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Collection: Problem Solving Products

4 in 1 make up pen, vegetable 4 in 1 manual round cutter and slicer, stainless steel vacuum flask set with 3 steel cups, portable refillable mini perfume atomizer bottle, portable emergency key chain mini power bank.

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The Best Problem-Solving Products Under $25

These smart buys solve life's little, annoying problems in a snap. Plus, they're all under $25.

Related To:

Life's hard enough without the small annoyances that make your daily routine that much more frustrating. Luckily, these problem-solving products are here to save the day. From keeping your guacamole fresh for days to fixing the scratches on your furniture and preserving your favorite sweater, these handy products tackle every one of those irritating problems you've dealt with time and time again. Best of all? They're all under $25!

Problem Solvers for the Living Room

Anti-Curling Rug Pads

PROBLEM: The rug is curling up, making you more prone to accidents.

SOLUTION: This handy set of anti-curling pads keeps those corners secure, while also keeping the rug in place on your floor so it doesn't move around. This sticks to any floor securely but is easily removable.

Sofa Cup Holder

PROBLEM: You never have a place to put your drink when you're on the couch.

SOLUTION: This brilliant silicone couch cup holder — it has weighted ends and a resin base that prevents it from slipping — works on fabric or leather and fits anything from a coffee cup to a remote control. It's safe to use with hot or cold beverages and comes in a few fun colors.

Touch-Up Wood Repair Markers

PROBLEM: That pesky scratch on your beloved wood furniture.

SOLUTION: These felt-tipped markers and wax sticks fix the problem in minutes. Color them on any scratch, let dry a few minutes and you're done. They come in a pack with a few colors that easily match with maple, oak, cherry, walnut, mahogany or espresso-colored wood, and the kit includes a wax stick sharpener. They work on everything from floors to furniture.

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Problem-Solving Products for Living Rooms

You'll Wonder How You Ever Lived Without These Handy Touch-Up Tools

Pet Fur and Lint Remover Brush

PROBLEM : Your sofa looks like a dog bed. SOLUTION : A pet hair collector that's the size of a lint roller without the sticky sheets. Simply glide this handheld wand (because it's that magical) over a pillow, chair cushion, car seat or piece of clothing while the soft bristles do the dirty work. When you're done, simply remove the base to dispose of trapped hair.

A Game-Changing Lint and Pet Hair Remover

Problem solvers for the kitchen.

Reusable Silicone Food Savers

PROBLEM : You're tired of wasting leftover produce. SOLUTION : Preserve the freshness of leftover fruits and vegetables with silicone food savers. Push the leftover food into the silicone cap, and save it in your fridge until you need it again. The food savers create a seal to keep things fresh and prevent exposure to circulating air.

Clip-on Silicone Strainer

PROBLEM: You're tight on kitchen storage and prep space. SOLUTION: Made of silicone, this clip-on collapsible colander attaches to any pot or pan so you can easily strain out pasta water, sauces and more. It takes up a lot less space than a large colander bowl and helps you dirty fewer pots.

Easy-Grip Jar Opener

PROBLEM: That hot sauce lid's not coming off anytime soon. SOLUTION: In swoops the easy-grip jar opener that fits lids or caps of any size. The patented design is perfect for kids or those with limited mobility. Just grip, twist and enjoy.

Over-the-Sink Drying Rack

PROBLEM: Your dish rack is taking up all the space in your kitchen. SOLUTION: Try this silicone-coated dish rack: It folds up easily so it virtually takes up no space in your kitchen, and it has steel insides to securely hold anything from a set of glasses to your heaviest pan right above the sink to dry with ease. It can also be used as a trivet, a colander or a cooling rack because it's heat-resistant.

Stainless-Steel Odor Absorber

PROBLEM : Your hands smell like onion. SOLUTION : Washing your hands with soap and water doesn't remove the smell of garlic and onion after a chopping spree. To remove unwanted scents from your hands, simply rub the bar between your hands like traditional soap under water for 30 seconds. Since the Rub-A-Way Bar is made from stainless steel, you'll never need to replace it like you would a standard bar of soap.

Flex Pot Clip

PROBLEM: Where's that extra hand in the kitchen when you need one? SOLUTION: The utensil pot clip attaches directly to the pot or pan edge and holds utensils in place while you're cooking. The flexible opening is designed to fit a variety of kitchen-tool shapes, and the silicone and stainless-steel materials are heat-resistant. Now you can keep kitchen tools within easy reach and off the stovetop.

Adjustable Baggy Rack

PROBLEM: Your kitchen counter is a mess after putting food into a storage bag. SOLUTION: This sandwich bag opener gives you hands-free control of your food storage bag. Anything tricky to pour such as soup or sauce can be transferred into the storage bag without messes or spilling. The rack can fit bags up to one gallon in size.

Cast Iron Cleaner

PROBLEM: Your beloved cast iron pan is difficult to clean.

SOLUTION: Wash off the grit AND preserve the flavor with soap-less, detergent-free grit removal. You don’t need to fear your seasoning being stripped off by harsh soap or cleaners. With The Ringer, all you need is warm water and you’re good to go.

6 Problem-Solving Kitchen Gadgets

20 Affordable Gadgets For People Who Hate to Clean

Problem solvers for the bathroom.

Toothpaste Squeezers

PROBLEM: You can never get that last bit of toothpaste out.

SOLUTION: This three-pack of toothpaste squeezers couldn't be easier to use: just insert and rotate with the handle, and you'll get every bit of your money's worth out of that tube. It works on tubes made from plastic or aluminum, and you can even use it with things like shaving cream or moisturizer.

Mini Spatulas

PROBLEM : You're tired of slamming your almost-empty makeup on the counter. SOLUTION : This money-saving tool will allow you to use every last drop of your bottled products. The Spatty comes in two sizes, and each one can fit inside small openings to scoop out stubborn cosmetics.

Drain Stop and Hair Catcher

PROBLEM : Your tub always gets clogged. SOLUTION : Try this dual-functioning hair catcher and drain stop. Press the center button to allow water flow and use it as a hair catcher, or push on the upturned edges to snap the valve shut and use it as a drain stop.

Bath Overflow Drain Cover

PROBLEM: You want to take a nice, long bath without hearing water trickle down the drain. SOLUTION: This bath overflow drain cover seals securely around your overflow drain to safely increase water depth by inches . This means a deeper, warmer bath so you can soak in peace.

Shower Gel Bottle Holders

PROBLEM: You don't have enough space in your shower to hold all of your favorite bath products. SOLUTION: These self-adhesive bottle holders adhere easily to your bath and shower walls to provide easy access to your most-used and most-loved products, from shower gel to shampoo. Talk about a spa-like experience!

Fogless Shower Mirror

PROBLEM: Your mirror always fogs up just when you need it.

SOLUTION: Whether it's a shave, tweezing or makeup application — nothing stops your bathroom routine faster than a foggy mirror. This fogless version has a rotating arm that you can easily adjust and is easy to install onto mirrors or into the shower with its suction cup. There's even a little hook for a razor.

Silicone Hair Tool Holder

PROBLEM: Your hot hair tools are always tangled and disorganized in your bathroom or left out to cool on the countertop all day. SOLUTION: This silicone hair tool holder fits nicely inside your vanity drawer, creating a safe spot to store hot hair tools, like your curling iron or hair straightener. Plus, there's plenty of space to wrap the cord around the tools and store them, keeping them out of sight and hidden until you need them again.

5 Problem-Solving Products for the Bathroom

Problem solvers for the bedroom.

Smart Plugs

PROBLEM: You hate getting out of bed to turn off the light. SOLUTION: Make anything "smart" with smart plugs. Simply plug it in and control from anywhere. We're talking lamps, fans and more.

White Noise Machine

PROBLEM: You have trouble sleeping with outside noise coming through the windows. SOLUTION: Block out unwanted noise with a portable sound machine. The Lectrofan is a portable white noise machine that comes with 20 different soundscapes and is loop-free to avoid interruption so you sleep soundly through the night.

Smart Dimmable Bulbs

PROBLEM: Your overhead lighting isn't giving off much ... ambiance. SOLUTION: Customize any light with smart dimmable bulbs. You can adjust the brightness from your phone and even set a schedule for waking up or winding down.

5 Problem-Solving Products for Bedrooms

Problem solvers for the laundry room.

Magnetic Ironing Mat

PROBLEM : You don't have space for an ironing board. SOLUTION: For side-by-side washers and dryers, lay this mat on top and you instantly have a heat-safe surface for ironing. Magnets sewn into the mat will keep it in place, and the mat folds up for easy, compact storage.

Lint Brush Vent Trap Cleaner

PROBLEM: Stubborn lint buildup in your dryer. SOLUTION: This sturdy but flexible brush is long and narrow and can fit into any lint trap so you can swipe up lint in one fell swoop after each dry cycle to keep the lint trap clean.

Dryer Vent Cleaner Vacuum Hose Attachment

PROBLEM: Your vacuum won't fit behind your heavy washer and dryer. SOLUTION: Keeping the lint trap and dryer duct is important to ensure your dryer doesn't become a fire hazard. For really hard-to-reach spots like the dryer duct and the nooks and crannies around your dryer, use this flexible vacuum hose attachment to suck up any dust and lint.

Wad-Free Bed Sheet Detangler

PROBLEM: Your sheets are always tangling, twisting and balling up in the washer and dryer. SOLUTION: As seen on Shark Tank , Wad-Free for Bed Sheets is a nifty gadget where you can insert the corners of sheets before tossing them in the washer and dryer to prevent the sheets from tangling up. Plus, it helps your sheets dry faster, meaning you save energy by not running your dryer as long.

Pet Hair Removal Tool

PROBLEM: Your clothes (and washer and dryer) are always covered in pet hair. SOLUTION: Just toss one of these reusable FurZappers into your washer or dryer to effectively remove pet hair from your clothes and your pet's bedding. Lint and hair are picked up and rinsed away in the wash or moved into the lint trap of your dryer.

Bamboo Charcoal Air Freshener

PROBLEM: Your shoes smell bad. SOLUTION: These natural, air-purifying bags are an easy and convenient way to maintain fresh, dry and odorless shoes, gym bags, luggage and sports equipment. Simply place the charcoal bags inside the affected area and leave overnight. To reactivate, place the bags outside in the sun once a month for at least an hour. With proper care, they'll last up to two years, and at the end of the bag's lifespan, you can recycle the bamboo charcoal into the soil.

Sweater Shaver and Cashmere Comb

PROBLEM: A favorite sweater just won't stop pilling.

SOLUTION: These sweater combs come two in a pack: One comb works for any sweater, and the other works for gentle cashmere. Both do the same thing; however, they remove the lint and pilling that makes your beloved favorites look worn. You can even use these on couches or bed sheets.

Wool Dryer Balls

PROBLEM: You're always running out of those wasteful dryer sheets.

SOLUTION: These dryer balls — made of 100-percent New Zealand wool — actually tackle a few problems; they eliminate the need for dryer sheets, which saves you money over time, and they also make your laundry fluffier, too. The balls bounce around, separating the laundry and helping it to dry 25-percent faster without any static. Wool dryer balls also don't contain harsh chemicals like dryer sheets often do. If you really love the scent of sheets, you can use drops of essential oil on these as well.

4 Problem-Solving Laundry Products

Problem solvers for everywhere else.

Bag Carrier

PROBLEM: You're tired of struggling to carry lots of bags to the car. SOLUTION: This nifty gadget is the easiest way to carry groceries, shopping bags and dry cleaning quickly and comfortably. It distributes weight evenly, allowing you to carry more bags in one trip.

Nail Polish Holder

PROBLEM : You haven't mastered at-home manicures. SOLUTION : The Tweexy wearable polish holder fits all finger sizes and all nail polish bottles, making DIY manicures even easier.

Car Garbage Bin

PROBLEM: Your car is always a mess.

SOLUTION: This car garbage can has hundreds of five-star reviews for a reason: it's an easy way to keep your car clean. The adjustable straps can easily secure this to wherever it's most convenient, plus the Oxford cloth and sturdy plastic bottom are strong and leak-proof. One reviewer wrote: " I use this wastebasket in my car all the time. It holds quite a lot and keeps garbage from getting under the car seats before you can make a stop to clean your car."

Purse Organizer Insert

PROBLEM: You can't find anything in your purse when you need it.

SOLUTION: With three exterior pockets, 10 interior pockets, a detachable center pocket with a sturdy zipper and a detachable lanyard for your keys, this is the thing that will keep your purse in check. The felt design is cute and comes in a few colors and sizes.

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67 Problem-Solving Products to Dropship for MAXIMUM PROFIT

Are you looking to start or grow a dropshipping business but not sure which types of products to focus on? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

In this comprehensive guide, I’m going to explain why you should consider problem-solving product items designed specifically to address common frustrations, inconveniences, and challenges faced by consumers.

So here is a list of 67 Problem-Solving Products to Dropship for Maximum Profit.

Article Contents

• 1 67 Problem-Solving Products to Dropship for Maximum Profit
• 2 What Makes Problem-Solving Products Profitable?
• 3 Most Profitable Problem-solving Product Categories
• 4 Sourcing These Products
• 5 Marketing Problem-Solving Products
• 6 Scaling Your Dropshipping Business
• 7 Managing Your Profit Margins
• 8 Advanced Dropshipping Strategies
• 9 Conclusion: Problem-Solving Products to Dropship
• 10 FAQs: Problem-Solving Products to Dropship

67 Problem-Solving Products to Dropship for Maximum Profit

By the end of this article, you’ll have a solid understanding of:

• What makes problem-solving products so profitable?
• The most lucrative categories and products to focus on.
• Tips for sourcing and marketing these items, and
• How to scale a highly successful e-commerce business around alleviating people’s pains.

I’m going to break this down step-by-step and equip you with an arsenal of winning product ideas that consumers absolutely love.

So, let’s get started.

What Makes Problem-Solving Products Profitable?

Before we get into specific products, let’s discuss what makes problem-solving items such a smart choice for dropshipping entrepreneurs . There are a few key factors at play:

They Provide Real Value and Fill a Need

Products that effectively help people solve frustrating problems add true value to their lives. They fill an important need that consumers actively have. This gives you an advantage over trendy or impulse-purchased products that require more convincing.

Targeted at a Specific Audience with a Problem to Solve

Problem-solving products cater to specific demographics or groups who are experiencing a common issue or pain point. This allows you to really tighten your target audience, saving money on ads.

Require Less Convincing to Make a Purchase

Since these products fix peoples’ problems, you have to spend less effort convincing them to buy. They already recognize they have an issue your product alleviates, making your job much easier.

Tap Into Emotional Triggers and Pain Points

Solving problems people desperately want fixed elicits strong emotional responses. Your marketing can tap into the frustration, inconvenience, and urgency they feel to trigger conversions.

When you can combine a highly targeted audience with a product that tugs at their heartstrings by making their lives noticeably better, you have a winning formula for a profitable dropshipping opportunity.

You might also like:

• Is It Too Late to Get Into Dropshipping
• How to Buy Directly from a Manufacturer in China

Most Profitable Problem-solving Product Categories

Alright, now let’s dig into the specific categories and product ideas that make the most sense to focus your dropshipping business around.

Pet Products

Pet owners are extremely passionate and dedicated to their furry friends. They are highly motivated to purchase products that make their pets’ lives better or easier to manage. Some top-selling problem-solving pet products include:

• GPS trackers – Help find lost pets quickly
• Training devices – Stop problem behaviors
• Beds – Provide comfort for arthritis, joint pain
• Grooming tools – Reduce shedding, matting, nail problems
• Feeders – Slow eaters entertain pets

Kitchen Products

The kitchen is full of hassles and frustrations. Products that reduce meal prep time, store food efficiently, or produce consistent results are always hot sellers. Consider:

• Storage containers – Keep food fresh longer
• Small appliances – Automate cooking tasks
• Reusable items – Replace disposable waste
• Dispensers – Improve organization

Home Products

Around the house, people need help keeping things clean, operating smoothly, and providing comfort. These are just some home problem-solving products that sell well:

• Cleaning tools – Reach difficult spots
• Smart home devices – Add convenience
• Furniture – Encourage better posture or sleep
• Lighting – Add visibility, safety, ambiance
• Outdoor – Make yards/patios more enjoyable

Beauty Products

Looking and feeling good about oneself is a priority for many demographics. Beauty devices that solve cosmetic problems or enhance routines are hot sellers, such as:

• Skincare devices – Reduce signs of aging
• Hair tools – Add shine, remove frizz
• Makeup applicators – Help apply cleanly
• Light therapy – Improve skin, brighten

Baby Products

New parents have a boatload of problems to solve as they care for infants. These problem-solving products help make parenting duties easier:

• Feeding tools – Soothe colic, transition to solids
• Safety items – Monitor breathing, block hazards
• Transportation – Carry baby hands-free
• Bathing – Bathe without slipping or crying

Medical Products

Health issues and mobility challenges are common problems. Devices that aid recovery, treatment or daily tasks enable independent living:

• Pain relief – Reduce strain on joints, arthritis, injuries
• Mobility aids – Improve stability in walking, standing
• Therapeutic devices – Apply compression, heat, massage
• Health monitors – Track vitals, sleep, and fitness data

Travel Products

Traveling poses many frustrations. Clever products that make trips more comfortable, organized, and safe appeal to jet setters:

• Outdoor gear – Provide shade, water filtration, illumination
• Luggage items – Prevent lost belongings and deter theft
• Personal comfort – Relax in flight, block noise and light
• Safety tools – Deter pickpockets, emergency preparedness

Vehicle Products

Owning a car comes with perpetual problems. Products that ease maintenance, improve organization, and enhance the driving experience attract car owners, like:

• Cleaning tools – Detail hard-to-reach areas
• Storage – Maximize trunk and interior space
• Electronics – Make music sound better
• Emergency tools – Escape accidents safely

As you can see, every area of life comes with problems people need to solve. Identify and provide solutions for the right audience, and your dropshipping business is sure to thrive .

