Building Bangladesh’s Largest Online Travel Agency and Migrant Worker Remittance Platform (Founder Deep Dive)
In-depth interview with the founder who has built the fastest growing migrant focused remittance app in South Asia.
Meet Ridwan Hafiz — A serial founder building GoZayaan, which is the fastest growing online travel agency in Bangladesh and Pakistan (400m+ population in total). He previously built the first and largest digital marketing agency in Bangladesh, and is now expanding his company’s product suite to help underserved migrant workers send official remittances back home. This new product has grown 4x month-on-month since launching, and is now the largest migrant-focused remittance app in the region.
In this interview, we cover:
Bangladesh's overlooked growth story and market opportunity, with a population over 170 million and GDP outpacing India.
The founding story behind Bangladesh's first digital marketing agency, and insights into unique social media usage patterns in the country.
How 80% of the world's population has never flown, but startups like GoZayaan are increasing access to travel.
How GoZayaan is expanding its offering to tackle an underrated, highly impactful, and billion dollar opportunity; serving Bangladesh’s migrant workers, improving their financial wellbeing.
The interplay between purpose and pragmatism in building great companies that benefit people, investors, and nations alike.
Ridwan provides a rare boots-on-the-ground perspective on entrepreneurship and innovation in Bangladesh. He shares hard-won lessons for startups looking to solve real-world problems while creating sustainable businesses.
The discussion explores overlooked opportunities, the human impact of technology, and the responsibilities of business builders in emerging economies. Read on for an enlightening conversation. Let’s dig in.
Bangladesh’s Macro Story — A Newly Developing Asian Tiger
Krish: To kick things off, could you give us a quick overview of Bangladesh as a market, to provide some context for readers? I think there can be some confusion around how Bangladesh fits into the broader South Asia and Middle East/North Africa regions. It would be great to hear some high-level facts about the market and the growth story there.
Ridwan: Sure. So Bangladesh is part of South Asia, but we're often overlooked compared to India, Pakistan, and the rest of South Asia and MENA. However, Bangladesh has shown tremendous progress over the last decade. We have a population of 170 million. Our GDP has been growing consistently for the past 10 years, with our GDP per capita surpassing India's twice in the last 3 years.
I chose to stay in Bangladesh rather than leave like many of my peers, and while I had some second thoughts at times, looking at where we are now and Bangladesh's potential, I'm confident I made the right decision. We're starting to see many in the diaspora, especially startup founders who have raised significant funding, return to Bangladesh to contribute to the country's development. So the diaspora is taking notice of the opportunities here.
Krish: That's a great macro overview. I'm reminded of an anecdote about how in the 1970s, as part of industrial policy, Bangladesh sent groups to South Korea to learn about the textile industry, since South Korea faced quota restrictions on textile exports to the US. They brought that expertise back to Bangladesh and built up the garment sector, which has been a huge economic driver. It seems to illustrate how cross-border learning and human capital development fuels innovation and growth.
Ridwan: Absolutely. The textile sector has been pivotal, not just in contributing to GDP, but in driving social change by massively increasing the female labour force participation rate. The majority of workers in the big textile factories are women from very poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Them entering the workforce has helped transform the country.
Krish: On that topic of women's empowerment, I'm curious how you think women's household financial decision-making changes as they start accumulating their own income and savings?
Ridwan: Bangladesh has historically been a very misogynistic society, but that has started changing significantly over the last decade as women have become equal or even primary breadwinners in many families.
Unlike in the Philippines where many women leave the domestic labor force to become overseas workers, in Bangladesh both the husband and wife typically work, which I think has helped reduce misogyny. Women are gaining more voice and decision-making power, though issues like domestic violence are still common as in most emerging markets. But the trends are positive and this has been very important for the country. We've also had a female prime minister for many years.
Krish: That's fascinating. It makes me think of a paper called "Hot Money in Goma" about a mining area in DR Congo. It described how the young men earning money would engage in risky, short-term thinking - spending their pay very quickly on drinking, gambling, etc. The lack of social institutions and norms enabled poor financial decision-making.
