the willingness to keep trying even when things are messy, progress is slow, and nothing feels like it’s working.

There’s no one moment where everything suddenly makes sense. You start where you are with what you have. As long as you keep solving real problems for real people, and keep adapting, the rest tends to follow.