Now let’s look at sourcing these types of winning products.. .

Sourcing These Products

To find reliable suppliers for problem-solving products, you’ll want to look at a few key platforms :

Alibaba – Great for finding manufacturers, especially for more complex or customized products. You can contact suppliers here to negotiate MOQs, pricing, quality assurance, and handling branded dropshipping orders.

AliExpress – Suitable for ordering samples and finding wholesalers reselling name-brand products. Compare sellers’ ratings, reviews, and service policies.

Printify – For dropshipping customized products like apparel, home goods, and accessories that solve consumer problems. Integrates with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms.

Oberlo Supply – Directory of vetted AliExpress suppliers committed to providing branded packaging and faster fulfillment. Sign up for free supplier accounts.

The goal is to find suppliers that are able to provide consistent quality, reasonable minimum order requirements, and reliable order processing and fulfillment . Don’t be afraid to ask for product samples and shop around.

Marketing Problem-Solving Products

Now that you’ve selected winning problem-solving products and vetted suppliers , it’s time to effectively market them to interested target audiences. Here are some proven strategies:

Demonstrate Clearly How It Solves a Problem

Explain exactly how the product alleviates pain points, difficulties, or inconveniences faced by consumers. Use persuasive copywriting focused on benefits.

Use Emotional Triggers and Emphasize Improvements

Tug at consumers’ heartstrings by vividly detailing frustrations and how your product eliminates them from their lives.

Lean On Social Proof Like Reviews and Testimonials

Back up your claims with positive customer reviews , satisfaction ratings, or expert recommendations to overcome skepticism.

Show Product Visually With Photos, Videos, GIFs

Display the product in real environments and use cases to help shoppers visualize the solution working for them.

Curate Related Blog Content and Email Sequences

Surround shoppers with content addressing the problems your products solve to prime them for purchase.

Now let’s explore how to scale up your dropshipping business around these unsaturated, high-profit products.

Scaling Your Dropshipping Business

Once you’ve gained traction selling problem-solving products, you can start implementing strategies to expand your business:

Hire Virtual Assistants

Bring on VAs to help with time-intensive product research , sourcing, order processing, customer service, and marketing tasks.

Use Automation Tools

Automate repetitive fulfillment, inventory, analytics, email marketing, and advertising processes to streamline operations.

Build Out an Affiliate Program

Incentivize influencers and satisfied customers to promote your products to their own audiences for more sales.

Expand Into Multiple Sales Channels

Get your products in front of more buyers by selling across multiple online marketplaces and platforms beyond just your website.

Develop Excellent Customer Service

Provide helpful, responsive support as your brand grows to keep customers satisfied long-term.

Managing Your Profit Margins

To keep your margins healthy as you scale, keep these tips in mind:

• Negotiate Better Rates with suppliers on shipping, production, and bulk order discounts as you increase purchase volumes.
• Reduce Costs like shipping, packaging, and returns through negotiations and being strategic. The more units you sell, the lower your unit costs.
• Avoid Overpaying for Paid Ads by relentlessly analyzing conversion data and optimizing for positive ROI across channels.
• Double Down on Bestsellers so you can buy larger quantities at lower rates and minimize risk.

Advanced Dropshipping Strategies

Once your core dropshipping business is running smoothly, try out these advanced tactics:

• Leverage Dropshipping Agents to handle product sourcing, inventory, fulfillment logistics, and supplier relations for you.
• Specialize in Complex, Higher Ticket Products like electronics or medical devices that require customization and an experienced agent.
• Create Your Own Products through private labeling and manufacturing arrangements, maintaining full control of the brand.
• Build Unique Bundles that solve multiple consumer problems in clever new ways while increasing average order value.

The sky is truly the limit once you’ve built momentum with a solid problem-solving product foundation.

Conclusion : Problem-Solving Products to Dropship

I hope this guide gave you a comprehensive game plan for profiting big from dropshipping problem-solving products consumers desperately want.

Remember to dig deep into customer pain points, source reliably, market effectively with emotional triggers and visual content, keep scaling, and get creative once you’ve nailed the basics down.

Now that you’re armed with dozens of winning, high-profit product ideas (and advanced strategies to take it further), the only thing left is to get out there and start solving problems.

Let’s wrap up with answers to some common questions about “Problem-Solving Products to Dropship”.

FAQs : Problem-Solving Products to Dropship

What are the most profitable problem-solving products right now?

Some of the hottest problem-solving products across various categories include weighted blankets, massage guns, cleaning robots, smart home devices, at-home red light therapy, reusable kitchen products and car organization tools.

How do I find and validate winning problem-solving product ideas?

Start by brainstorming and researching problems your target demographics face using surveys, forums, and keyword research. Vet ideas by analyzing reviews , search volume, competition levels, manufacturing feasibility and potential manufacturing partners. Order samples to test quality.

What problems are people most eager to solve through products?

People tend to be most motivated to solve problems related to health, safety, personal appearance, daily hassles, improving home and workspace, enhancing leisure time and travel, and anything helping care for kids or pets.

How can I improve conversions when selling problem-solving products?

Make your copy persuasive in detailing the problem and how you solve it. Use emotional messaging. Incorporate visual demonstrations and customer testimonials. Send follow-up sequences to guide buyers through the decision-making process. Offer free trials or guarantees.

What marketing strategies work best for problem-solving dropshipping?

Content marketing focuses on “how to” advice and empathetic storytelling. Leveraging targeted social media communities and influencers. Pay-per-click ads focused on search intent keywords. Retargeting recent site visitors. Affiliate marketing partnerships.

How much profit margin can I expect from problem-solving products?

If sourced wisely, marketed effectively, and scaled efficiently – 30-50% profit margins are very realistic for problem-solving dropshipping businesses. Some products have even higher margins upwards of 70%.

What sourcing tips do you have for dropshipping problem solvers profitably?

Order samples before committing inventory purchases to ensure acceptable quality. Negotiate discounts on large orders. Find out return policies. Get shipping costs down through volume. Work with suppliers focused on strong customer service .

Are some categories of problem-solving products oversaturated?

Categories like general fitness/athleisure, phone accessories, and organizational tools are getting pretty crowded. Focus on niches still flying under the radar or differentiate through branding and exclusive products.

Should I focus on high or low-ticket problem-solving products?

It depends on your goals. Lower ticket products move faster volume, while higher ticket items bring in more revenue per order. Find the right balance for your target profit and growth objectives.

How can I stand out when dropshipping popular problem-solving products?

Offer customized or special edition versions. Provide superior support and bonuses. Establish yourself as an authority around the customer problem through content marketing . Focus on an underserved geographic or demographic niche.

That concludes the article “Problem-Solving Products to Dropship”. Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for visiting.

About the Author

Hello, I’m Samuel, and I’ve been in the dropshipping business for the past 9 years. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of helping many novice dropshippers grow their businesses. Based on my experience, I’ve launched this blog to share my insights and knowledge with the dropshipper community.

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Home » Articles » Coders Converge in Cambridge to Solve Problems in Pakistan

Coders Converge in Cambridge to Solve Problems in Pakistan

Over a weekend of white-knuckled typing, whiteboarding and brainstorming, 12 teams of technologists and entrepreneurs in Cambridge, Mass., plan to solve civic, social and security problems in Pakistan. Coders at Packathon will team with mentors to develop businesses, Web sites, software applications and other products under a 40-hour deadline from Sept. 13 to 15.

Pakathon’s US venue notwithstanding, the event represents a nascent interest in creating technology in Pakistan, its coordinators say.

“It is a recent trend, but there are people in Pakistan doing great work,” Assad Badruddin, who co-founded Pakathon along with Zheela Qaiser, told E4C. Badruddin is a Karachi native, a veteran of a handful of startups and a recent graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

[quote author=”Assad Badruddin”]People are definitely trying to promote a cultural awareness about entrepreneurship and tech, as it is understood in places like Silicon Valley. Cities like Karachi are thriving with entrepreneurs but most of their companies are not in tech. [/quote]

At the event in Cambridge, the 12 teams will build solutions to problems with one of six themes: violence, education, energy, agriculture, disaster relief and health. The team with the winning plan will take home $5000 to seed its development. We looked to past Pakistani events for ideas of what to expect.

Packathon unites coders and other experts to solve problems in six categories: health, violence, education, agriculture, disaster relief and energy. Photo credits (clockwise from top left: UK Department for International Development, Mukesh Gupta / Reuters, Hashoo Foundation, A. Yaqub / CIMMYT, EU Humanitarian Aid, U.S. Embassy Pakistan

Pakathon is the latest in a year of gatherings of problem-solving coders with sights on Pakistan. There was Startup Grind and also  Startup Weekend Lahore , that helped launch more than a dozen businesses. Some of those include SmartRooms, which creates digital information for grade-school students; Cashless Campus, a cash card for universities; and Seed, a tool for sharing food with the needy.

In April, Civic Hackathon Karachi launched Report a Rishwat , a text-messaging service that encourages honesty by allowing people to report officials who ask for bribes.

Pakathon springs from a unique moment in Pakistan’s history as the country is embracing democratic ideals, Badruddin says. ”Many Pakistanis both at home and abroad are taking up civic duty to shape the future of their country,” Badruddin said in a statement.

The country’s democracy has been pocked with military coups – three in the last 50 years. But throughout the tumult, Pakistan has cultivated the sciences and technology. The country has a space program and in 1962 it became the first South Asian country to launch a rocket out of the atmosphere. Then in 1990, Pakistan became the first Muslim country to put a satellite into space.

Pakistani researchers make advances in physics, chemistry and medicine, and, since 1991 the country has sent research scientists to Antarctica.

Pakistan’s economy has also shown promise. In 2005, the investment bank Goldman Sachs named Pakistan among the Next Eleven, the countries that, along with the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), could become leading economic powers in the 21st century.

Poverty persists, however, as does violence and the slew of problems that make international headlines.

With Pakathon, Badruddin hopes to focus on his home country’s strengths and focus on solutions.

“This is an Anti-Conference: we are starting where the conference ends. No talk, just action. We are calling all hackers, educators, lawyers, doctors, dissidents, accountants, physicists, musicians, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs interested in making a difference to step forward and take part,” Badruddin says.

For information, please see Pakathon’s Facebook page .

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23 genius products that solve every little annoying problem in your life

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These days, there's seemingly a product for everything . And while it doesn't make sense to fill your home with one-function knick-knacks, sometimes investing in a gadget or accessory makes sense if it eliminates daily inconveniences. 

Whether you want to be outside (but hate the heat wave right now ) or want to wash your hands without dirtying the sink handles in the process , there are plenty of home upgrades that feel subtle but add up to make a huge difference. So whether you want a mess-free pancake mixer , a bike helmet that fits easily in your bag , or an alarm clock that doesn't abruptly wake you up , keep reading to see our favorite products to solve all of life's most annoying problems.

23 products that solve every little problem you have:

A hat that physically cools you down in the heat.

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If you're bogged down by the current heat waves, this baseball cap gets 23 degrees cooler when you wet it , making it a genius (and affordable) hack for those summer hikes. 

A cheap survival bracelet for any mild hiking emergencies

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Whether you stumble upon any hiking issues (or just want some peace of mind when you're on a particularly long one), this survival bracelet packs a punch . It comes with a 10-foot paracord, compass, fire starter, and small cutting tool.

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One of our favorite bike helmets and best products we've ever tested , this super-lightweight helmet folds down to almost half its size for easy backpack storage.

Clear pop containers for decluttered kitchens

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If half-filled bags of flour are the bane of your existence, these clear, easy-to-use plastic containers are perfect for storing and labeling all your ingredients without having to desperately fumble around your shelves every time you need baking soda.

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Our favorite long charging cable , this one is 10 feet long and comes with a weighted, durable design to last a lot longer than your regular phone charger.

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A TikTok-famous hack , this cable management box neatly tucks away and hides any messy floor cables for a cleaner look.

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This genius product is huge on TikTok for a reason : all you have to do is add ingredients to the bottle, let the wire whisk device at the bottom mix everything together, and use the nozzle to dispense evenly sized pancakes every time.

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This razor-sharp scraper has made the rounds on TikTok as an easy cleaning hack. It has some weight, making it easy to grip and control as you scrape away the grime that just won't wash off.

Silicone food bags when Tupperware is too clunky

Zip Top Reusable Food Storage Bags, available on Amazon, $38.39

Essentially sturdier Ziploc bags, these TikTok-famous silicone bags are incredibly easy to close and save a lot of space compared to standard Tupperware. They're also freezer- and microwave-friendly.

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For those who hate having soggy beach clothes in the car , this mat folds up into a waterproof bag when you're done, so your wet swimsuit doesn't dampen up all your other stuff.

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Hatch Restore alarm clock, available on Amazon, $129.99

Our favorite customizable sunrise alarm clock , this model can be controlled with an app and has plenty of light and sound options to make waking up even more natural and easy.

An extendable duster to reach every possible corner

OXO Good Grips Microfiber Extendable Duster, available on Amazon, $17.99

This is our favorite duster for one simple reason: it's easily extendable to get all the spots you wouldn't reach otherwise, like ceiling fans or the top part of your blinds.

An under-desk treadmill if you hate sitting at a desk all day

GOYOUTH 2 in 1 Under Desk Electric Treadmill, available on Amazon, $379.99

Our favorite under-desk treadmill , this model is strong and durable for its price and is a great option for anyone working from home who desires more movement.

A sleek, hands-free faucet

Delta Faucet Trinsic Touch Kitchen Faucet, available on Amazon, $598.98

This is our favorite kitchen faucet because of how advanced it is for the price — you can tap the faucet itself to turn it on and off when you have dirty hands. Plus, it has a color-changing LED to indicate water temperature.

A pillow for side-sleepers with neck pain

Eli & Elm Side Sleeper Pillow with Adjustable Filler, available on Amazon, $139.99

If you're a known side-sleeper who wakes up with an achy neck, this adjustable, sturdy pillow gives your neck much-needed support during the night.

Tik-Tok famous cleaning paste

Stardrops Cleaning Paste, available on Amazon, $19.99

The Pink Stuff is all over TikTok because of its versatility — you can use it on everything from white leather sneakers to kitchenware . 

Sustainable alternatives to paper towels

Skoy Cloth Reusable Swedish Dishcloth, available on Amazon, $13.99

If you care about the environment *and* blow through a roll of paper towels every week, these Swedish dishcloths are sustainably made, compostable, and machine washable.

A bagel "guillotine" for easy breakfasts

Hoan The Original Bagel Guillotine Universal Slicer, available on Amazon, $19.99

Besides being really fun to use, this clever device makes it less annoying to slice up bagels — especially if you're making them for a big group.

A bestselling egg cooker for easy eggs, anytime

DASH Rapid Egg Cooker, available on Amazon, $16.99

This $17 egg cooker does it all — it makes hard boiled eggs without boiling water, poaches eggs with almost no work on your end, and creates scrambled eggs and omelettes in a snap.

A cute dispenser to get the right amount of dish soap every time

Soap Daddy, available on The Smile Shop, $12.99

As seen all over TikTok , this little dispenser has an easy push-down feature to get a perfect dollop of soap on your sponge or hands without having to squeeze a near-empty bottle every time.

The comfiest gripper socks for no-slip workouts

Women's Gripper Ankle Socks and Men's Gripper Ankle Socks , available on Bombas, from $15

Whether you need them for yoga class or just your home's hardwood floors , these gripper socks keep you from slipping and also offer an especially comfy fit. 

A motion- and voice-activated trash can you never have to touch

Simplehuman Kitchen Recycling Trash Can with Voice and Motion Sensor, available on Amazon, (currently OOS)

If you're willing to shell out $250 for a garbage can, this one is well worth the money for anyone who *hates* touching the lid. Beyond its hands-free motion and voice controls, it has compartments for both trash and recycling and even a storage space for new liners.

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Innovation Challenges: a tool for harnessing the problem-solving potential of youth

November 20, 2019.

This is part 2 in a series of blogs charting the journey of UNDP Pakistan’s Innovation Portfolio and the Youth Empowerment Programme to test, adapt & scale innovative approaches for achieving development outcomes.   Read part 1 here.

With a population of 197 million, and with 68% of the nation younger than 30 (and 27% between the ages of 15 – 29; an age group which Pakistan defines as youth), Pakistan now has more young people than ever. YEP believes that a wealth of untapped problem-solving potential is hidden within young people – and collaborated with the Innovation Portfolio to brainstorm the best way of harnessing this for positive social impact.

A youth-focused innovation challenge offered an approach that would empower young people to become active agents of change within their communities by offering them the driving seat in the search for new, more effective and sustainable ways of achieving positive development outcomes and achieving the SDGs. At the same time, using a challenge as a model of open innovation would give UNDP access to diverse sources of ideas and talent for solving complex social problems. The challenge, co-designed by the Innovation Portfolio and YEP gave young people the space to identify the problems within their own communities and come up with innovative ideas to overcome these. In return, UNDP would support them in tackling these challenges and teach them new skills to refine their creative solutions.

(Read the detailed blog on our experience  here ). The lessons learnt end of the challenge allowed us to adapt and re-design the challenge, for its second round, in which we narrowed down the SDGs we wanted young people to submit solutions for. We also used technology to enhance our outreach by partnering with  Viamo , a global organization with expertise in ICT4D, to push out SMS messages with links to the web application form. Our approaches became more flexible for providing mentorship support to the winners, and we focused more on connecting young people to build a community of problem-solvers.

So far, the challenge has proved to be more cost-effective than a traditional grant giving modality. At the same time, it demonstrates that open innovation can give rise to valuable new approaches that have the potential for impact and scale – one of the women participant of the Youth Innovation Challenge, has been asked by the government to scale-up her project which focuses on the provision of life skills and psychosocial support for children in schools. Till date over 2,400 young people have been constructively engaged through projects undertaken by the award grantees.