(Editor’s Note: For more on the macro story of Bangladesh, I highly recommend Noah Smith’s Substack article here).
Building, then Selling Bangladesh’s First and Largest Digital Marketing Agency
Krish: Let’s move on to your own history, building the first and largest digital marketing agency in Bangladesh. Could you share that story?
Ridwan: Sure, so I studied computer engineering at Bangladesh's top university. By my third year, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur - but more out of necessity than anything else. My family was struggling financially, so I needed to start working early to support them and my younger brother.
We started a software company with just $100, but pivoted to become Bangladesh's first digital marketing agency, which we grew to $10-12M in revenue without any external funding before I exited to start GoZayaan.
This was in the early days of Facebook - it was desktop only, but they had just launched Facebook Pages and apps on their platform. Global brands were getting on Facebook and we saw an opportunity, since we knew the underlying tech. We started building Facebook apps for clients like Unilever and Samsung.
But we realised our clients needed more holistic support on Facebook beyond apps - content creation, community management, strategy. No one else was providing that. Even though "social media agency" wasn't really a category at the time, we decided to become that. After landing Samsung and Unilever as clients, we became the go-to agency and never looked back.
Krish: Going from $100 to $10M+ with no external funding is incredible. It's a great lesson in capital efficiency and pragmatic entrepreneurship. Software startups often need a lot of upfront investment, but service businesses like agencies can be grown very lean.
How did you navigate the learning curve of conceptualising this new category of social media agency and then growing the business? What was that journey like?
Ridwan: When we started, we didn't even know "digital marketing agency" was a term! Bangladesh is known for software exports, so building an agency was a contrarian move. But a few things came together:
Facebook had just launched Pages and the app platform. Global brands were experimenting with Facebook but didn't know what they were doing.
Meanwhile, traditional advertising like TV was losing popularity, especially among the digitally savvy youth audience that brands wanted to reach. Even big companies knew they needed to be on social media.
So we started building Facebook apps for a few clients. Through that, we saw they needed way more help - content, community management, strategy. Creative agencies were equipped for traditional channels but not social. No one knew who should own it.
We saw that gap as an opportunity. We decided to call ourselves a "social media agency" even though that wasn't really a thing. Then we started signing bigger brands like Samsung and Unilever. We worked with Samsung for 8 years and amazingly, even after I left, the agency is still Unilever's AOR for digital after 11 years.
Krish: Wow, becoming Unilever's agency of record is huge. As you grew the agency, what were some of the key inflection points and milestones along the way?
Ridwan: In 2012, we did a big campaign for Samsung - the first video series made specifically for Facebook and YouTube in Bangladesh. Before that, brands would just repurpose their TV ads for social.
We created a local version of Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd" prank show. No celebrities wanted to be in a Facebook video, so I actually hosted it myself! Samsung wasn't sure about it, so they said we had to fund the first episode ourselves, and they'd only finance the rest of the season if it was a hit.
Well, we made the first 7-8 minute episode, put it out, and within 24 hours 90% of the population had seen it. It went insanely viral, everyone was talking about and sharing it. That really put us on the map.
Krish: Creating the first viral video sensation in the country is an incredible milestone. As you've watched the social media landscape evolve in Bangladesh over the last decade, how has it changed? Has it gotten more saturated and competitive?
Ridwan: It's become extremely saturated. That's actually one reason I wanted to exit the agency and build something new. With all the growth, everything started becoming commoditized. Now there are tools, even AI tools, that can do a lot of the work. Influencer marketing became huge. When we started, we were the only players. Now there are over 3,000 digital agencies!
So of course the market got very competitive, prices came down, revenues declined. A lot of brands started moving things in-house instead of hiring agencies. The business hit a peak for us around 2016 and then stayed flat or declined a bit.
