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Sheba’s comeback story: A demonstration of resilience
MAHMUDUL HASAN
When facing a severe fund crisis, tech startups in Bangladesh, heavily reliant on foreign funding, are usually sold off at throwaway prices if not compelled to shut down entirely.
But despite facing a similar situation, Sheba has demonstrated resilience by securing funds from local conglomerates and now performing with robust promise.
“We are stronger than ever, retaining most of our employees,” Adnan Imtiaz Halim, founder and CEO of Sheba, told The Daily Star in an interview.
“Our service delivery numbers are rapidly increasing, we’ve secured a payment service provider licence, and all our verticals are projecting strength,” he said.
Sheba.xyz, the largest digital marketplace for household services in Bangladesh, underwent an existential crisis in May 2022.
Missing a round of foreign investment at the time, the local startup’s leadership confronted a moment of truth: they had to lay off a majority of their employees and downsize operations for survival.
“For a year, we focused on sustaining, relying on Sheba’s strength and resilience,” Adnan said.
“We plan to reinitiate operations with full vigour between May 2022-2023. Our objective is to formulate a robust comeback strategy, leveraging a minimal workforce dedicated to this venture,” he added.
However, the crisis did not solely stem from the missed round of investment.
After launching in 2016, Sheba quickly captured the attention of urbanites by offering comprehensive solutions to common challenges associated with city living, such as cleaning, plumbing and more.
Operating as an online connecting platform, Sheba.xyz facilitates service solutions for both users seeking services and the service providers themselves.
In 2019, the company launched Sheba Manager, a business app for managing offline and online shops.
The app offers a suite of tools to efficiently manage businesses, encompassing daily sales tracking, balance calculations, and detailed reports on business income growth, among other essential features.
Having gained popularity soon after its release, Sheba Manager currently has about one million users.
Sheba has since experienced remarkable growth, with the demand for its household services soaring to more than 1,000 orders per day.
From 50 employees based in a small house in Dhaka’s Mirpur DOHS in 2016, the company’s workforce expanded to 480 employees in the five years before the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, the onslaught of the pandemic on its operations was hard.
“The initial setback to our business came from the pandemic. We were compelled to suspend our household service entirely for several months,” Adnan said.
“But the bright side of that gloomy time was that we provided 50,000 small businesses with food and financial assistance while Sheba Manager emerged as a very useful tool for them as well,” he added.
The crisis escalated when an almost secured investment fell through as Sheba is not registered as a company of Singapore.
“We could not obtain legal clearance for the funds because of this,” Adnan said.
As a result, Sheba was blindsided by a significant investment shortfall, which was like a “sudden storm” hitting its operations.
“We convened a town hall meeting to transparently address this crisis with our team. It was a time of great uncertainty, but we were committed to facing these challenges as a united family,” he added.