The second round of the Youth Innovation Challenge was launched in May 2019. The same model was retained, however the applications sought were on thematic areas identified as concerns during grassroots dialogues conducted by YEP as another initiative. An unprecedented 2,800 applications were received, out of which 100 have been shortlisted and will be receiving grants soon.

Using mobile technology to reach budding entrepreneurs: does it work?

The potential to use technology to achieve scale in terms of reach and impact is high. In view of the rapidly changing employment market of the future that many young people are facing globally, it had become increasingly critical for UNDP Pakistan’s Youth Empowerment Programme (YEP) to innovate in its approach to not only providing skills training for young people but to also reach further and wider regarding which groups of young people we work with. Although Pakistan’s social entrepreneurship ecosystem has been buzzing in the last couple of years, it is still in its nascent stages with many initiatives targeting urban youth. At UNDP we asked ourselves, “How can we reach millions of youth that are illiterate, in rural and/or remote locations and deliver effective training to them on entrepreneurship as an employment option?”

In our quest for more reach, new partnerships, innovative thinking and greater impact we partnered with Viamo, a global organization with expertise in providing behaviour change solutions using ICTs, and Telenor, Pakistan’s second largest mobile operator, to co-design a one-month pilot experiment in how to deliver entrepreneurship training over mobile phone using voice messages. With our challenge being how to reach more remote groups of youth; particularly less literate rural populations, we saw an opportunity to capitalize on the fact that 86% of Pakistan’s 154 million cellular subscribers are aged between 10-30.

Choosing to deliver content via voice message, known as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) meant that, crucially, people did not need to be literate to listen. It successfully allowed us to expand our engagement to populations of youth who are more marginalized, don’t have smartphones or internet connectivity, and who can’t bear high mobile costs. Having never approached the delivery of training in this way before, conducting a pilot to identify what did and did not work was critical.

Two pilots were conducted for the IVR content where Karobar Asaan Content (Easy Business) was hosted through two teams at Telenor to assess the engagement level of users. One pilot was conducted with a predominantly rural and less literate population and the second pilot was conducted with a relatively more urban and more literate population. A total of 279,691 users were engaged across two distinct pilot approaches; 26,710 users from pilot 1 and 252, 981 users from pilot 2. Building on to the pilots conducted by Viamo, YEP now aims to impact specific communities with business skills development content in regional languages (Pashto, Sindhi and Siraiki) as the IVR content went live at the end of the July. It is accessible using simple phones and it is free of cost for end beneficiaries. The content builds on to International Labour Organisation’s Community-Based Enterprise Development (C-BED) curriculum and a compelling story line to maximize engagement and knowledge retention among youth at scale.

To make sure we “close the loop” in providing training on future-focused skills and continuing to support young people to become productively engaged in society, we concurrently engaged Knowledge Platform, an internationally renowned firm with the expertise in developing interactive video-based content, to design a mobile app and online platform to deliver more content on entrepreneurship training for internet-connected young people in Pakistan. The vision is to innovate in the delivery of complimentary and mutually-reinforcing entrepreneurship training via various technology mediums. The app includes 13 modules consisting of videos based on a storyline, an interactive game, and quizzes to engage the users in entrepreneurship content. The videos, game and quizzes have been developed, and the user testing was carried out to receive feedback on the same. The final app is expected to be ready by mid-October and will be tested out on trainees from on-the-ground trainings on entrepreneurship to assess the impact of digital knowledge on the ground.

Last but not least, this initiative represents for UNDP Pakistan a new model of engagement and partnership with the private sector. When such content is well-designed and targeted, high engagement rates may translate into profits for our telecom partner, Telenor Pakistan. Engaging content therefore becomes worth owning or commercializing for permanent hosting on the mobile network and is an example of how the “for profit” and “for good” sectors can work together to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

The final blog in this 3-part series will reflect on the lessons learned and the future of innovation in UNDP Pakistan.

Ilena Paltzer Ilena Paltzer has worked for UNDP Pakistan as Innovation Coordinator, and for the FATA Governance Project on Coordination, Partnerships, and Innovation. She has also worked for the UN in South Sudan, across the East & Southern Africa region, and New York. Ilena is interested in finding new approaches for achieving sustainable and holistic social impact and pushing the sector to reconsider the way we "do development". She is also particularly interested in innovative ways of strengthening women's agency and engagement in these processes

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What’s fueling Pakistan’s emerging start-up ecosystem

In this episode of the McKinsey on Start-ups podcast, McKinsey executive editor Daniel Eisenberg speaks with investor Aatif Atwan and McKinsey Partner Abdur-Rahim Syed about the burgeoning start-up ecosystem in Pakistan. An edited transcript of their conversation, which took place earlier this year, follows.

To hear more episodes of McKinsey on Start-ups , subscribe on Apple , Audible , Google Podcasts , Spotify , or Stitcher .

Daniel Eisenberg: Based on demographics alone, Pakistan’s start-up ecosystem should already have been thriving for many years. It has, for starters, the fifth largest population in the world, approaching 230 million. And that population is both overwhelmingly young, with a median age of 22, and bi-lingual, with the fourth largest number of English speakers in the world. Add to that one of the fastest-growing middle classes, more than 100 million mobile broadband subscribers, and hundreds of thousands of tech professionals, and you have all the makings of a fertile market for new enterprises and digital services.

Yet until recently, venture or growth funding in Pakistan was barely a trickle compared to similar countries in the Middle East/North Africa region or in other parts of Asia. In the last couple of years, however, global VCs and other foreign investors have begun making significant bets on local start-ups as many regulatory and cultural barriers have started to soften.

To gain a better understanding of the changing dynamics of this start-up market, we are pleased today to be joined by two experts based in the region. Aatif Awan is the founder and managing partner of Indus Valley Capital, a Pakistan-focused venture fund he launched in his native country after working as a tech executive in Silicon Valley for several years. Abdur-Rahim Syed is a McKinsey partner based in Dubai who co-leads the firm’s start-up work in the region. Earlier in his career, he also worked in Silicon Valley.

Aatif, Abdur-Rahim, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Aatif, you launched Indus Valley Capital in 2019 after working in high-ranking positions at both Microsoft and LinkedIn. What has been changing in the Pakistan start-up ecosystem in recent years that convinced you it was the right time to focus on it in this way?

Aatif Awan: The funny thing is I didn’t see myself moving back to Pakistan at all, let alone starting a Pakistan focused VC fund, until I found myself in a position where I knew I had to do it.

In 2018, after leaving LinkedIn, I decided to take a year off. I spent about half of it in Pakistan with my parents. That’s when some Pakistani founders started reaching out to me, seeking advice on growth, product, or fundraising.

It was mind-boggling that between 2016 and 2018 Pakistani start-ups were averaging about $10 million a year in VC funding, which is $0.05 per capita, or about one-third of a basis point of the G.D.P. That did not make any sense whatsoever. Next door, MENA was doing $800 million in annualized VC funding. And when you looked at the fundamentals in Pakistan, which I started looking at closely, it’s the fifth largest country with 200 million plus people. The median age is 22, which makes it the fourth largest Gen Z and younger population. It’s also the fourth largest English-speaking population and has had the fourth largest absolute increase in middle class.

So, the foundational elements were all in place, and then you had this population increasingly adopting the internet. We had more than 50 million broadband subscribers back in 2018. Now it’s 110 million. The tech talent to build those start-ups was there as well, with 300,000 plus tech professionals. I realized that it was just a matter of time, as we are at the cusp of this inflection point of a very large economy making that offline to online transition.

We’ve seen that happen in the U.S., in China, Indonesia, and India. Whenever that happens it creates massive opportunities for impact as well as financial opportunity. That made the decision obvious and quick for me. I knew if I didn’t do it, I’d regret it. I decided to move back and start Indus Valley Capital, which is a Pakistan-focused early-stage VC fund.

Daniel Eisenberg: Abdur-Rahim, you also worked in Silicon Valley early in your career. First at eBay and then at McKinsey, and you’re now based in Dubai.

For years the Middle East has far outpaced Pakistan in attracting VC funds, as Aatif pointed out. The gap now seems to be closing a bit. Why in your view did it take so long for Pakistan’s start-up ecosystem to start to take off, even though it had this foundation that Aatif was talking about?

Abdur-Rahim Syed: The gap is certainly closing, but the whole region is accelerating. If you take Saudi Arabia, the largest economy in the MENA region, they had $140 million of VC funding in 2020. In 2021, they had $548 million. That’s almost quadrupling in one year. Pakistan is on a faster trajectory, so the gap is closing.

As for why it took so long, if you look at the macroeconomy of Pakistan it’s been long dominated by agriculture, and by conglomerates that often have captive businesses. There’s not a burning platform, a driving reason to innovate, to take risks. I’ll give you one example. Take gross capital formation, which is a critical enabler of future growth. Pakistan’s gross capital formation in the last couple years has been roughly 15 percent of G.D.P, compared to 30 percent for India and 32 percent for Bangladesh. Hopefully this will change now that we have a significant acceleration in the start-up space.

Daniel Eisenberg: Aatif, you have a unique perspective with your investments in Pakistan right now. What sectors or horizontals are dominating as the scene emerges?

Aatif Awan: It’s been super exciting seeing this dramatic rise of Pakistani start-ups over the last couple years. In 2021, Pakistan raised close to $350 million in VC funding. That ratio of 80 to 1 relative to MENA is now at seven to one, which is in line with the G.D.P. ratios. If you break that down, a vast majority has been e-commerce start-ups. This is very typical of emerging markets. At the beginning you see founders going after the largest chunks of the economy waiting to be online. That tends to be e-commerce followed by logistics and that’s what has dominated in the Pakistani start-up ecosystem for the past couple of years. Fintech is now rising  on the back of some positive regulatory changes, including the introduction of new Electronic Money Institution (EMI) and digital banking licenses. We have also started seeing a pattern in the digitization of education and the health sectors, which can have a major impact on the country.

Overall, in 2021 more than half of all funding was e-commerce start-ups, which was split between the B2C and B2B start-ups. On the B2C side it’s ranged from commerce start-ups offering quick delivery of groceries and convenience items, to online ticketing, pharmacy delivery, and fashion shopping. On the B2B side we’re seeing a rapid digitization of the informal retail sector, which is essentially mom and pop corner stores that we call kiryana stores in Pakistan.

In terms of notable examples, I’ll mention two of the most well-funded start-ups, which in full disclosure were our first two investments. Airlift is a quick commerce start-up that has raised over $100 million in funding. They offer 30-minute delivery of grocery, pharmacy and household items. They are also expanding to electronics and have some very notable investors. They’re backed by First Round Capital, which is one of the earliest investors in Uber, Square, Notion, and Roblox. They typically don’t invest much outside the U.S. Airlift also got funding from Josh Buckley and Harry Stebbings, who are some of the leading solo capitalists, as well as from founders of Twitter, DoorDash, TransferWise, and many other top start-ups in the Valley. The other one I would mention is Bazaar, which is a B2B commerce and fintech start-up. They’ve raised over $100 million in funding.

If you look at the last two years, there’s been a little over $500 million in fundings. Airlift and Bazaar consumed $200 million of that. Bazaar’s investors also include some top tier investors like Target Global, Dragoneer and Acrew. They are essentially building the operating systems for B2B commerce in Pakistan with a platform that covers the marketplace, last-mile logistics, software, and fintech offerings.

To put things into perspective, Bazaar is just two years old. What’s exciting to see is that in a large, untapped market, when these start-ups come, they can grow very, very rapidly.

Daniel Eisenberg: Abdur-Rahim, I’m not sure if it’s too early to judge, given how young these start-ups are, but how concerned are you about a disparity between early-stage capital and later stage funding. I know in some markets early-stage capital has been relatively easy to come by, but obtaining later stage funding has been more of a challenge.

Abdur-Rahim Syed: It is a concern. But it’s not an uncommon concern among similar markets. Were we to have this conversation two years ago we would be asking if there is enough capital for series A. At this point, it’s clear there is enough capital for pre-seed, for seed and for series A.

Is there capital for series B? Aatif mentioned Airlift disclosed a large series B round recently and they have funding north of $100 million now as well. That’s only one example. The real question as we go forward is will the funding continue to flow? And at what speed?

There are three drivers of this question. The first is obvious. In the global macro venture capital environment there’s a lot of liquidity, a lot of global investment. Some of it is flowing towards Pakistan at an accelerated rate. Will that remain generous?

A second driver is in e-commerce and logistics. These are working capital heavy start-up spaces. Growth is very clear in a large consumer base, but growth is expensive. Can we begin to pivot to spaces where growth is less expensive and start-ups are less reliant on significantly large amounts of funding? Fintech is a great idea and we are beginning to head in that direction. Where beyond fintech will the start-up space go to next?

The third and often under-discussed driver is can Pakistani start-ups go beyond Pakistan? Once you go beyond Pakistan, go regional, go global, go to the U.S. market, the U.K. market, or to the MENA markets, you begin to tap into other funding pools. There’s the portfolio risk element of your series B, series C, series D being solved.

There is a start-up, a B2B food delivery platform called Retailo, which recently raised a $36 million series A round. They are headquartered in Saudi but operate in Pakistan, Saudi, and in UAE, and their founders are Pakistani. We need more stories like that, where Pakistani companies succeed in scaling in Pakistan, while scaling other markets in parallel.

Daniel Eisenberg: Aatif, what is your view of the potential for going global? It’s obviously a challenge for start-ups all over the world making that move from their home market to regions far afield. Is that going to naturally come, or do certain things have to happen to make that a reality?

Aatif Awan: I agree with Abdur-Rahim that it can be a very strong driver for continued momentum and growth, and we’re starting to see it. Retailo’s a fantastic example. They’ve shown this can be done very early. Prior to that, Careem proved the model as well, although it started in UAE. Another example is Zameen, which started from Lahore, Pakistan. It’s a real estate start-up that expanded out of Pakistan into the MENA region and ended up moving their headquarters to UAE. Zameen is a unicorn now.

So, we’ve seen an appetite among very ambitious founders to say Pakistan is a great market. You can build very large companies, but now that we’ve gotten those early stages of funding, why not go even bigger? I think we’ll continue to see that.

What we haven’t seen a lot of is building for the U.S. market or the European market with more of the enterprise-focused SaaS plays or deep tech plays. I think that is a matter of evolution. Eventually it would be exciting to start building more pure software start-ups and deep tech start-ups, which cater to these very large markets.

Daniel Eisenberg: Abdur-Rahim, we’ve already touched a little bit upon regulatory issues. In your view, what must happen for continued funding and innovation growth, whether it’s regulatory changes or how the private sector operates?

Abdur-Rahim Syed: A lot of it comes down to continued momentum, the evidence from funding rounds, and the success of start-ups. Even exits like Careem, as Aatif mentioned, inspire a new generation of students and professionals to go into the entrepreneurial space.

The question is, at what speed will it continue? Are there regulatory unlocks that can help ease this? Aatif mentioned that on the banking side you’re beginning to see some unlocks there. On the payment side, Pakistan does not yet have PayPal available, so international payment gateways would help the Pakistani engineering entrepreneurial base to move beyond the global gig economy on global platforms as well.

Daniel Eisenberg: I’m also interested in a country where conglomerates have traditionally dominated. Is there a change in attitudes these days toward entrepreneurs and business risk?

Aatif Awan: Absolutely. In terms of the culture, a few years ago the brightest young minds chose to either go abroad or work for multinational companies in Pakistan because that was the way to make big bucks. That has completely changed. Now they want to be founders or join start-ups as early employees. That’s been a phenomenal cultural shift.

In turn, the conglomerates are also seeing the writing on the wall and they want to partner with start-ups. Some of them are launching their own start-ups, which obviously has a mixed history. It’s very hard for large companies to innovate, and the model of having a start-up within a company often doesn’t work out that well. But the recognition is there.

On the regulatory front Pakistan has had some very forward-thinking regulators in recent years. They’re keen on enabling start-ups because the macroeconomic situation in Pakistan doesn’t look that great. There are still balance of payment issues. Businesses cannot grow too fast because they don’t have enough on their reserves. That hampers growth. The government and the regulators see start-ups as an opportunity to break out of that cycle, so they’ve been very keen to help. We have seen several initiatives from the regulator side, the most recent one being the establishment of special technology zones (STZAs). They offer some very lucrative incentives to foreign investors in terms of tax breaks.

In terms of cutting down the red tape, we’ve seen both the State Bank of Pakistan and the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) come up with regulations that enable the structuring of start-ups as holding companies abroad.

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Abdur-Rahim Syed: Aatif, in 2018 the U.S. dollar was equivalent to 123 Pakistani rupees. Cycle forward three years, 2021, it was 177 to a dollar. That’s a significant devaluation. On the one hand, as someone who represents investors and invests on behalf of foreign investors, currency depreciation is a challenge you have to work around. On the other hand, it increases the export strength of Pakistan and the capital formation of the country. In your position, how do you balance the two? How do you see the Pakistani currency playing a role in Pakistan’s start-up ecosystem and growth?

Aatif Awan: Sometimes, the policies that are helpful for the overall economy might not necessarily be equally as conducive for startu-ps. If you take a 20-year view, the Pakistani rupee has been a weaker currency. We should be okay with that as it helps with exports. Historically, the problem has been that it was kept artificially at a steady level. But when there is a sudden drop it creates shock waves in the system. The current government has allowed it to float freely and I think the economy’s been adjusting fine.

When it comes to start-ups, if you’re earning in rupees and you have investors who are foreign, you convert earnings to U.S. dollars and your growth numbers don’t look that impressive if there’s a sudden drop. If it’s happening on an ongoing basis you can reprice your services over time and it doesn’t have as big an impact.