I'm sure the agency will always remain a top player, but I didn't see a path to the 10x year-over-year growth we had before. The writing was on the wall that this industry was maturing.
Consumer Patterns in Bangladesh
Krish: Shifting gears a bit, I'm curious about the cultural aspects of social media in Bangladesh. I know you said you're not super plugged into that world anymore, but I'd love to hear any observations on things like celebrity culture, influencers, how people use the different platforms compared to other countries, and anything else that stands out about the Bangladeshi social media landscape.
Ridwan: There are definitely some differences in social media usage between Bangladesh and more developed markets. For example, while Instagram is hugely popular in the West, especially among young people, in Bangladesh Facebook is still by far the dominant platform. Instagram and Snapchat are still pretty niche.
Interestingly, a lot of people in Bangladesh don't visit standalone news websites - they actually consume a lot of their news through Facebook. They'll see a link there first and then click through. So Facebook really is the main portal to the internet and content discovery for a lot of Bangladeshis.
That said, we are seeing the youngest generation, Gen Z, start to shift away from Facebook and toward TikTok. So they kind of leapfrogged over Instagram as a generation.
Another key difference is that for a lot of Bangladeshis, their first internet experience was through mobile, not desktop computers. Only a small subset of us started out using computers and then shifted to phones. So the content consumption habits and preferences are very mobile-first.
Of course, TikTok has given rise to a whole new crop of influencers and celebrities. We also have a growing culture of YouTubers and vloggers, similar to what you see in India, Europe, the US.
But overall, while other platforms are growing, Facebook still reigns supreme for brand and content consumption in Bangladesh. It'll be interesting to see how that continues to evolv, especially as the Gen Z wave ages up.
Krish: This has been a fascinating look at the Bangladesh digital media landscape. I'd love to pivot now to hearing the story behind GoZayaan. Going from a marketing agency to a travel startup targeting migrant workers is quite the entrepreneurial journey. Walk me through what sparked the idea for GoZayaan and how you went about building it.
Founding Bangladesh’s Fastest Growing Online Travel Agency, GoZayaan:
Ridwan: First of all, I always say I didn't choose travel, travel chose me! A decade ago, I had barely flown before - my first time on a plane, I had no idea how airports worked. I waited at the gate for 2 hours because I didn't know I had to go through immigration and security!
Fast forward to today, and we have over 2,000 people flying daily with GoZayaan. So it's been quite the journey.
The original spark came from a pain point I experienced myself. My family had moved to the US, so I was visiting once a year. But I could never book flights directly with my Bangladeshi credit card, because our cards don't work with foreign travel sites like Expedia due to our capital controls.
Every time, I had to borrow a card from a friend or family member in the US and pay them back in cash. I realised I couldn't be the only one dealing with this, and as Bangladesh's economy grew, more and more people would face this issue.
Then I started talking to local travel agents, and was shocked by how they operated. They'd tell people to book last-minute, not in advance, and charge extra fees to lock in rates, because the customers didn't know any better! They couldn't compare prices, so they had to take whatever the agents told them. I realised they were totally ripping off customers, myself included.
So even though none of us had travel industry experience, we decided to tackle this problem. I thought "I built one successful startup, how hard could it be?" I was a bit arrogant in retrospect, having never raised VC before either.
We set out to aggregate flights and hotels and make them accessible to Bangladeshi consumers looking to travel to India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, etc. We grew to 40 people and raised a pre-seed round.
But then COVID hit. Borders closed, no one was travelling. We found ourselves with $400K in debt and no way to make payroll. But amazingly, even though we couldn't pay our 50-person team for 9 months, not a single person left. They believed in me and the company, and that we would find a way through it.
To survive, we pivoted to focus on domestic travel, since international travel was dead. We realised that while the per-trip spend was much lower domestically, the overall volume of people who could afford to travel within Bangladesh was huge.
Krish: What an incredible story of resilience. I can't believe your team stuck with you even when you couldn't pay them for nearly a year. That's a testament to the mission, culture and grit you'd built.
