How to build dependable product in Pakistani market
I’ve worked with a few Pakistani clients over the past 2 years. I’ve learned that building a dependable product in Pakistan is quite different from building for global markets.
Eventually, I realized that simplicity is the key to making your product reliable. Here are a few reasons why you should keep your product extremely simple for local consumers.
Procedural Knowledge
Procedural knowledge refers to the client’s prior experience with the software or technology you are building.
Before building the product, it’s worth understanding the procedural knowledge of your client. For example, if you are building a POS for a shop, your research should include whether they are already using some kind of desktop or mobile software. If the answer is “no,” it’s better to keep the product extremely simple with fewer options instead of overwhelming them with complex solutions like ERPNext.
Unique Requirements
Most local businesses have unique requirements that must be addressed before pitching the product. Offline support and cloud sync are among the requirements that almost every business needs.
Accessibility & Compatibility
While accessibility and compatibility are challenges for pretty much every product, they are even more critical for local clients since many businesses still rely on old legacy systems and technology. That’s why it’s important to test your product on different devices and browsers, especially mobile phones and older Windows systems.
Local Constraints
Local constraints can become barriers later on that affect your product’s long-term sustainability. It’s important to have a strategy to handle constraints like pricing, payments, and others.
One of the constraints I faced was not being able to bundle cloud charges into the pricing, so I ended up storing the data on the user’s drive instead of relying on paid cloud storage.
These are just a few considerations; there can be more depending on the business requirements. That’s why you should always talk to businesses to understand their pain points and legacy systems before building anything dependable.
If you want to see a simple product making money in the local market, here is the product I built for a local transport terminal: https://www.findio.pk/projects/booking-manager