The other mitigating factor is that most of the Pakistani start-ups that raise VC funding have the structure of a foreign holdco. Typically, it would be in Singapore or Delaware. What that means is it makes funding easier and you maintain reserves in U.S. dollars, in a foreign bank account. So, if you raise $10 million and the rupee depreciates by 10 percent, it doesn’t affect you. Maybe it even helps you because now in terms of operating expenses, it translates. That dollar stretches further. I think structurally the ecosystems work to minimize the impact on start-ups and overall, for the macro, it’s the right thing to do.

Daniel Eisenberg: Abdur-Rahim, given your perch in MENA, how does Pakistan’s ecosystem compare to the evolution of ecosystems there?

Abdur-Rahim Syed: The MENA region is, as you can imagine, quite varied. The bulk of the investment side typically comes out of natural resource rich countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE. Much of that investment comes from the government, either directly via fund to funds investment, or via state enterprises setting up investment funds. In some ways that capitalizes the market, especially early stages, very well. On the other hand, there are certain restrictions placed on where they can invest.

Pakistan is more similar to a country like Egypt or Indonesia, developing countries with large, young populations. Egypt, for example, has increasing growth and acceleration of both the number of start-ups as well as funding going to start-ups. What Egypt has done well, like Pakistan, is attract significant foreign capital. What it’s also doing that is quite notable is seeing a lot of new start-ups more quickly going abroad.

Perhaps the largest start-up in Egypt is Swvl. Swvl has headquarters in Dubai, and they’re aggressively expanding across multiple continents. Pakistan is beginning to follow that trajectory. If it stays on that pathway there’s a larger opportunity that the Pakistan talent base can draw from.

Daniel Eisenberg: And is geopolitics still an issue for foreign investors going into the region?

Aatif Awan: In my conversations this doesn’t come up much at all. It used to be a big issue a decade ago certainly. When I was looking at this opportunity in 2018, from a security standpoint things had been good for a while, but the perception hadn’t caught up. In 2021 that perception caught up, so you started seeing a large influx. A good validation point of that was when the Taliban took over again in Afghanistan there was a question of what that means for Pakistan. What we saw was more VC funding announced in Pakistan in four weeks than there had been in the four years prior. That kept the momentum going. What people realized was that the Pakistan of today is very different from the Pakistan of 15, 20 years ago.

So, from a security standpoint things look good. We’re seeing a lot more foreigners visiting, and their perception has changed very quickly. I’ve spent time with foreign investors who, within the first few hours of arriving, have a completely different impression of Pakistan, especially in terms of infrastructure and the young, vibrant population.

Abdur-Rahim Syed: The proof is in where the investments are coming from, whether it’s Gobi or it’s MSA from China, Kingsway from the U.K, Tiger or Kleiner from the U.S., or Shah Rukh from the UAE. It’s clear from all corners of the globe, there is significant investment increasing in Pakistan. But if we peel a little more under the skin, and we’ve done a bit of research on this, we’re looking at the top 250 funded start-ups in the MENAP region .

We asked ourselves, “Where do those founders and leaders come from?” What we found was in places like Pakistan and Egypt, the vast majority of founders are native-born. They are much more entrenched in the local ecosystem, and can navigate it.

If you look at a place like a UAE, it’s the opposite. More than 80 percent of leading founders and entrepreneurs are not from the UAE. They’re expats. Saudi is roughly half. The ability of the Pakistani ecosystem to be grounded in its own talent that knows how to navigate Pakistan makes it resilient to similar concerns.

Daniel Eisenberg: You mentioned that tech talent, education, and the number of engineers is a real asset for Pakistan. Finding enough good talent is obviously an issue for all companies these days around the world. Is there enough of a base there to handle the growth of new start-ups coming on board?

Abdur-Rahim Syed: The volume is clear. Pakistan has roughly 190 accredited universities. We’re talking over 290,00 graduates coming into that economy each year. So, there’s plenty of talent.

There’s a question around the quality of that talent. In the short term, if even a fraction of that is top quality, we just need enough start-ups, even corporates investing in innovation, for them to get battle tested. So, I expect this space will become a larger strength for Pakistan going forward.

Daniel Eisenberg: Aatif, how do you see that critical issue?

Aatif Awan: I’d agree with that. I think the raw numbers are there, but what we saw happen with Careem was that a single company can catalyze so much of this talent and be the training place, which then creates senior talent that goes on and feeds dozens of companies. Now that we’re seeing this first layer of start-ups, this talent is coming up to speed very, very quickly. So, I’m very bullish on that.

The other dynamic that’s playing into it is that tech has gone remote. That trend was happening anyway, but it’s been accelerated by COVID. Pakistan is a net beneficiary of that because now a lot of companies are hiring from Pakistan. People sitting in Pakistan can work for a U.S. company.

That also puts pressure on that talent in the short term. Now they’re available to any company in the world, so we’ll see some short-term pain. But I look at it as a positive in the longer term.

Working with the best in the world remotely, that’s what’s going to fill the gap for Pakistan going forward, so we’re very excited that that’s happening already.

Abdur-Rahim Syed: Today it is very clear that there is sufficient talent for the spaces that start-ups are currently going into, such as ecommerce and logistics. As the ecosystem matures and moves towards SaaS start-ups, we’re talking about machine learning and AI. That kind of talent is not here yet. So, there’s a challenge for the talent ecosystem to accelerate at the speed at which start-ups will be created.

Aatif, you spent a lot of time working with the Pakistani diaspora. What you call the “Wapistanis.” How has that experience been for you? Do you see the diaspora coming back either as investors or operators in the ecosystem and becoming a core element of the talent in Pakistan?

Aatif Awan: I think that has been the early set of founders, whether it was people who worked at Careem or worked at U.S. start-ups. Airlift’s founder and CEO used to work at DoorDash. Bazaar’s founders worked at Careem, Snapchat, and McKinsey. We’ve seen that play out quite a lot in the early days.

When I’m talking to the Pakistani diaspora, particularly in the U.S., COVID has underlined the desire to eventually go back. People realized that they are far from their family, and the situation has accelerated that desire to return. I’m hearing this more and more. One of the things we are trying to do at Indus Valley is help accelerate that.

We have created the Wapistani track. Wapistani is this term that was coined by Rabeel Warraich, who founded Sarmayacar, another VC fund in Pakistan. It’s a combination of wapis, which means to return, and Pakistani. I love this term.

We have created a program around that, which helps people move back more easily. We connect them with founders and start-ups here and with other people who are moving back. That’s a huge asset for Pakistan that will fill some of these specialized talent gaps that we spoke about earlier.

Daniel Eisenberg: Aatif, what kind of obstacles or challenges have start-ups in Pakistan encountered as they try to scale?

Aatif Awan: Talent is a big one. The game gets difficult at each level. As you scale, going from a ten person company, to 100 people, to 1,000, it’s a very difficult skill set that’s required.

That is going to be a challenge. What we’re seeing is that the best founders are stepping up. And, as you bring on investors, particularly from the U.S., they have portfolio companies that have scaled.

We are getting a lot of operating investors investing in start-ups as well. That’s super helpful because now you have access to somebody who’s been there, done that. And you can get that mentorship. From a founder perspective, that’s how you address the problem. Then you also need good leadership, for finance, for HR. That’s just something we as an ecosystem will need to work on. Hopefully there will be enough people coming back who can help, and join some of these start-ups.

The need for funding is also a challenge. While we’ve seen a couple of start-ups cross $100 million plus in funding, as more start-ups get there, that’s something that will continue needing to happen. The good news is we have some very large crossover funds now investing. Tiger Global has done multiple deals. Dragoneer and Prosus have invested. Hopefully they’ll continue to keep investing and will have more come and join them. But we need the SoftBanks of the world to also invest for the series C, D, E rounds.

Finally, there’s the question of exits. We need to take some of these early start-ups all the way to M&A or IPO. And that’s what then truly unlocks the ecosystem.

Daniel Eisenberg: Abdur-Rahim, in an emerging ecosystem like Pakistan, how important is growing the domestic investor base?

Abdur-Rahim Syed: From the investor perspective, that’s the real question. Where is the Pakistani capital?

There are some large conglomerates that are getting in and investing. Fatima Ventures comes to mind via their JV with Fatima Gobi out of China. But many of the large conglomerates that have a lot of capital in the Pakistani ecosystem and even more important than capital, assets, capabilities, networks, and regulatory heft, I would love to see them a lot more involved and investing for a couple of reasons. The obvious one is capital. Second is resilience. If the international capital markets begin to dry up or are less generous, I would love to have local resilience in the space. That’s something that is needed for the next S-curve.

Daniel Eisenberg: I would assume, if domestic IPOs are going to become a realistic exit strategy, you really need to get the domestic investor base interested in these kinds of companies?

Abdur-Rahim Syed: If you look at the multiples for domestic IPOs in the Karachi Stock Exchange, they’re not very high. One example of how they could exit is Anghami, that serves the MENA region. They exited via SPAC in New York with north of a $200 million valuation. There’s potential to go that or other ways in foreign markets.

Once Pakistani start-ups go multi-market, and they have access to capital in multiple markets, there is less risk. But to be able to really nurture the innovation in Pakistan itself from a product perspective, from a regulatory perspective, from a market access perspective, it’s critical to have the local industrialists involved and investing.

Daniel Eisenberg: Aatif, did you want to add anything about the potential for growth of the domestic investor base?

Aatif Awan: What we’re seeing is that there is appetite among the local investors. It’s encouraging that a few founding groups and conglomerates have started VC funds. What can’t be known yet is whether local investors will step up if the current strong global funding slows down, or never really gets going at the late-stage funding level. The local capital markets are not that deep and I think that’s one of the things that will need to change for the smaller-scale IPOs. It’s possible that more higher growth, higher quality start-ups will help grow the capital base for the Karachi Stock Exchange. Yet this first wave of start-ups is going to be too big for the local capital markets, and they will have to go to international stock exchanges.

As for exit options more broadly, there are going to be three main classes of exits for early investors. The first and most frequent one is M&A, which is already a well-established playbook. Within that you have your global category leaders buying regional players for expansion, which is similar to Uber buying Careem for $3.1 billion. The same thing for quick commerce start-ups. DoorDash has already been on an acquisition spree in Europe. They’ll eventually do the same in Asia. You also have Chinese tech giants buying Pakistani tech companies. Already the two big exits that we’ve seen in Pakistan was Alibaba buying Daraz, which was an e-commerce start-up. And Ant Financial taking a 45 percent stake in fintech Easypaisa.

The second category would be IPOs, with Pakistani companies going public on the local stock exchange, and the bigger ones listing in Hong Kong, London or New York. There are plenty of examples. Swvl has gotten listed on NASDAQ. You’ve seen Kaspi from Kazakhstan go and have a $6 billion IPO in London.

The third category would be secondary raises. If you are investing early enough, the likes of Prosus and Dragoneer and Tiger, they like to acquire and build ownership over time. So, they can provide some secondary liquidity as well.

Daniel Eisenberg: As we come to the end, could each of you briefly give us a sense of where you hope the Pakistan start-up ecosystem will be in five to ten years?

Abdur-Rahim Syed: If you look at the core reasons why investors are excited, the facts are undeniable. The median age in Pakistan is 23 years; The U.K. by comparison is 41 years, and it will take a while for the Pakistan median age to get up there. There are almost 19 million either middle class or upper-class Pakistanis, which is bigger than all of Germany. The sheer size and the potential of the country is going to stay, which means that we are at the beginning of the journey for entrepreneurship and digitization in Pakistan. How quickly this grows is the question, not whether it grows. Will it reach similar levels as Indonesia and other pure markets? I’m sure it will. And I’m sure they’ll keep growing too, as there’s a lot of positive momentum. Many of the challenges we discussed are part and parcel of the growth journey of a digital growing, developing country.

Daniel Eisenberg: And Aatif?

Aatif Awan: In 2019 I was using Indonesia as a model to compare what’s in store for Pakistan. Pakistan looked, in terms of start-ups and VC funding activity, like Indonesia in 2009. So, there was this gap of ten years.

By contrast, today it looks more like Indonesia of 2014 and 2015. It’s very exciting that Pakistani’s start-up ecosystem is growing faster and the gap has begun to drop. The fundamental reason for that is that while Pakistan had a late start, a lot of that foundation was in place. The mobile adoption had taken place.

If you look at the $350 million of 2021, on the one hand, it’s very, very fast growth. But it’s still just 0.1 percent of Pakistan’s G.D.P. Imagine once that catches up to the ratio that countries like India have. I expect that Pakistan should be doing multiple billion dollars in VC funding every year, and given where the economy is, start-ups will become some of the biggest companies in Pakistan. In fact, these will be the major driving force for the Pakistani economy in five years, not the traditional businesses.

Daniel Eisenberg: Well, it’s going to be fascinating to watch as the growth journey continues. I want to thank both of you for taking the time to talk about this topic in such depth.

In addition to our guests, a big thank you, as always, to our entire McKinsey on Start-ups production team: Molly Karlan, Polly Noah, Sid Ramtri, Myron Shurgan, and Katie Znameroski.

And finally, thank you for listening. We hope you’ll join us again for McKinsey on Start-ups .

Comments and opinions expressed by interviewees are their own and do not represent or reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of McKinsey & Company or have its endorsement.

Aatif Awan is founder and managing partner of Indus Valley Capital. Abdur-Rahim Syed is a partner based in McKinsey’s Dubai office; Daniel Eisenberg is an executive editor in the New York office.

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Pakistan’s startups take centre stage

Startups in Pakistan, one of the last untapped frontier markets, raised $486m of global capital since January 2021.

Pakistan’s economy has been battered by rising inflation, COVID, supply chain shocks and high energy prices over the last few years. But in that world of constant shocks, its booming startup sector is turning out to be a silver lining for the country.

In 2021, 83 startups raised $350m according to Invest2Innovate , a Pakistani consultancy firm. And so far this year, the sector has already raised $136m .

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Kalsoom Lakhani, the founder of Invest2Innovate and general partner at its sister firm i2iVentures , an early-stage investor, says 2021 was a record-breaking year and says people will question if the momentum is sustainable.

“What’s really important is for the ecosystem to also be building the health overall,” she told Al Jazeera, referring to startups and investors preparing for things such as how to grow the talent pipeline to meet the needs of these fledgling businesses, or how to improve the policy and regulatory environment to help them grow. “So while this momentum is exciting, there needs to be strengthening of these pillars in order to create sustainability and longevity and the continuing growth of the startup ecosystem,” she said.

COVID-19 was a catalyst for the startup landscape in Pakistan, which saw investments rise from $65m in 2020 to $350m in 2021. Extended lockdowns and quarantines provided entrepreneurs the opportunity to create digital products with a human impact.

With more than 250 startups since 2015, an increasing internet penetration driven by low-cost smartphones – there were 184 million cellphone users at the end of 2021 – and affordable data, Pakistan is one of the final few untapped markets for startups and investors to offer internet-based services similar to those in other parts of the world. These services include ride-hailing, and food and grocery delivery, among others.

Faisal Aftab, CEO of Zayn Capita l, a venture capital fund and one of the primary investors in the Pakistani startup landscape, estimates that Pakistani startups will be worth $50bn by 2030.

“Today the number sits at $1.8bn, if we count Daraz and FoodPanda, which people should, then we’re sitting at $3bn to $4bn. We’re looking at an easy 10 times growth here,” says Aftab. Daraz, an e-commerce platform, was founded in Pakistan and now offers its services in several countries, and Foodpanda is an international food and grocery delivery business.

“It’s profound what is happening,” says Aftab, referring to the many first-time investors that have mushroomed in the country to pour money into these startups in hopes of handsome returns down the line. Many of these startups straddle parts of the informal economy and will help bring that under the formal economy and the tax net for the first time, he adds.

The five largest disclosed startup funding rounds in 2021 were: Airlift ($85m), Bazaar ($30m), Tajir ($17m), Qisstpay ($15m), and TAG ($12m).

Invest2Innovate’s Pakistan Startup Ecosystem Report 2021 highlights the need for more attention directed towards startups to create a supportive ecosystem in which businesses can flourish.

Opportunities for growth, however, come with the challenge of finding the right human and capital resources to allow the building of infrastructure that can absorb the two million new people entering the workforce every year, the report says.

Infrastructure

Recent reforms, including a legal framework for Electronic Money Institutions set up by the country’s central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan, have allowed new businesses to be set up and have led to an increase in investments. Another policy that led to investor cheer was the Digital Banking Policy, which was finalised in January and allows digital banks to not just be e-wallets, but also provide credit, investments, and other products.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, which oversees non-banking companies, has established legal definitions for startups, and the federal government has helped set up Special Technology Zones.

Danish Lakhani, founder of NayaPay, a digital wallet still in its testing phase, has been approved to be launched to the mass market by the State Bank of Pakistan after a nine-month pilot and inspection. NayaPay raised $13m in February from primarily local and foreign investors and is the largest funding for fintech in Pakistan.

“As an early electronic money institution, we worked closely with various departments at the State Bank during the evolution of the EMI-licensing process,” Lakhani told Al Jazeera.

Bottlenecks for foreign investors

While the huge injection of money into Pakistan’s struggling economy bodes well for the startup scene, it still faces challenges such as lack of local investors, limited skilled workers, and the gender gap in founders and workers.

According to the i2i investment tracker, angel investors – high net worth individuals who financially back a business usually in return for a share – invested $32m across 14 deals at the pre-seed stage, and $123m across 46 deals at seed stages. The pre-seed stage is when an idea needs enough equity to kick-start operations for an early version of the product. The seed stage is when the company needs to raise funds with an angel investor or institution formally.

However, funding for later stages is an issue that needs to be addressed if companies want to scale and enter new markets. The majority of the early-stage investments are from outside Pakistan. There were 11 local angel investors in 2021 who co-invested in six deals that totalled $6.9m.