(Here’s a picture of the team!)
Pivoting During Covid, Learning to Serve Migrant Workers (Profitably and Meaningfully)
Krish: So you pivoted to domestic travel to get through COVID. But then how did you end up focusing on migrant workers as a customer segment? That seems like another big pivot.
Ridwan: We realised that over half our customers were actually first-time travellers. There's a stat from Boeing that in 2017, 80% of the world's population had never flown before. When you consider how many people globally have yet to participate in air travel, you realise how huge the remaining opportunity is, especially in emerging markets.
So that got us thinking - who are the Bangladeshis travelling for the first time? A big segment is migrant workers, especially those going to Singapore and the Middle East.
There's this whole industry of recruiting agencies who help Bangladeshi workers get visas and jobs abroad. But the workers also need flights, and that's where we saw an opportunity.
We started spending a lot of time with these migrant workers in Singapore. We'd literally go up to construction workers on the street and say "Hey, can we buy you dinner and hear about your life?"
We ended up having these dinners with 5 workers at a time, 3 times a day. After 2 months we had bought dinner for over 150 workers and had these really deep, emotional conversations with them.
We wanted to understand not just their functional need for flights, but their whole lived experience, how they thought about money, what their dreams and fears were.
What we realised was that these guys are totally different from middle class consumers. Tools like Expedia are way too complicated for them. They don't really know how to use search and filter functions. They're not comfortable navigating complex user flows.
So we went back to the drawing board and designed something totally different based on the mental models of these migrant workers. We looked at the apps they were comfortable with, like Facebook and TikTok.
A big UX insight was to make every page focused on a single, simple action. So for example, the first screen just asks "Where do you want to go, Singapore to Dhaka or Dhaka to Singapore?" No typing or searching, just two big buttons, in their native language.
Then the next screen is just "Select your departing date" with a big calendar. Then "Select your return date." Every step is broken down into the simplest possible interaction.
We looked at how TikTok keeps users engaged by making it dead simple to go to the next piece of content. We applied that same design ethos to the flight booking flow.
We went back to Singapore to test the prototype with migrant workers and iterate based on their feedback. When we launched, it just took off like crazy - we had 10,000 app downloads within 2 weeks, with barely any marketing. For context, there are about 100,000 Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore.
Now we have over 90,000 downloads, mostly through pure word of mouth. We get these amazing messages from workers saying things like "I booked my ticket on Hometown and saved $40 - that's 3 days of wages for me! Now I can buy a new toy for my kid or a gift for my wife."
A lot of these guys were getting totally exploited by offline agents before. The agents would tell them not to book in advance and instead book last minute while paying $10 a week to lock in fares. Which is totally BS, but these workers didn't know any better.
So by simply making online booking accessible to them, we're saving them from exploitation and empowering them financially. The impact for these families is profound.
You Never Forget Your First Customer
Ridwan: I'll never forget our first paying customer. I have to share this story - it's the moment I knew this was our calling. We were on the ground in Singapore doing a marketing push, telling people about the new remittance feature. We'd been on our feet for 13 hours, it was hot as hell in the day and pouring rain at night. But we were committed.
One of our existing flight booking customers came up to us and said "Oh yeah, I know GoZayaan, I booked my ticket home with you last year!" Turns out he hadn't been back to see his family since. He was long overdue. These workers are abroad for years at a time, it's incredibly painful being away from family.
So we helped him submit his info to activate remittances. He was skeptical at first, but we walked him through it. Then he had to go, his dorm was an hour away by train and it was late.
After he left, around 9:30pm, he messaged us saying he wanted to try sending money. This guy sends $200 back for his daughter's birthday, then goes to sleep. 25 minutes later, he gets a call from his wife. She's crying, saying she got the money. This man broke down on the phone, weeping, saying "You made me the happiest dad in the world, I haven't seen my kid in a year and you helped me give her a birthday gift."
That was the moment we knew we were put on this Earth to help these people. This is why we do what we do. It's not about the money, it's about the profound human impact and blessings we get from these customers.
