Jibran’s Perspective

Project 2: Gift cards to Pakistan

I’ve completed a freelance project I was working on for a few months, and have started saying no to new opportunities. It’s time to work on one of my own ideas again. This is part of my plan to start failing more.

I’ve decided to build a business sending gift cards to Pakistan - and eventually other countries in that corner of the world.

Why?

A few years ago I had sent a gift card to a colleague in the UK. I found a number of very good options. They all had websites that inspired confidence, and used robust payment methods (Stripe in my example) that I could trust with my credit card.

I recently had to send a gift card to a colleague in Pakistan. I was confident that I would find a bunch of great options; instead I only found one that I could think of trusting with my money.

I ended up using their services and the card was delivered, but there were a number of problems I saw:

• No trust building around card payments. There was no clear mention of which provider they used. I did a bank transfer instead of using a CC. This meant my payment was manually verified and the card was only sent after a few hours.
• There was no confirmation email about my order. I was worried enough to call their helpline to confirm that my order had gone through.
• Once they had sent the card (which I also had to confirm via phone), I only got a confirmation email the next day.
• To get an invoice to expense this, I had to send them an email. I’m still waiting on an invoice.
• There were multiple colleagues who chipped in on this gift card. I had to collect the money from them and then pay for the card myself. In my previous experience of sending a gift card to the UK, I was able to include my colleagues in the process. They were able to add their contributions directly to the gift card I selected and a card of the total amount was sent to the recipient.
• Finally, there was no option for the receiver to choose which gift card they wanted. Instead I had to choose for them. There is a “Universal Gift Card” they claim works at all merchants and is the one I got, but redeeming that would be slightly more complicated.

Interestingly, my colleague didn’t open the email they received with the gift card because they thought it was a spam/scam/malicious email. Only after I asked if they had received the card did they end up opening it.

I know a better user experience exists. I want to bring the same to Pakistan and solve my own problem at the same time.

Is there a market for this? I believe so, because:

• It’s a problem I’ve just faced.
• I’ve seen my wife having to deal with low-trust companies sending gifts to Pakistan. Gift cards are different, but eventually I could also add the option to send physical gifts to the recipient.
• I’ve seen my employer deal with this. Recently a baby gift basket arrived 2 months after the baby was born. 🤯
• This is a recurring problem. People & companies need to send gift cards on birthdays, weddings, etc.
• With more companies starting to hire remotely in Pakistan, this could be a valuable service for businesses to subscribe to.

Validation?

I haven’t found an easy way to validate this idea. There is no community of “people sending gift cards to Pakistan” that I can tap into. That isn’t a cohort I can find in one place.

I could make a list of B2B customers; companies that hire remotely in Pakistan.

However, I want to start with individual customers - because I’m starting from a place of solving my own problem. It should be possible to pivot to B2B if I don’t find any interest from individual customers.

Validation then involves me starting with a blog - suggesting gift cards to send to Pakistan. I’ll use SEO to bring in traffic. If I see enough visitors, I could start building a business. This also means that if/when the actual product launches, I’ll have a distribution channel already working.

What if I’m wrong?

There’s a very strong possibility that I’m wrong about this idea. That I’ll spend a bunch of time for it to get nowhere, or that I have picked a problem that isn’t very valuable to solve.

This is my unique brand of fear of failure. I used to think I didn’t fear failing, because I had already failed many times. Instead, my fear of failure manifests as a fear of picking the wrong thing and wasting time on it. The way I am dealing with this is to realize that if I don’t pick anything - which I have frequently done in the past - I have an exactly 0% chance of succeeding. Just trying something makes that probability > 0%.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Another thing that’s helping me is to time box this idea. I will spend 6 weeks on building the blog and populating it with as much useful content as possible. After that I can spend an hour or two every week to add a few more pieces of content. I can start researching and working on a different idea after the 6 week period and wait for the SEO to have an impact before making a decision to continue or abandon this.