While there has been progress by regulatory authorities for startups, there is still a lack of legal framework for foreign companies wanting to buy shares in Pakistani firms.

The government has allowed holding shares for startups to be outside Pakistan, thus helping to push foreign investments. Zayn Capital’s Aftab says companies feel more comfortable knowing they can keep their shares outside of Pakistan because of the lack of faith in its judiciary and legal frameworks.

Furthermore, there is a lack of clarity on taxation laws for venture capitalists, and those wanting to sell their stakes in these startups.

William Bao Bean, a general partner at SOSV – a global venture capital fund with a portfolio of more than a thousand companies and $1.2bn in assets under management – and managing director of Chinaccelerator, is an investor in many startups in Pakistan. He says the regulatory environment, the currency, and the economy does not really matter to him. His company is focusing on the mid to lower-income market in Pakistan and wants to provide services that change lives, he says.

“When you have technology coming in and making a fundamental change to how people live, as they can communicate, they can be entertained, they can have their first love, they can buy insurance for the first time, they can buy their first pair of Nike’s….. people will gravitate towards [those] life-changing services. And there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop it,” he told Al Jazeera.

Lack of local investors and scalability

There are more international investors than local angel investors – the number of international angel investors grew from 5 in 2015 to 37 in 2021. In comparison, there were 11 local investors in 2021 and 10 in 2018. Additionally, local investor investments totalled up to $6.9m, which was 1.9 percent of the total funds raised at pre-seed and 21.8 percent at the seed stage. International investors, however, made 14 deals totalling $147m.

Skilled workers

There are not enough skilled staff for senior positions or a trained workforce to meet the needs of the various startups. The availability of quality technical staff, such as software engineers and data scientists, is limited.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) Technology and Innovation Report, out of 158 countries, Pakistan ranks 146 in terms of technology and development. Often, competitive startups have the same pool of workers and managers circulating within the same industry.

Universities are not equipped with curriculums that can be beneficial to new businesses or enable students to create their own. As a result, with the limited pool of trained workers, companies end up offering raises to hold on to trained employees. In addition, with foreign funding, salaries are further bumped up, adding to pressure on smaller firms to be able to pay competitive wages to get the right talent.

Founders who have international degrees raised more money than those who graduated from local universities. Invest2Innovate’s data showed that of 80 deals, there was at least one founder in each startup that had an international degree.

Despite the preference given to foreign graduates by investors, senior managers find local graduates have more of a connection with the local market.

“There is a clear preference of wanting to hire international graduates because of how they understand the technology and a foreign degree is a brand,” says a female manager at an e-commerce website who declined to be named for reasons of job security. She’s been working in the startup landscape since 2016 and believes there is a significant difference in the workforce within Pakistan as well, not just with international graduates. Local university graduates between Karachi and Lahore are vastly different in terms of their efficiency, understanding of technology, and willingness to learn.

However, she adds, as a manager in a hiring position, she sees that international graduates create an uneven environment. The socioeconomic class differences in a workplace create an unspoken boundary, which is further amplified by the educational institutions people come from.

The drastic gender gap

The gender gap in Pakistan is one of the worst in the world, ranking in the bottom three, at 153 out of 156 countries, according to the Global Gender Gap Report.

Female participation is vastly unaccounted for as most of them are unskilled, or unpaid, labour. As for women who are in the formal workforce, their options for growth are limited often because their families aren’t comfortable with them traveling out of the house or to far places or because they have to prioritise taking care of family members and that often means dropping out of the workforce or not taking up roles that require longer hours at work.

However, there is progress as far as women being connected to the internet is concerned. Entrepreneurship has allowed women in urban centres to progress to becoming business owners.

According to Invest2Innovate’s report, gender disparities are prevalent in the startup ecosystem and prevent women-led startups from achieving their full potential. Only 1.4 percent of all investments raised within the past seven years in Pakistan were by solely women-run startups.

Oraan, a fintech startup to help women save money, raised $4m last year, making it the most funded female-led startup. Halima Iqbal, co-founder and chief executive of Oraan says it was difficult to secure funding, but they were glad to have the backers who believe in the problem they are solving.

“A very tiny portion of VC funds in the world go to women-led companies and there is a relatability factor that plays a role in funding,” as most of the investors are male.

Despite Oraan’s success, female-founded startups were disproportionately at a disadvantage as women-led startups received a mere $8m from 2015-2021, compared with female cofounders, who received $138m, and male-led startups received $447m according to the report published by Invest2Innovate.

The female manager mentioned above says in all the years she has worked in startups, there have been very few women in senior positions, with the majority of women limited to human resources or junior executive staff.

“As a senior manager now, I’m often alone in a boardroom with men and despite my confidence, I feel intimidated. I’m also often made to feel that I’m being talked at,” she told Al Jazeera.

NayaPay’s Lakhani says one of the core values at his firm is gender neutrality. “[We have] flexible working options, on-site childcare facilities, training, and growth opportunities are readily available for all our team members. We are partnering with organizations such as CodeGirls which encourage and train women interested in technology roles.”

Despite the progress some companies are making, on-site child care facilities and flexible hours are not the norm yet. Women are still widely left out of the investment networks and mentorship. Support programs need to be bespoke designed for female-founded startups, including legal and financial services, networking development, and access to mobility, stated the insights report .

Shane Shin, of Shorooq Partners, an investment company based in the UAE, says startups in Pakistan are exciting because if they can be scaled to enter Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that’s where companies become worth several billion dollars.

“Pakistan is at the juncture of accepting global capital from the US and Asia, and this is a very rare phenomenon,” says Shin.

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Problem Solving and Decision Making Skills (Karachi)

Price ₨ 41,000.00

15 in stock

February 19 – 21, 2024

Venue: pim, karachi., course description.

The hallmark of dynamic and successful organizations is accurate problem identification and quality decision making. Poor decisions generate inefficiency and losses. Good decisions vitalize the organizational processes and enhance efficiency and profitability.

The measure of manager’s worth lies in the quality and timeliness of his decision making. His effectiveness in this vital skill is the key to success on a personal and organizational level. Perhaps the most highly regarded and rewarded managerial skill today is that of effective problem identification and decision making.

COURSE CONTENTS

• Basics of management and decision making
• Kepner-Tregoe’s Problem solving and decision making modules
• Crises Management
• Problem Recognition
• Decision Making
• Positional problem analysis

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• To provide a conceptual framework for rational, accurate and speedy problem identification
• To provide a conceptual framework for rational and effective decision making
• To develop SKILL IN USE of the modern techniques of problem solving and decision making

COURSE METHODOLOGY

• Intensive simulation of problem solving and decision making
• Group discussions
• Theoretical and conceptual input through lectures

TARGET AUDIENCE

The course is structured to help senior and middle level managers who are actively involved in problem solving and decision making in all areas of management.

About Instructors

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Muniza Irfan

2 years ago

Can a intermediate student apply for this course?

No, This is for in-service professionals. Sorry

Ikram Ullah

4 years ago

Courses at are very good opportunity.

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Boom to bust: Pakistan’s startup story

Between 2018 and 2019, startups in Pakistan blossomed. But is their downfall solely due to the two major crises?

Starting a business is much more complicated than people think it is. Many young, fresh graduates or mid-career level professionals who opt for creating their small-scale companies and are called entrepreneurs. They see a demand or a problem to be solved in the market and develop their business model around it. Sometimes, they copy other successful business models or create new ideas. The initial cost of these companies is relatively high, and resources are minimal. The ones who get enough funding from ventures and make up a good team with solid business models survive, whereas the rest fail midway. The failures have a more significant chunk, which is 90 per cent.

Entrepreneurship is a great way to build your future, but it requires specific planning, resources, facilities, and a belief to keep going. But Pakistan may need more of these areas, which is why 90 per cent of the startups fail. According to a figure, around 300 startups are launched every year, but only 10 per cent of them sustain. In Pakistan, the startup market grew before COVID struck, but then the investments dried up. This resulted in a closure of a startup en route to becoming a unicorn in the country.

Now, as 2023 has started and the world, especially Pakistan, is going through financial difficulties, what does our country hold for the future of startups? To know about the reasons for the failures and the future of startups, The Express Tribune talked experts from one of the leading incubators of Pakistan – the National Incubation Centre – and a startup that was launched at the time four big competitors were in the market – Krave Mart.

The period of 2018-2019 is known to be the best for startups in Pakistan. The success ratio was high, and many good ideas came up. The startup industry was growing in all areas. Ideas were coming up, the number of ventures and angels were increasing, and incubators were helping small-scale startups sustain. All of this went awry when COVID struck the world. There was a global recession due to the pandemic; dozens of startups and other companies hit rock bottom.

But was COVID the only reason for the downfall of the startup market in Pakistan? Is this the only reason that Pakistani startups were or are still failing? Well, no. This is just one of many, and there are multiple issues that explain why startups make mistakes and end up failing.

Lack of knowledge

Many of the well-written proposals with brilliant ideas never proceed to a higher stage and fail in the beginning. This is because they people behind them need to educate themselves on all areas and aspects of running a startup. Many entrepreneurs in Pakistan need more knowledge and skills to start and run a successful business. They may need to understand market research, business planning, financial management and other critical business tools and processes. This can make it difficult for them to make informed decisions and navigate the complex startup process.

Haziq Ahmed, the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Qcommerce startup Krave Mart, explained that the startups in Pakistan don't do much research on the market they are entering. "You must do thorough research before putting the first brick of your startup. Having no knowledge of the area you are about to step into and then relying on a small size of research can end up in failure. Especially in Pakistan, where the market is full of challenges for newcomers, you need to talk to every person that is related to your startup or who you will be dealing with in the future so that you know what is about to come and prepare yourself accordingly. If you cannot see the future of the steps you are taking, then failure waits ahead," he said.

"Additionally, many entrepreneurs in Pakistan may need a solid understanding of the industry they are entering, making it difficult to identify opportunities and develop effective strategies. This can lead to a lack of focus and direction, resulting in the startup's failure."

Giving an example of Swvl and other international startups that entered the Pakistani market with a lack of research, Haziq said that the lack of understanding of the legal and regulatory environment could also pose a significant challenge for startups in Pakistan. "Entrepreneurs may not be aware of the laws and regulations that apply to their business, which can lead to costly mistakes and penalties. Additionally, the players and mafia in the market won't let you easily operate. So you have to be prepared. This was one of the reasons why Swvl had to shut down its operation in Pakistan," he added.

Project Director at National Incubation Center Parvez Abbasi explained the mistake that fresh startups make: "The failure ratio of startups in Pakistan compared to international startups is relatively high. It simply comes down to the nature of startups here that makes them drop below. About 90 per cent of all startups in the country tend to fail or not make it past a definite stage. Usually, it is because of the lack of technical and marketing knowledge, which explains the amount of failure present. In addition to individual blunders, most startups fail to generate the required capital to sustain themselves, thus not making it very far," said Abbasi.

Innovation vs experience

Another critical factor contributing to the failure of startups in Pakistan is the need for more innovation and market differentiation. Many startups in Pakistan tend to copy existing business models and ideas from other countries rather than developing unique and innovative products or services that can stand out in the market. This makes it difficult for them to compete with established players and attract customers.

One of the main reasons for the lack of innovation in Pakistan is the need for more research and development (R&D) activities. Many startups in Pakistan need more resources and facilities to conduct R&D activities, which can be critical for developing new products and services and staying ahead of the competition.

Additionally, the lack of education and training in innovation and entrepreneurship contributes to Pakistan's need for more innovation. Many entrepreneurs in Pakistan need more knowledge and skills to develop and implement innovative business models and ideas.

Haziq, who entered the market when there were already four players, said that although they had a similar business model to the other four players who were already established in the market, Haziq knew where he had the edge over others due to having an experience in logistics, and so kept focus on that.

"Many Qcommerce startups focus on gaining more and more orders, which their warehouses cannot accommodate. The claim is that delivering the order in 10 minutes is not easy, and you have to focus on the more active areas. The others focused on making more than 2,000 orders per day from each store without considering the limitation of the store. We kept in mind the limitation and focused on delivering 200 to 250 orders. Not just this we kept on relocating our store according to the need. The size and the location matter a lot," he said.

Many startups that rely on the margins that the companies have for them and the delivery fees face challenges in sustaining. These margins are tiny at the beginning and swell as the company grows and sells good volumes to convince manufacturers to give them better margins. According to a source in the FMCG industry, the margins from Unilever for retail stores can go as high as 15 to 18 per cent, but more than that is not possible.

"We not only focused on the margins, but now, as we are growing, we are focusing on Krave Mart-labelled products that will have a higher margin, and we will be able to sustain financially. The discounts we offer are aimed at cultivating strong returning customers, as they will come and buy a discounted item and more products with that," he said.

He further added that the quality of service also matters. At Krave Mart, all the items are checked when delivered to the warehouse and again before going out for delivery to the customer. Even then, if there is some issue, they offer refunds and replacements considering the history of the customer.

Abbasi said that every startup has real people at the helm and every individual belonging to the startup is different. "The gross impact on the outlook of businesses could vary. Similar ideas can still produce different outcomes. However, it can become repetitive, meaning there's no disruption in innovation. Sadly, collaboration is looked down upon here, and you're always someone else's competitor rather than a companion. Thankfully, organisations such as the NIC are there for small startups, and they cater to the ones who are lagging," he added.

To overcome this challenge, it is essential to increase access to education and training programmes for entrepreneurs, provide resources and support for startups to help them conduct R&D activities, and create a more conducive cultural mindset that encourages innovation and entrepreneurship.

Dearth of resources and facilities

Another major issue contributing to the failure of startups in Pakistan is the need for proper infrastructure. Many areas of Pakistan need more basic facilities such as reliable electricity, fast Internet connectivity and suitable office spaces, which are essential for the smooth functioning of any business. This makes it difficult for startups to operate and compete with companies in more developed regions.

Abbasi, while explaining the available resources, said that the overall aptitude of the Pakistani public is a big hurdle for startups. "The general acceptability is minimal as few are willing to support businesses from the ground up. Secondly, in terms of finance, there are no established options available for startups. The government makes it hard for traditional, let alone startups, to operate conveniently," he said.

He added that many brilliant, unique and worthy ideas form from multiple startups, but unfortunately, these big-time ideas can't work on that sort of revolutionary scale in Pakistan due to a lack of resources. Different from startups, traditional businesses face various obstacles.

Another area for improvement is the need for more access to experienced mentors and advisors who can provide guidance and support. Lack of them can make it difficult for startups to overcome obstacles and make critical business decisions.

The need for incubation and acceleration programmes is also a reason. While incubation centres and accelerators exist in Pakistan, they are few and far between, and most of them are based in major cities like Karachi and Lahore, leaving the rest of the country with little to no support.

Incubation and acceleration programmes are critical for providing startups with the resources and support they need to grow and succeed. These programmes give startups access to funding, mentorship, education, and networking opportunities, which are essential for a successful business.

NIC is one of the largest government-owned incubators. Abbasi shared that the NIC enables startups and creates an environment through networking, coaching, and mentorship to help develop a sense of awareness and acceptability for innovation in the startup landscape of Pakistan. To date, the NIC has helped enable more than 700 founders to fulfill their dreams and, in hindsight, contribute to the flourishing startup ecosystem in Pakistan.

Haziq, however, has a different opinion. For him, most incubators and accelerators are focused on the freelance market. "They are increasing the IT export of the country, which is also a good thing to do. But the type of startups we are talking about are the ones that turn into companies, and for them, there is a lack of opportunities," he said.

"One of the main reasons for the lack of incubation and acceleration programmes in Pakistan is the lack of government support and funding. Many government-funded incubation and acceleration programmes are limited in scope and reach. The lack of private sector investment in incubation and acceleration programmes also contributes to the problem. Many private sector organisations are hesitant to invest in incubation and acceleration programmes due to the perceived high risk and lack of return on investment," said Haziq, whose startup has recently joined the Y Combinator at Silicon Valley and has gained support in upscaling the business.

The need for more awareness and understanding of the value of incubation and acceleration programmes among entrepreneurs in Pakistan also contributes to the problem. Many entrepreneurs need to be aware of these programmes' benefits and learn how to access them.

Limited venture capitalism

Pakistan has a limited venture capital ecosystem, which makes it difficult for startups to secure funding. This can make it difficult for startups to scale their operations and grow their businesses. Some startups were able to obtain the highest seed fund in the history of Pakistan but due to the investors' lack of confidence and unclear vision of the startup, ultimately walked the path to failure.

Many investors view Pakistan as a high-risk investment destination and hesitate to invest in startups. Additionally, many startups in Pakistan need more financial and business management skills to help attract investors and secure funding.

For example, Airlift. It started its operations as a ride-hailing service with a vast gap in the Pakistani market but faced financial challenges due to COVID. They then shifted their business model from ride-hailing to Q-commerce. During this period, they secured $85 billion in funding, which was the highest in the history of Pakistani startups. After gaining further success, the announcement was made that the startup had managed to raise another successful round of $350 million. This took the startup to a $1 billion valuation. But in reality, these were all tall claims made to the investors, and the startup could not generate enough revenue to work without the funding, and eventually, they had to shut their operations.

Abbasi said that the venture market in Pakistan is tranquil. "There aren't too many players, nor have the game's rules been set yet. The funding business is not very large when referring to startups. Unfortunately, the market size of venture capital is not very big; investors don't find plausible interest in the opportunity to fund startups," said Abbasi.

He added that Airlift hit the ground hard despite being one of Pakistan's most promising startups. "They raised $85 million in funding only to blow it all. The company came out with a statement saying the shutdown was due to the global recession and recent downturns in the market. On the other hand, venture capitalists and indecent cash flow could also have been the problem," he explained.