That was our first remittance customer. In that moment, all the exhaustion and stress melted away. We knew we were going to help as many people like him as we could, and we were going to build a big business doing it.
As a business of course we need to be pragmatic and financially sustainable. But I always say - find a customer segment you can serve better than anyone, where you can have real impact. Solve their problems and the economics will work out.
There are millions of migrant workers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines going to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. As the world develops, the need for this blue-collar labour force will only grow. It's a huge market - not the highest per-user monetization, but massive volume.
And for us, the real fulfilment comes from using technology to materially improve the lives of an underserved population. When we help these migrants access reasonably priced flights and send money home to their families instantly, it's incredibly meaningful.
Krish: That story gave me chills. What a profound illustration of the human impact you can have as an entrepreneur by focusing on underserved markets. I think a lot of founders and investors can fall into the trap of only chasing the luxury/premium end customer because the unit economics and margins look better on paper. But as you said, solving real problems for the masses is how you build a truly impactful and valuable business.
Contributing to the Macro Development of Your Home Country:
Krish: Let’s dig a bit deeper into the remittances piece - so your migrant worker customers organically pushed you to expand from travel into remittances? It wasn't part of the original plan? Walk me through that.
Ridwan: Exactly, it was totally customer-driven. We never planned to get into remittances originally.
Once the cheap flights product started gaining traction with migrant workers, they started saying "This is great, but our biggest headache is actually sending money home every month. Can you solve that too?"
When we asked why they didn't just use banks, they said bank transfers take 3-5 days. They work 6 days a week, 13 hours a day, they can't take time off to go to a bank branch. Plus the interfaces are all in English which many don't speak.
So the most common way they send money is actually illegal - it's called "hundi". Basically you give cash to an agent, who has a network of agents back in Bangladesh. Your family picks up cash on the other side. No digital trail.
For Bangladesh, Pakistan, even parts of India, these informal remittance channels are one of our biggest macroeconomic problems. This money doesn't hit our national reserves or banking system. It's just cash in, cash out.
Last year the official remittance inflow to Bangladesh was $25B. But the estimated total including informal channels is more like $100B! So 75% is flowing through illegal channels.
If that money flowed through proper digital rails, our currency reserves would be 3-4x higher, we'd have so much more stability and buying power as a country. It would help control inflation, prices of goods, fund more development work. Solving this remittance issue is crucial for the entire region's growth.
I'm kind of embarrassed to admit, we didn't even realise this was an issue until our customers told us and we started digging into the data. It's a huge systemic issue. These migrants are the ones keeping our economy afloat, but the fruits of their labor aren't being captured. It's a real tragedy.
So we asked them why they prefer hundi, and it comes down to two things: speed and simplicity.
Hundi gets cash to their families in 6 hours. No other legitimate service comes close to that speed. Hundi also requires no paperwork, no English, no bank account, no smartphone. It's dead simple.
So we knew we had to build something just as fast and easy to use, but through legitimate digital channels. We took the same simple UX philosophy as our flight booking flow, and we built a remittance service where they can send money home in 10 minutes, fully legally and digitally.
We made the onboarding and KYC super streamlined, the transfer flow is just as simple as booking a ticket. Same app, one extra button. We localized everything in Bangla. If you can use TikTok, you can use our app to send money home.
We launched it in November, and the growth has been insane. The biggest telco-run remittance provider between Singapore and Bangladesh, we overtook them in transfer volume in the first month.
Month 2, we beat the biggest bank. Now we're growing 4x month-over-month. And this is just our 4th month live. The demand is incredible, and we're just scratching the surface. We're already contribution margin positive on the remittance product.
The Road to a Billion Dollar Company → Be Relentlessly Customer Driven:
Ridwan: So that's the gameplan - we're laser focused on these remittance corridors between Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East. Wherever the migrant workers are, that's where we're going.