The lack of proper exit strategies also contributes to the failure of startups in Pakistan. Many entrepreneurs focus on the initial stages of starting a business but need to plan for the future, which makes it difficult for them to exit the market and move on to new projects.

Skilled workforce shortage

The need for a more skilled workforce is one of the major hindrances to the growth of startups in Pakistan. Many startups need help finding and retaining talented employees, making it challenging to build and scale a business.

Abbasi explains that a team that needs more diversity is headed toward difficulty. "One dimensional teams, like a group of engineers running a business, will lack marketing expertise. Likewise, the same would happen the other way around. Variety is critical in the management setup because, after a particular scale, it might not be possible for the founders to run their businesses alone. They will need to call upon seasoned professionals from different fields. Of course, institutions like the NIC can handhold startups and help them with aspects of HR, marketing, and even training their interns to retain them," he said.

Meanwhile, Haziq believes that a professional can be hired. When Krave Mart was to launch, they already had players in the market they had to compete with. "We didn't have time to test or train people, and we needed to be experienced professionals. The founders came from different experiences but to do the job, we had to have the experienced professional we hired. It is because of the team that we are progressing toward our goal.

Regulatory barriers

Startups in Pakistan face several regulatory obstacles, such as bureaucratic red tape and a need for clear regulations around business operations. These barriers can make it difficult for startups to navigate the legal and regulatory landscape.

Moreover, the lack of a proper legal framework and intellectual property rights also poses a significant problem for startups in Pakistan. The current laws are not adequate enough to protect the rights of entrepreneurs and their innovations, which can lead to exploitation and discourage innovation.

For Haziq, the ease of doing business in Pakistan is more than in other countries. He explains by giving an example of a company planning to launch in Pakistan. "The number of legal documents and approvals required in Pakistan is far less than in other counties. So it is easy to operate in Pakistan as far as the regulations are concerned. But yes, there are many more barriers created by the competitors and mafia which need to be controlled to give a safe and secure environment for the startups to operate," he said.

Future for startups

The future for startups in Pakistan looks promising, as the country has a large and growing population of young, educated people who are increasingly turning to entrepreneurship as a career path. Additionally, the government is taking steps to support the startup ecosystem by establishing technology parks and incubators and providing funding and other resources to help startups get off the ground.

However, challenges still need to be addressed, such as limited access to funding, a need for experienced mentors, and a need for improved infrastructure and regulations. Despite these challenges, the future for startups in Pakistan is expected to be positive as long as the government supports the ecosystem and entrepreneurs take advantage of the opportunities available to them.

Abbasi also believes that startups are on the rise globally, and startups' stability is rising again. "Due to Pakistan being a new space for startups, the recent uprising and success are evident because of all the opportunities in this brand-new area. As a result of being in an underdeveloped ecosystem, opportunities are not scarce. There are many challenges in a country where government and private businesses need to align like Pakistan. However, along with these challenges, multiple opportunities arise for business owners to bridge."

"For these unique ideas to flourish, the general public must participate at a larger scale. For example, a startup company working on organic plastic faces challenges due to the import of required raw materials, the lack of equipment in the country, and the low amount of facilities, which results in the company only working in labs rather than making it commercial."

In conclusion, the startup ecosystem in Pakistan faces several challenges that can lead to failure. To overcome these challenges and increase the chances of success for startups in Pakistan, developing a more supportive ecosystem that includes access to funding, mentorship, and a skilled workforce is essential. Additionally, the government must work to address regulatory barriers, create a more conducive environment for business growth, and increase the number of incubation and acceleration programmes.

When a product impresses you enough to tell your friends or coworkers about it, it’s safe to assume that product is really, really good. You know the ones: those seemingly simple products that make your day-to-day life a little bit easier, or solve a pesky problem you’d previously accepted as unsolvable. For example, our editors swear by these incredible problem-solving products they use all the time; we’ve already shared them with each other, and now we’re sharing them with you.

If you need further convincing before giving these gems a chance, well, you’re in luck. All 40 items featured here also come highly recommended by Amazon shoppers, who have given each one hundreds (or, in most cases, thousands) of perfect five-star ratings and reviews. Beyond the fact that practically everyone who’s tried them seems to love them, these useful products don’t necessarily fall into one specific category; they vary widely in purpose, and some are a bit niche. That means whatever annoying problem you’ve been itching to solve, there’s a good chance you’ll find a fix below. Good luck!

We only recommend products we love and that we think you will, too. We may receive a portion of sales from products purchased from this article, which was written by our Commerce team.

This Washcloth That Removes Every Trace Of Makeup Using Just Water

The Original Makeup Eraser seems almost to good to be true — how can a washable, reusable cloth remove every last drop of makeup, including waterproof mascara, using nothing but water? It might be magic, but it really does work, as hundreds of Amazon reviewers happily confirm. "Product has completely changed my life!" one person wrote. "My skin has improved dramatically — disposable wipes and cleaners were clearly not removing all my makeup, and it was affecting my skin. Using this every night feels like a mini facial."

An Effortless Way To Save On Heat & Air Conditioning Bills

Installing these door draft stoppers couldn't be any easier — or more worth it. Sold in pack of two, the insulated strips can easily be trimmed to fit your doors perfectly, and attaching them using the included adhesive tape will take you mere seconds. Keeping drafts out will not only keep the temperature in your house comfortable all year-round, but will also more than likely save you a ton of money on utility bills.

• Available colors: 4

An Exfoliating Solution That Amazon Reviewers Call "A Miracle Treatment" For Razor Burn & Ingrown Hairs

If waxing or shaving always leaves you with painful razor burn and ingrown hairs, this best-selling exfoliating solution may be, well, your solution. Many Amazon reviewers swear it's the only thing that's worked for them, and for well under $20, it's certainly worth a shot. "I didn’t expect a miracle, but hoped for the best, since nothing else has ever worked in my 48 years," one Amazon reviewer shared, continuing, "It works, ladies and gentlemen. It IS a miracle."

These Thin Spatulas That Scrape Out Every Last Drop Of Product From Bottles, Tubs, & Jars

Hair and skin care products can quite literally be worth their weight in gold, so it's worth investing in these spatulas to make sure you're using every last drop of yours. The set comes with spatulas in two sizes — 12-inch and 6-inch — both designed in a skinny shape to fit inside narrow bottles. BPA-free and dishwasher-safe, they're a must for pricey cosmetics, but they can also come in handy for condiments and more.

These Air-Purifying, Mildew-Preventing, Odor-Absorbing Bags That Are Completely Natural

These bamboo charcoal-filled bags are one of the most effective products you can buy to purify the air, absorb unwanted odors, and prevent mildew. They'll last for two whole years if you put them out in the sun for a few hours to reactivate every month or so, and when they're finally done, you can sprinkle the charcoal in your garden to encourage plant growth.

The Best-Selling Fabric Shaver With More Than 30,000 Glowing Reviews On Amazon

You know when a mundane household product works so well, using it is actually kind of fun? That's how thousands of Amazon reviewers feel about this best-selling fabric shaver — it's super satisfying to see all the fuzz you've removed from your clothes, bedding, and furniture sitting in the detachable lint compartment before you throw it all away. "Hi, I’m obsessed," joked one Amazon reviewer. "I can’t stop. I should send this back. I’ve started asking if my neighbors need anything depilled."

• Available models: battery-operated, rechargable

These Stackable Food Containers To Keep Your Produce Fresh For Longer

Rubbermaid's FreshWorks food containers are not only stackable and neat-looking, but also extend the shelf life of produce, thanks to their built-in crisper trays and oxygen-regulating lids. If fresh fruits and vegetables tend to spoil before you have a chance to finish them, the set of three, dishwasher-safe, BPA-free containers will more than likely save you money (and cut down on waste!) in the long run.

A Set Of High-Quality Chain Extenders To Customize The Length Of Your Necklaces & Bracelets

Make the most of your jewelry collection with these best-selling chain extenders — they're not only great for adjusting a bracelet or necklace that's too small, but will also let you customize your favorite necklaces to achieve the perfect layered look. The eight-piece set includes four stainless steel extenders in gold, and four in silver, with 2-, 3-, 4-, and 6-inch lengths for each color.

These Pretty Lace Bands To Prevent Chafing Between Your Thighs — & They Have Over 3,000 Five-Star Reviews On Amazon

These thigh guards certainly look alluring, but they also serve a more practical purpose: Lined in slip-resistant silicone, the thigh-high bands prevent uncomfortable chafing and rubbing between your thighs. The various lacy styles and colors are perfect for date nights and dressier events, but if you'd prefer a more laid-back look, Bandelettes also come in several more basic styles.

• Available styles: 17

The Ingenious Purse Insert That Makes It Easy To Keep Things Organized — & It Protects The Inside Of Your Bag, Too

Why is it that every time you need your chapstick or keys, your purse suddenly feels like an endless abyss? If you're sick of digging around, invest in this handy purse insert — available in six sizes to fit inside any bag, it has a designated pouch or pocket for just about every imaginable item, making it super easy to keep all your essentials organized and easy to access. Plus, the insert will prevent makeup spills and other mishaps from ruining your purse's lining.

• Available sizes: 6
• Available colors: 13

These Space-Saving Hangers Every Fashion Girl Needs

If you love fashion, no closet will ever really feel large enough. If you can relate, you need to get these Black Magic hangers ASAP. Made of heavy-duty plastic, the space-saving hangers are actually more like hangers for your hangers: Each one holds up to 10 garments in a neat, vertical cascade, but will only use up the space of one normal hanger on your closet rod. Genius!

A More A Sustainable Alternative To Plastic Wrap

Aptly named "Food Huggers", these reusable silicone covers come in stackable set of five sizes that hug the leftover portion of virtually any fruit or vegetable, creating an airtight seal to lock in in juices, keep out bacteria, and generally keep produce fresh for longer. They're an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic wrap, and can also be used as a lid for open cans and other containers.

These Nifty Bra Strap Clips To Make Any Bra A Racerback

Instead of going out and buying a convertible bra, use these nifty bra strap holders to convert your favorite bra into a racerback. The 12-piece set includes nine bra strap clips — three white, three black, three beige — plus three strap-style holders in the same trio of neutral colors. In addition to concealing your bra straps underneath racerback tops and dresses, the holders are great for tightening the straps on any worn, stretched-out bras that you love.

A Foolproof Way To Prevent Your Area Rug From Slipping Around On Hard Floors

When a traditional rug pad isn't cutting it, these popular rug grippers may just do the trick. They're sold in a set of four grippers — one for each corner of your rug — and have strong adhesive to attach to your rug on one side, while tiny, vacuum-like suction cups grip the floor on the other. While they won't keep a rug in place on top of carpet, thousands of Amazon reviewers swear by them for use on hard floors.

These Best-Selling Nipple Covers That Won't Show Through Even The Tightest Tank Tops

If you want to go braless, but don't necessarily want your nipples to double as an accessory, buy Nippies and never look back. Unlike many pasties, the adhesive backs on these are truly washable and reusable, and actually stay in place all day long. Also unlike many pasties, Nippies are made of a smooth, skin-like silicone that's truly invisible underneath clothes.

• Available styles: Creme Size 1 , Creme Size 2 , Caramel Sizes 1 & 2 , Coco Size 1 , Coco Size 2

The Cult-Favorite Anti-Chafe Balm More Than 10,000 Amazon Reviewers Swear By

If you've ever put deodorant on your inner thighs (or anywhere else!) to prevent chafing and irritation, it's worth investing in Body Glide instead. Garnering more than 16,000 Amazon ratings and a 4.7-star average, the best-selling anti-chafe balm is not only more effective than the old-school deodorant method, but also is made without aluminum and other potentially harsh or pore-clogging ingredients. "I don't even know where to start," gushed one Amazon reviewer. "Finding this product has changed my life."

A Hydrating Hair Mask With A Cult-Like Following

If regular conditioner isn't enough to keep your strands from drying out, this deep conditioning hair mask is exactly what you need. It's formulated with a generous dose of argan oil, and according to Amazon reviewers, can take hair from straw-like to silky in just one use. "WOW! The first time I used it, I couldn't stop touching my hair," one person wrote. "I was in disbelief at how soft it was."

These Handy Little Cable Holders With Tons Of Other, Clever Uses

Sold in a 16-pack, these nifty little clips have a small ridge to hold a cord or cable on one side, and strong adhesive backing on the other. Use them to keep cords and charging cables neatly organized where you want them — by your desk, for example, or near your nightstand so you don't have to reach down beside your bed each night. You can also use them to hold thin items like toothbrushes and pens!

This Strong, Double-Sided Fashion Tape That Really Works

Double-sided clothing tape is a must-have for every fashion lover's toolkit. It's great for pinning low-cut, backless, or otherwise precarious clothing in place to prevent wardrobe mishaps, and can also come in a handy for a whole range of other purposes , from creating a temporary hem to boosting your cleavage without a bra.

This Game-Changing Substance That's As Essential As Duct Tape & Superglue

Sugru is basically duct tape 2.0 — once you have it at home, you'll find yourself using it to fix everything, not to mention all the DIY projects it's great for. It starts out as a clay-like puddy that's easy to mold and manipulate any way you like, but as it dries, it transforms into a grippy, durable silicone that permanently bonds to virtually any surface: glass, metal, wood, ceramic, plastic ... you get the idea. As if that wasn't impressive enough, it's also waterproof, heat resistant, electrically insulating, and shock resistant.

An Affordable Rubber Broom That's Like A Magnet For Pet Hair

More than 30,000 pet lovers gave the Furmover a perfect five-star rating on Amazon. It works like a normal broom, but it's made of a rubbery material that's basically a magnet for pet hair — Amazon reviewers say using it to clean carpet, floors, and even walls and furniture is so satisfying, it's actually pretty fun. "HOLY SMOKES!" one person wrote. "Within just a few light strokes I was pulling up strands of hair and fur that had seemingly become a part of the carpet."

• Available styles/models: 6

These Ingenious Markers & Crayons For Touching Up Wood Furniture

While refinishing wood furniture can be pricey, time-consuming, or often both, using this wood touchup kit makes breathing new life into your favorite pieces practically effortless. The kit comes with six repair markers (to match the color of wood furniture), and six wax sticks (to fill in chips and match the finish), each in a range of six popular shades like oak, maple, and cherry. It also comes with a sharpener for the crayon-like wax sticks.

An Easy Way To Prevent Crumbs From Falling Into That Impossible-To-Clean Gap Next To Your Stove

When a crumb falls into that awkward space between your counter and stove, you know it'll likely stay down there for years. Rather than cutting your losses, buy these gap covers instead. Made of durable, easy-to-clean silicone, they rest neatly between your appliances to prevent spills and crumbs from falling through. "WHAT took me so long?" one Amazon reviewer wrote. "They fit perfectly, look wonderful, and I could customize the size to fit exactly where I wanted them to with a pair of scissors."

• Available sizes: 21-inch, 25-inch
• Available colors: 3

This Popular Mop & Bucket Set That Amazon Reviewers Call "Life-Changing"

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The Only Lint Roller For Pet Hair You'll Ever Buy Again

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This Plug-In Surge Protector With AC Outlets, USB Ports, & A Handy Little Shelf

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A Smart Way To Prevent Accidental Burns From The Oven Rack

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An End Table Alternative That's Perfect For Small Spaces

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A Set Of Mesh Laundry Bags For Washing Delicate Items

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This Windshield Cover That's A Must For Surviving Winter Weather

Anyone who lives in a snowy climate will immediately understand the appeal of this windshield cover . Rather than scraping ice off your windshield in subzero temperatures every morning, simply pull off the weather-proof cover and go. It's designed with windproof straps that attach to your wheels to keep the cover in place, as well as flaps with suction cups at the ends that go through your car's windows, so you can suction the cover to your inner windshield to deter any potential thieves.

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A Set Of Temporary Buttons To Tweak The Waistband On Your Jeans

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A Set Of Gel Petals To Cushion The Balls Of Your Feet When You're Wearing Heels

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Problem Solving Course - Pakistan

• Diagnose underlying issues and effectively solve them with this Problem Solving Course
• Learn to apply critical thinking skills to tackle present and future obstacles 
• Become familiar with various tactics for solving problems and improve thinking capacity

Problem Solving Course Overview

• Course syllabus
• Who it’s for
• What’s included
• Why choose this course

Problem Solving Training Course Outline

Module 1: Introduction to Problem Solving

What is Problem Solving?

• Characteristics of Difficult Problems
• Barriers to Problem Solving

Module 2: Strategies for Investigating Problems

• Trial and Error
• Problem Solving Strategies

Module 3: Overcoming Barriers to Problem Solving

• Decision Making Problems
• Troubleshooting and Diagnosis Problems
• Strategic Performance Problems
• Policy Analysis Problems
• Design Problem Solving

Module 4: Models for Problem Solving

• Deming Wheel – PDCA Cycle
• Hurson’s Productive Thinking Model
• Fishbone 
• What is TRIZ?
• Key Tools of TRIZ

Module 5: Problem Solving Cycle

• Identify the Problem
• Explore Possible Strategies
• Look at Alternatives
• Select a Possible Solution
• Implement a Possible Solution
• Evaluate the Result

Module 6: Applying Critical Thinking to Everyday Problems

• Make the Best Use of Time
• Difference Between Urgency and Importance
• Tackle One Thing at a Time
• Step by Step Approach
• Record Progress
• Modify Habits
• Tackle Autopilot Mode
• Change Perspective
• Be Reasonable and Practical

Module 7: Improving Decision Making Skills and Thinking Capacity

• Steps to Effective Decision-Making
• Creating a Paired Comparison Analysis Table
• Grid Analysis Tool for Decision-Making
• Comprehension
• Application

Who should attend this Problem Solving Course?