Because that's the beautiful thing - these migrants, they cluster. You go to a labor camp in Dubai or a dorm in Singapore, it's all Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos. So once you have licenses in a market, you can serve multiple nationalities from the same app, just with a few tweaks.
And what we've realized is that the sheer volume is staggering. Yes, these aren't the wealthiest individuals, you're not making $100 per user per month. But you have hundreds of millions of users who will each give you a dollar or two. The unit economics work because of the scale.
So the short-term goal is to really saturate these core corridors in South Asia. The mid-term vision is to expand to the Middle East, which has 5-10x as many migrant workers. Nail the product, dial in the ops and licensing.
Then long-term, go global. There are migrant workers from emerging markets in every major developed region. As long as there is economic opportunity drawing labor from poorer to richer countries, these folks will need to access cheap travel and send money home. That's the multi-decade opportunity we're chasing.
We want to be the financial services platform for the world's migrant and blue-collar communities. It starts with flights and remittances, but the needs go so much deeper. These people are totally underserved.
The through line in our journey as a company has been this relentless focus on understanding our customers' lived experiences, and building products that tangibly improve their lives. I always tell our team - the day we lose that focus is the day we've lost the plot.
Like you said before, as investors and builders it's easy to get lost in excel models and unit economics, valuations and exits. And of course that stuff matters. But if that becomes the core purpose, you'll never do anything truly amazing.
At GoZayaan, our purpose is to create access and opportunity for people who've been left behind by the formal financial system. If we stay true to that, and really nail the customer experience, I have no doubt the business will be wildly successful.
I think the lesson for founders is - find a big market segment, of real human beings, whose lives you can transform better than anyone else. Immerse yourself in understanding the customer. Hell, go have dinner with them if you can!
Then just build an amazing product and experience for them. Don't get distracted. Be relentlessly resourceful in figuring out the ops, the infrastructure, the UX, the licensing, all of it. Never lose that fire for the customer and their well-being.
To me, that's the essence of entrepreneurship. Using your ingenuity to solve problems, build something valuable, and expand access for people. Creating a more inclusive world. Generating wealth, sure, but through real value creation, not extraction or arbitrage.
If we can look back in 10, 20, 30 years, and say that GoZayaan materially improved the financial health and quality of life of millions of hardworking people and their families, I'll consider us successful. And if that comes with a huge financial outcome, all the better. We'll have more fuel to keep doing important work.
So yea, that's what keeps me going. On the days when I'm stressed about cash flow, or hiring, or competition, I think about that man weeping on the phone because he could finally give his baby girl a birthday present. He probably hasn't stopped thinking about that moment.
I want every migrant out there to feel seen, to feel that sense of dignity and access and being able to provide. If we can give more people more moments like that, we'll have done our job. We'll have made the world a bit better than we found it. As sappy as it sounds, that's the dream.
Krish: I don't think there's anything sappy about that at all. What you just articulated is the highest calling of entrepreneurship - to solve problems and expand access in a way that creates real, tangible value for people.
And the fact that you've aligned GoZayaan's fundamental business model and success metrics with the financial well-being of an underserved population - that's powerful. That's how you build something meaningful and motivating for the long run.
I think you're spot on that the key is to never lose that connection to the end customer. To let their experiences and aspirations be your North Star.
Closing Thoughts:
This article was brought to you by Sturgeon Capital, a frontier markets focused investment firm which managed $300m+ across venture capital and private equity in emerging regions in Central and South Asia. It is a part of a series of deep dives dedicated to covering the stories and lessons from founders from Sturgeon Capital’s portfolio.
We believe these stories illustrate the asymmetric opportunity that exists in undercapitalised, nascent, rapidly digitising, high growth, emerging markets. Doubling down on this conviction, we recently completed the first close for our second VC fund here, onboarding investors such as the World Bank’s IFC, SBI Holdings, and other family offices and high net worth individuals.
If you’d like to learn more about our markets, feel free to get in touch with kk [at] sturgeoncapital [dot] com.