The Problem Solving Training Course is ideal for individuals across various professional backgrounds who are seeking to enhance their ability to effectively identify, analyse, and address complex challenges. This course can benefit a wide range of professionals, including:

• Team Leaders
• Project Managers
• Business Analysts
• Consultants
• Quality Control Professionals
• Operations Managers
• Entrepreneurs and Business Owners

Prerequisites of the Problem Solving Course

There are no formal prerequisites for this Problem Solving Training Course.

In today's fast-paced and dynamic business environment, Problem Solving has emerged as a pivotal aspect of Management. The ability to effectively identify and resolve challenges is not only relevant but essential for success in any professional setting. Problem Solving is the act of determining a problem, identifying its root causes, prioritising solutions, and executing them.

Mastering Problem Solving is of utmost importance for professionals across various domains, including Managers, Executives, and Team Leaders. These individuals, entrusted with critical decision-making responsibilities, need to be proficient in Problem Solving to drive efficiency and innovation within their organisations. By refining these skills, they can adeptly handle complexity, clear obstacles, and bolster their problem-solving capabilities.

The Knowledge Academy's 1-day Problem Solving Training is designed to equip delegates with comprehensive Problem Solving skills that are in high demand among multinational corporations. This course delves into various Problem Solving models, including TRIZ, PDCA Cycle, Hurson’s Productive Thinking Model, and Fishbone Diagrams.

Course Objectives

• To understand the principles of Problem Solving and its significance in management
• To explore different Problem Solving models and their practical applications
• To develop critical thinking and decision-making skills for effective issue resolution
• To learn tactics and strategies for addressing problems and overcoming obstacles
• To enhance troubleshooting and diagnosis abilities
• To identify and address common barriers to effective Problem Solving

Upon completing this Problem Solving Course, delegates will benefit by gaining a profound understanding of Problem Solving, equipping themselves with essential management skills. They will be better prepared to tackle real-world challenges, enhance their decision-making abilities, and contribute significantly to their organisation's success.

What’s included in this Problem Solving Course?

• World-Class Training Sessions from Experienced Instructors 
• Problem Solving Certificate
• Digital Delegate Pack

Why choose us

Ways to take this course.

Online Self-paced

Online Instructor-led

Experience live, interactive learning from home with The Knowledge Academy's Online Instructor-led Problem Solving Course. Engage directly with expert instructors, mirroring the classroom schedule for a comprehensive learning journey. Enjoy the convenience of virtual learning without compromising on the quality of interaction.

• See trainer’s screen
• Recording & transcripts
• Virtual whiteboard
• Share documents
• Works on all devices

Unlock your potential with The Knowledge Academy's Problem Solving Course, accessible anytime, anywhere on any device. Enjoy 90 days of online course access, extendable upon request, and benefit from the support of our expert trainers. Elevate your skills at your own pace with our Online Self-paced sessions.

• Certificates provided online
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Experience the most sought-after learning style with The Knowledge Academy's Problem Solving Course. Available in 490+ locations across 190+ countries, our hand-picked Classroom venues offer an invaluable human touch. Immerse yourself in a comprehensive, interactive experience with our expert-led Problem Solving Course sessions.

Highly experienced trainers

Boost your skills with our expert trainers, boasting 10+ years of real-world experience, ensuring an engaging and informative training experience

State of the art training venues

We only use the highest standard of learning facilities to make sure your experience is as comfortable and distraction-free as possible

Small class sizes

Our Classroom courses with limited class sizes foster discussions and provide a personalised, interactive learning environment

Great value for money

Achieve certification without breaking the bank. Find a lower price elsewhere? We'll match it to guarantee you the best value

Streamline large-scale training requirements with The Knowledge Academy’s In-house/Onsite Problem Solving Course at your business premises. Experience expert-led classroom learning from the comfort of your workplace and engage professional development.

Tailored learning experience

Leverage benefits offered from a certification that fits your unique business or project needs

Maximise your training budget

Cut unnecessary costs and focus your entire budget on what really matters, the training.

Team building opportunity

Our Problem Solving Course offers a unique chance for your team to bond and engage in discussions, enriching the learning experience beyond traditional classroom settings

Monitor employees progress

The course know-how will help you track and evaluate your employees' progression and performance with relative ease

Some of our worldclass trainers

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What our customers are saying

Mr. Craig ,my course presenter knows his story - I read the study materials of the course before and I could understand what was going on, but his during his presentation I have gained a lot and I can now solve the problems any where. The course was very much fruitful.

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Kept the training fun and was very open to questions etc

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"Really good course and well organised. Trainer was great with a sense of humour - his experience allowed a free flowing course, structured to help you gain as much information & relevant experience whilst helping prepare you for the exam"

Joshua Davies, Thames Water

"...the trainer for this course was excellent. I would definitely recommend (and already have) this course to others."

Diane Gray, Shell

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• Profit Magazine
• Pakistan Today

Audit uncovers Rs2.4bn irregularities in Balochistan dam projects

Govt to shift from net to gross metering for solar panels…, pm forms economic advisory council for policy guidance, govt to restrict cash use in real estate to curb money…, petroleum group import bill decreases by 8.87% yoy in april 2024, in the ever-raging battle between coca cola and pepsico, sting is…, changes are afoot at careem. what do they mean for the…, the banking sector has been reaping the rewards of high inflation…., is the track and trace system a fraud or is there…, highnoon laboratories and the curious (court) case of related party transactions, managing exits; how to fire an employee, value trapped, the sifc and the dar problem, board composition – do you have the right people for your…, pakistan records highest-ever monthly it exports of $310mn in april , the problem is access to credit, not payments claims abhi ceo…, tech funding might be recovering in the us, but the trickle…, instagram surpasses youtube in ad revenue, turkish fintech unicorn papara set to acquire sadapay in possible $50mn…, design thinking has come to corporate pakistan. what does that mean.

A management problem-solving framework that has been developed out of industrial engineering, promises to help companies address their customers – and management’s – root problems rather than just symptoms. But does it work? And will Pakistani companies learn how to use it?

Design thinking. The term has been around since the late 1980s, but it has only been in the past two decades that it has become the buzzword that connects problem-solving to new age methodologies in business. To its proponents, design thinking is a cutting edge, out of the box way of approaching any problem, whether it is business, ethics, education, or socio-economic, that removes barriers and uses empathy and creativity to give unique solutions. To its detractors, it is a vague, asinine, unscientific and unsubstantiated method peddled by self-help gurus, corporate trainers, design consultancies, and academics in exchange for exorbitant fees.

Essentially, design thinking uses five steps to solve problems. The first is to empathise with and contextualise the problem so you can place yourself in it. Once you have done this, you define the problem, think of solutions without any constraints as to their feasibility, narrow down your options and begin testing your hypotheses. This non-linear problem solving technique has been used and suggested for problems within corporations, and larger issues such as changing entire structures of state education systems by creating stream lined and personalised solutions to problems.

In Pakistan, design thinking appears to have gained awareness around early 2008, the same year that IDEO, a design consultancy representing a global footprint across the globe with for profit and nonprofit organizations, invested in growing its presence through thought leadership across management magazines and conferences . While the years that followed do not suggest the concepts were applied – led by the scarcity of examples of human-centered design across industries – the approach was being taught within communications design programs at universities as early as 2009.

Dr. Suleman Shahid , an assistant professor at the School of Science and Engineering at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), has offered consultancy and training services since 2009 in the areas of design thinking and user experience (UX) design and strategy. Cut to 2020, and a short search on LinkedIn will reveal that there are nearly 9,000 professionals in Pakistan who have cited design thinking as a principle skill within their LinkedIn profiles, with the majority operating through Fiverr and the remaining split across ICT, education, telecommunications, advertising, and specialist design firms.

However, the existence of these 9,000 ‘professional’ design thinkers does not mean that Pakistan has this many people qualified as design thinkers or even this many people that know what design thinking is. It simply means nine thousand people have caught on to the buzz-term enough to put it on their CVs. The only question is, if Pakistan is using design thinking, does it just not work, or are we just not using it correctly?

While a variety of banking organizations in Pakistan have made grand gestures in the form of design labs and visions of a technology first future , many have fallen short simply on being unwilling to invest in facilitating a rapid customer experience for the netizens. The attached chart shows how data from Google PageSpeed Insights ranks various banks in Pakistan based on how their sites are optimised for mobile and web experiences. So clearly, there is a difference between those that claim to be design thinkers and those that practice it.

Does design thinking work?

The argument that design thinkers make is simple enough. For too long our approach to problem-solving has been to treat symptoms. This is true for both small problems, like losing your keys, and for big problems like crime. According to design thinkers, we respond to these problems by fixing the symptoms, so the solution to these two problems would be searching for your keys and putting people in jail. The question that is not being asked, however, is why the keys keep getting lost and why people commit crime in the first place.

This argument of solving the root problem instead of the symptoms is the same one made by homeopathic ‘doctors’ and practitioners of Vedic medicine. It is exactly this fear of quackery that makes people skeptical about such a concept.

Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, is considered to be the global authority on the subject of design thinking. He is quick to point out that even though the terminology is fairly recent – with Google Trends showing the concept being searched as early as 2004 on the internet – the application of its principles can be observed in the customer-centered, systems thinking approach that Thomas Edison took to the creation of the light bulb. He considers Steve Jobs, and Ferdinand Porsche to be practitioners as well, adding that the principles were widely spread long before design was seen as a profession, the difference being that it was intuitive and its practitioners often seen as slightly odd.

“They were not typical inventors, engineers, artists or businessmen,” said Brown in a blog post . “They integrated aspects of all of these and they focused on creating solutions that met the needs of the customer. I believe that design thinking is part of a longer tradition of integrated, human centered, creative problem solving.”  

The early examples were mavericks who used their intuition to determine how they approached and solved problems and created breakthrough ideas. Now we exist in a time where we need more than a few intuitive mavericks to tackle the challenges in front of us.

Survey impressions

To understand the current state of design thinking in Pakistan, Profit surveyed nearly 30 practitioners across the country on how design thinking delivers value to their organizations, how the impact is measured, the challenges believers in the framework face, and whether they feel it has worked well for their organizations.

About 35% of respondents said that an organization’s top priority or business objective for introducing design thinking was to improve customer satisfaction while 32% cited the need for reducing time to market, which is often the largest problem in banking organisations that can take up to six months to roll out a product update. Nearly 65% of respondents shared that the design thinking framework has been implemented for over a year, while nearly 25% said the practice was applied throughout the entire organization instead of just one department, for which 17% respondents agreed to.

Nearly 43% of respondents said that their organisations ‘live and breathe’ design while nearly 28% said that teams reverted to old practices after trying design thinking. A third of respondents agreed that the use of the framework played a role in reducing overall project costs while 22% said that their organisations created projects that did not solve any needs prior to using design thinking.

Armed with these findings on the current state of design thinking in Pakistan based on responses from verified practitioners, Profit also spoke to several practitioners, both classically trained and those that applied the concepts in their work after coming across the framework, to understand how far the practice has come in the country and the business case for its usage.

Case study 1: Understanding the barriers of financial inclusion for women

In 2019, IDEO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation created an initiative to promote gender-inclusive financial services in Pakistan by achieving a deep understanding of the barriers women face across access and usage.

To do this, they worked with Ideate Innovation, Karandaaz, Telenor, Jazz, and UBL to research the barriers women in Pakistan face in accessing digital financial servicesÿ specifically at the moment of cash in, cash out (CICO). Over the course of three weeks, researchers from Ideate Innovation interviewed 60 people – 45 women and 15 men – from three regions of Pakistan. To say the least, with an already massive unbanked population, prejudice against women means they have many more problems in financial inclusion than men. But how was design thinking used, or how did some people attempt to use it, to solve this problem?

Speaking to Profit , Manahil Huda, a UX Designer and Design Researcher based in Karachi explained how insights vary based on gender, and how design thinking can bridge the gap. In a previous project by the Radical Group, Huda was working with Hysab Kytab, a personal finance manager. Their goal was simple, to increase the number of female users on the app. “Preliminary research showed that the terms used were complex for housewives.” Terms like payables, receivables may even be understood by a clerk that goes out and hears them at work, but for women that stay at home and have never studied accounting, may find it confusing.

Speaking to Profit , Syed Faizan Raza, a design researcher at Ideate Innovation, made a similar observation, saying that while financial service providers can help create a better future, they require mobility, and the vast majority of women in Pakistan currently have little or no interaction with them as a result. However, digital financial service (DFS) providers – such as Jazz Cash and EasyPaisa – are uniquely positioned to come to women, rather than expecting women to seek them out.

This, of course, was the part of the design thinking equation where the design thinkers empathise in an almost Schleiermacher-esque process, by which they place themselves in the shoes of the people that are facing the problem to understand it better so that they may be able to resolve it better.

At the end of a detailed research activity, which delivered insights and archetypes to understand the root causes behind DFS hesitation and the paths of most and least resistance, researchers from Ideate Innovation presented four opportunities. The first opportunity was to launch a mobile shop rickshaw service that brings CICO services, groceries, and day-to-day products that may not be available in local markets. Additional opportunities include a female-staffed store, a bank-generated program that makes community leaders agents tasked with signing up women in the community, and an entrepreneurship curriculum delivered through YouTube.

However, Hysab Kytab could not just change the names of these categories because that would impact previously saved data. Instead, the solution devised was to add short one liner descriptions along with these jargon in order to make it easy to understand.

Another insight was that the color scheme was initially too corporate. What this means is that housewives felt the app was more suited towards people that work. That, however is not the case considering how housewives are primarily the ones that allocate expenses under a budget. In order to make the app feel more inclusive towards such a segment (and possibly students), the color scheme was changed to a more neutral scheme that was neither feminine nor masculine, and did not look as corporate and serious as it initially did. This was the innovation and ideation part of design thinking, however, there was no real information of whether the testing stage even happened.

Huda further drew a comparison between tracking your personal finance and women tracking their period. Tracking a period is not simple, there are a multitude of factors that come into play. However, women, even housewives are able to use period tracking apps on their phones with ease. That is because of how simple they are. Through the explanation of terms through jargon, Hysab Kytab became simple for women to use too.

However, that is not where this stops. Huda says, “When you enter your symptoms in a period tracking app, they often show you tips on how to manage them better. For instance, a warm glass of milk for cramps. Similarly, if someone wasn’t able to hit their savings target for a month, the team suggested the app Hysab Kytab to do the same.” As a result, the app not only tracked personal finance, it also gave tips. All these factors helped the app bring along more female users.

Case study 2: Closing the gap and solving for sensory inclusion in Pakistan

When the Family Educational Services Foundation wanted the deaf community to have hassle-free access to the Pakistan Sign Language (PSL), they hired a design consultancy to understand the root of the problem. According to Hasan Habib, founder of Designist, the project led to over 1,000 units of Raspberry Pi’s, which are mini computers, distributed across the nation, with the intervention benefiting over 60,000 people nationwide, covering nearly 100 cities and 200 schools

“The product aims to provide hearing impaired individuals the opportunity to learn and augment their sign language vocabulary to improve the quality of their conversations,” explains Habib.

While designing the product, Habib explains that his team made efforts to develop current human behavior to how sign language was being taught in classrooms and assessed the effectiveness. For this purpose, the Designist team visited several schools in Karachi, Hyderabad, and Nawabshah to observe the challenges that students and teachers faced with the language, especially the role of digitalization in this process. “We followed a Human Centered Design approach where we designed everything from the end-users perspective. Additionally the approach was co-creative where all stakeholders were involved in the design process.”

After this initial process of acquainting themselves with the problem and empathising, Habib says that they designed new ways of accessing words through easy to understand categories and search functions, which was something that users previously struggled with. Moreover, the Designist team added a function whereby users could request for words. This feature was missing from the application but was something their research showed was needed. “This project was not just to make a digital website or platform, but to enable communication and empower the deaf community nationwide.”

“It won a national P@SHA award and the international Wise award in Qatar,” said Habib. “But the most important thing is it enabled an entire community to learn to communicate, something we take for granted.”

Speaking to Profit , Habib said that because design thinking practitioners prototype and test ideas, the chances of the success of a product or service is better than they would be.

“Essentially, you are de-risking yourself. You save money by doing quick tests, rather than a large roll out,” he said. “Multiple stakeholders are brought together into the design process, which means most angles of the business and service are covered. The essence of what we do is we design based on deep research of human behavior. Our design outputs are based on what the humans’ need, not what the ‘client’ thinks they need.”

Classically trained in human centered design from Hyper Island, Habib believes that that the design thinking terminology would be better suited as being called human centered analysis, adding that his experience in the four years of operating Designist has come across multiple misinterpretations.

“The Pakistani market in terms of design is still very focused on design used for beautification,” said Habib. “It is mainly used in marketing and advertising and not necessarily as a business function to improve or create products or services. Also when it comes to design, the Pakistani market does not give it the importance it deserves. It is always treated as an afterthought and thinks it is something that can happen instantly. The market does not understand the depth required to create great design.”

Case study 3: Integrating digital products within a branchless banking service

Inspired by the design sprint methodology created by Google Ventures, Telenor Pakistan created an internal design driven innovation program called Activate, which is a five-day process for answering critical business questions. The process was recently applied to help the telecommunications giant integrate Telenor digital products inside the Telenor Microfinance Bank’s Easypaisa app.

“The key question was to create a separate dedicated Telenor branded mini store within the app, where all digital products will be placed, or have them placed individually,” said Madiha Pervez, manager of digital innovation at Telenor Pakistan. “We decided to solve this problem using the design sprint approach, where a sprint team was recruited across Telenor and Telenor Microfinance Bank. “

The team first aligned on an end goal: to increase customer acquisition for Telenor Pakistan’s digital products as well offer additional purchase use cases within the Easypaisa app, which would in turn improve in-app engagement. After identifying and interviewing five experts at the bank, researchers made inquiries which led to the understanding that a Telenor branded mini-store might not engage customers as much as placing digital products in specific genres such as gaming and entertainment.

Madiha said that the teams then had a good discussion on what questions they wanted answered and agreed on the following sprint questions, which were answered through the process in one week: Will customers buy digital products from the Easypaisa App directly or via a try & buy model? Would recharge customers want to buy digital products in the Easypaisa app? Would users be comfortable seeing the entertainment and gaming content in the Easypaisa app to buy? Would we be able to ensure seamless experience for Telenor as well as OMO customers?

The next day, her team came up with possible solutions based on existing experiences from a range of other companies as a point of inspiration. Thereafter, solution concepts were sketched, the best of which were moved to the prototype phase. A red team critiqued each solution and decisions were made within the researcher pool on which solutions would achieve the aforementioned long term goals. UX experts and designers then worked with Madiha and her team to build realistic app prototypes.

“Simultaneously, personas for interview recruitment were made,” said Madiha. “For example for our gaming products we identified male millennials within the age of 18-23 years. Real customers identified were then interviewed. We learnt by watching them react to the prototype. They were asked the sprint questions.”

Speaking to Profit , Madiha said that the majority of customers that use the app prototype preferred the try and buy option, adding that she felt a key strength of the prototype was that it enables users to personally experience the service, know the value and make an informed purchase decision. She added that the digital products were found to be engaging for Easypaisa users who were able to navigate and subscribe easily. User feedback gleamed that the app was a seamless experience to manage subscription renewal with clear visibility

“This test made the entire sprint worthwhile,” she said. “[It] reduced uncertainty around what to do next and helped us chalk out a very clear future direction.”

Case study 4: Reducing stunting in newborn children through behavior change

From December 2017 to February 2018, the USAID funded an initiative that aimed to contribute to the Sindh provincial government’s efforts towards reducing stunting of newborn children in the first 1,000 days in three districts; Ghotki, Khairpur & Naushahro Feroze. White Rice, a behavior design consultancy, was brought in to design the evaluation, train the field workers, monitor the activities, manage and analyze the data, and synthesized the findings

The goal was to address and influence a change in priorities & mindsets among mothers and caregivers which would ensure new habits such as only breastfeeding infants below six months of age, feeding a balanced diet rich in fruits to infants above six months of age, using multivitamin tablets every other day, keeping food and utensils safe from flies, and washing hands with soap before handling food and after using the toilet.

Raheel Waqar, CEO of White Rice, told Profit that the campaign began with situation analysis, followed by focusing and designing, campaign creation, campaign implementation, and campaign evaluation. He said that the primary enabler of change reported in the evaluation phase was reported to be the awareness gained from the campaign, followed by the provision of supplements, and the support received from other mothers.

“The campaign – misaali maa – reached 26,000 mothers in the three project districts,” he said. “It was rolled out for three months, from December 2017 to February 2018. Campaign activities included six planned home visits for each mother with participatory activities such as emo-demos, spot the difference, group sessions with mothers, and community sessions,” he said. “

He said that campaign activities and materials incorporated insights from the in-depth qualitative research. His team engaged participants with interactive activities instead of one-way lectures, creating key messages that addressed motivations and aspirations, while incorporating stylistic components elements of most watched media into the illustrations.

“The campaign used ‘priming theory’, which is the use of images to stimulate related thoughts, to create materials for local visibility so as to aid recall and generate conversation in the community around the campaign,” he said. “The evaluation was carried out from November 2018 to January 2019, 8 months after the end of the campaign activities.”

Participatory analysis by White Rice led to an understanding of the factors that enabled positive change while also understanding the factors that blocked positive change, with the former being the importance given to mothers and unification of mothers in the community – among several other reasons – while the latter aspects that hindered change included prevalent myths in the community, low family support, lack of access to a latrine, and low production of mother’s milk.

Qualitative research revealed that the campaign gave mothers several intrinsic benefits such as the knowledge and support – due to the campaign unifying women in the community as one – to withstand family and community pressure that perpetuates myths and unhealthy habits. The mothers surveyed felt that the campaign created respect for them in the family and in the community as an exemplary mother, which empowered them. A major benefit of the campaign was the spark of empathy in the community for the mothers’ burden and lived experiences and elicited family support for key behaviors.

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A proven formula in Pakistan: 3 steps to transform retail into a thriving e-commerce business

For a country where most retail still relies on customers walking into stores to browse and purchase, mandatory lockdowns in Pakistan pushed people online for their regular shopping. This shift empowered more businesses, big and small, to take the leap into e-commerce.

Pakistan is going through a major generational shift, so we’re digging into three factors making a difference for retailers going through digital transformation: a credible website, a customer-centric supply chain, and targeting audiences at the most relevant points of their purchase journey.

Here, we explore how Beechtree, a high-street clothing brand, focused on these three insights to successfully turn its business around during the challenges of 2020.

While the Pakistani economy has steadily been moving online, a large part of the consumer’s retail experience still relies on brick and mortar shops. That is, until the government-imposed lockdown from COVID-19. Since then, retail foot traffic dropped to an all-time low — down 70% on the previous month’s baseline. 1 When spring came without its usual crowd of shoppers, retailers scrambled to adapt to this new normal.

The retail industry, despite these challenges, continued to bloom , as consumers shifted their attention online. Since then, the conversion of offline to online consumers has continued to multiply.

Consumers shifting online from offline

Think with google.

Source: Google, “What is Pakistan Searching For? Insights for Brands,” June 2020.

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This creates a golden opportunity for retailers to move online and meet consumer needs. Beechtree, a clothing retailer owned by HKB, was quick to jump on this chance, swapping its hopes of physical expansion to a digital transformation strategy involving the following three key insights it learned from Google and its partner agency, Shopistan.

1. Ensure your website is fast, informative and accurate

Without the benefit of tactile senses to determine the authenticity of a product, it’s only natural to place more importance on our experience using the product’s website. 81% of Pakistani consumers research a product extensively before purchase, so more and more, the website is beginning to replace the physical store. 2 Fast loading times, extensive product information, providing shopping recommendations, and the ability to know the availability of goods in real time affects the online shopping experience and can make the difference between conversion and abandonment. When it comes to page loading time, seconds count:

Source: Accenture Interactive, Masters of Mobile Study, SEA, 2018.

Beechtree moved its website to multi-node hosting, which allows functions to run separately on different parts (or nodes) of a server and adds more nodes as needed. Its website loading speeds improved by up to 30%, even in high traffic.

The team also made clever use of Google Optimize for A/B testing to find the most popular products to promote in each region. Setting up separate landing pages for Islamabad and Karachi, they increased conversion rate by 17% focusing on luxury clothing in Islamabad, and by 7% focusing on casual clothing in Karachi. They then used the opportunity of having their stores closed to the public to stockpile popular inventory for each region to ensure on-time deliveries.

Having your own website not only helps you reach your online audience, it helps you understand them better. It is a fantastic first step for gathering first-party data to better serve your customers, without engaging expensive third-party agencies or analysts. This enables you to enhance your strategy and identify trends to reach more customers and improve conversion rates, as customers value getting recommendations and a clear overview of the choices available to them.

Steps you can take to ensure a better website

• Assess your website. Look out for loading times, mobile responsiveness and the ease of navigating. Google’s Test My Site tool can act as a useful starting point.
• Understand your customer. From your website, collect consumer journey data to segment your audience. Then, test how you can serve each segment more relevant products.
• Update your inventory. Match the availability of your online products with actual inventory by clearly marking items as “sold out” and providing estimated delivery times for what’s in stock. This helps you improve customer satisfaction by managing delivery expectations.
• Using a combination of first-party data and available inventory can also be used to make relevant recommendations to customers.

2. Develop a customer-centric supply chain strategy

Today, digitally savvy consumers have high expectations of delivery times when buying online. On Pakistan’s leading e-commerce marketplace, Daraz, the overall sales of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) products doubled in March 2020 and these numbers are only expected to increase. From Google Trends data, we see a huge 150% increase in searches for “same-day delivery” and a 138% increase in the search term “near me”. 3

This, however, is a challenge that Pakistani retailers struggle to live up to. 94% of freight traffic is reliant on roads that are not well-equipped for speedy deliveries. 4 According to the 2018 Logistics Performance Index report, Pakistan came in at 122 out of 160 countries. 5

With logistics being a stumbling block, Beechtree shifted inventory from its warehouse to its 25 closed stores across the country, following customer behaviour carefully to understand which products to stockpile at which store. It also made sure that online and offline inventory matched by working with Shopistan to track available items in each location. The results?

Steps you can take to develop a customer-centric strategy

• Automate your inventory tracking system to automatically match online and offline stock availability.
• Partner with reliable logistics companies who can help manage inventory and provide the last mile of service with on-time delivery to customers.
• Work with multiple logistics partners to ensure that customers will always receive deliveries on time.
• Train your staff to manage your e-commerce site and get them up-to-speed on order-management or customer relationship software to help keep things running smoothly online.

3. Connect with your customer at different stages of their purchase journey

81% of the 87 million connected Pakistani consumers research a product extensively before purchase, 6 with 55% of them using Google Search and YouTube. 7 This translates to a highly savvy consumer, who businesses can reach at any point of their online journey.

In Beechtree’s case, the team tagged their entire website flow to track visitors’ actions. With this data, they used Google Ads remarketing tags such as “product viewers” and “shopping intent” to generate dynamic product-level data with advanced audience segmentation. They then used these segments to create their own unique customer purchasing funnel below.

For customers in the awareness Stage, the Beechtree team used a three-step strategy:

• Smart Display using automated bidding, targeting, and ad creation to help entice customers with low advertising costs.
• Google Search Ads to increase the volume of traffic to their site and visibility of their brand and products.
• Google Smart Shopping campaigns to automate their campaigns across Search and Display, testing different combinations of the image and text to reach audiences at the relevant “Shopping Intent” stage of their journey with the best possible ad.

For customers who had previously visited the website, Beechtree’s approach was:

• Focus on Google Search to serve custom ads using remarketing lists.
• Implement Display ads for retargeting, so Beechtree could stay top-of-mind as customers browse the internet.
• Re-engage with customers on YouTube by using a combination of TrueView and static ads.

For customers already in the Conversion stage of the journey, Beechtree used Dynamic Retargeting on Google Search and Display ads to reach customers who had previously shown interest in a product or had abandoned their cart at checkout.

With this full-funnel strategy, Beechtree was able to track the performance of each specific campaign using a specific attribution model in tracking conversion data. The results:

Steps you can take to connect better with your audience

• Be discoverable. Be present when a consumer expresses interest in your products. Appearing at the top of search results can be critical in gaining new customers.
• Acquire new customers. Engage with potential customers who are interested in the products you sell. These customers are actively looking for products to buy across YouTube, and Google Display Network. You can target your ideal customer using audience insights.
• Increase customer loyalty. Retain your highest-value customers across YouTube, Search and shopping networks by using remarketing tools like customer match lists to turn past shoppers into loyal customers.

In reality, nothing is linear in the process of transitioning your physical retail store into a booming e-commerce business. Yet, it is a change we must all learn to embrace as customers are increasingly turning to online channels to purchase, and this will only increase going forward. So, get going and start building an amazing website, tweak to a customer-centric supply chain strategy, and use every opportunity of the purchasing funnel to connect with your customers. With these strategies, you’ll be in a good place to start turning your business around.

Contributors: Amna Asim, Agency Account Strategist, Google Customer Solutions, South Asian Frontier; Shiraz Abdullah Mahmood, Marketing Specialist, South Asian Frontier

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1 Google, COVID-19 Community Mobility Report, Pakistan, March 2020.

2,7 Ipsos and Quantum,“Path to Purchase 2.0: Understanding the roles, interactions, and impact of touch points in consumer path to purchase," Pakistan, July 2018.

3 Google trends, 2018 vs. 2019.

4,5 The Nation, "Pakistan’s supply chain dilemma: Logistically wrong policies," Pakistan, 4 June 2020.

6 Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Telecom indicators, Pakistan, Dec. 2020.

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22 Problem-Solving Products That Help Put An End To Pesky Home Issues

Home maintenance doesn’t have to consist of endless projects. If you find furniture scratches, slippery rugs or tangled bed sheets in your house, there are so many products that can help you fix these small annoyances. From rug pads to wood polish, here are essentials that’ll help keep your living space in good shape.

HuffPost may receive a share from purchases made via links on this page. Prices and availability subject to change.

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Things From Amazon That Reviewers Say Made A Huge Difference In Their Home

Popular in the community, from our partner, huffpost shopping’s best finds, more in shopping.

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We hope you love our recommendations! Some may have been sent as samples, but all were independently selected by our editors. Just FYI, BuzzFeed and its publishing partners may collect a share of sales and/or other compensation from the links on this page.

If There Were A Problem-Solving Hall Of Fame, You Would Find These 27 Products There

They really do deserve an award for how great they are at making life easier.

BuzzFeed Staff

1. A pet hair remover  you simply swipe over surfaces covered in hair from your furry bestie. 

Promising review: "Where has this been all my cat-loving life? Sticky rollers work fine for clothes, but this is the only product that has ever COMPLETELY removed all the cat hair from my bed. I have a long-haired, 20-pound tabby, and if you run your hands up his back a few times and fling the hair everywhere, it looks like it's snowing — he never stops shedding no matter what I do. After using the ChomChom, I can put on a black dress and roll around on my bed and not get a single hair on me. It's absolutely amazing. Everyone is getting one for Christmas, even if they don't have a pet. I don't care; it's THAT good." — Stephanie

Get it from Amazon for $24.99  (clip the $5 off coupon for this price!).

2. A tattoo aftercare cream formulated with fatty-acid and antioxidant-rich ingredients to help moisturize and soothe newly inked skin. 

Mad Rabbit is a small biz that sells clean and natural tattoo skincare products and was featured on season 12 of Shark Tank !

Promising review: "Product was awesome. It rejuvenated a 5-year-old tattoo and made it look like new again. Mad Rabbit absorbed into the skin very easily without being greasy." — Janson Ward

Get it from Amazon for $18.99 (available in two scents). 

3. A producer container doubling as a colander for rinsing your favorite fruits and veggies and a keeper so they stay fresh in your fridge longer than they would in their original packaging.  

These containers are dishwasher-, microwave-, and freezer-safe!

Promising review: "I really wanted to see if this worked so I purchased two packages of strawberries. I washed all the berries and let them dry throughly. I put half in my berry keeper box and the other in the plastic container from the store. My daughter had to ask for help with the new berry keeper; she had difficulty opening it and closing it sometimes. The berry keeper kept strawberries for 15 days, the grocery store container only kept them 6 days. Groceries aren’t cheap and I can use anything to prolong the life of my produce. Washed well in the dishwasher on the top rack . I’ll be purchasing more of these attractive quality boxes . I need one for blueberries and grapes." — Toogreen

Get it from Amazon for $8.99+ (available in three colors and various sets). 

4. Peach Slices acne spot dots — simply put one of these little hydrocolloid stickers over a zit, let it sit for a few hours (or overnight!), and then bask in the amazement of the pore-clogging gunk it absorbed when you take it off. 

Peach Slices is a small biz that sells skincare products!

Promising review: "This brand is so affordable and works just the same as the more expensive brands. I go through them so quickly so this is a plus! I’m generally a picker at my zits, but if I can get to one of these dots in time I save my face a lot of irritation and pain . I wear them at night and sometimes during the day, only takes about two to get rid of those pesky whiteheads, sometimes more for a big zit. They really suck everything out ." — Savannah Wilson

Get a pack of 30 from Amazon for $4.99 . 

5. A set of Shoe Slotz space saving units that'll take your collection of shoes from an overwhelming messy pile of who knows what to basically resembling the aisles of a DSW because you'll *gasp* actually be able to see your shoes. 

My colleague Sally Elshorafa swears by this for organizing shoes. Here's what she has to say:

" This product SAVED MY SHOES!  I have an awkward set of built-in shelves in my closet, and it was the only place I wanted to put my shoes. As you can see from the before pic (above), it was a big mess; my shoes were piled on top of each other and getting really dirty.  Traditional shoe caddies or boxes didn't really work because there's not much horizontal space, so I tried the  Shoe Slotz . It fixed the problem perfectly! Because the design smartly stacks one shoe on top of the other, you save 50% of the space you'd normally use to store your shoes." 

Get a pack of 10 from Amazon for $32.95 .

6. A Gold Bond Friction Defense stick for swiping over areas prone to chafing and hopefully help stop it in its tracks. There's nothing worse than a day of exploring a city, walking around a Disney park, or vibing at a music festival ruined by that dreadful pain. 

Promising review: "I just used it for five days in 90-degree-plus weather at Bonnaroo music festival in the middle of Tennessee on a farm in June with 100,000 people walking several miles, dancing, and sweating every day. I am happy to report that this product is a lifesaver. My thighs didn't chafe once, and I have big ones! I had to reapply once during the day. I strongly recommend buying this if you have large thighs and need relief from chafing. I couldn't wear dresses or skirts in the heat if I was walking anywhere, and now I live in them because of this stuff! Buy it! It works!" — Issac

Get it from Amazon for $5.96 .

7. A portable carpet and upholstery cleaner that boasts strong spray and suction so cleaning stubborn stains will feel effortless. Messes left behind by pets or small children shouldn't mean permanently ruined carpets, furniture, or car interiors.

Promising review:  "This vacuum is amazing. I first heard of it on TikTok where people were using it to clean their stairs, mattresses, car seats, etc. and from the videos, it already looked amazing. But considering how dirty my dining chair cushions were, I was a little bit apprehensive and skeptical. I purchased the item and used it on my chairs for the first time and the results were SO AMAZING. Best vacuum I've ever used. I even bought a second one!" — Davina

Get it from Amazon for $123 .

8. A fruit and veggie divider to make quick work of cutting up berries, carrot and celery sticks, or any other produce you wanna snack on. Just here to help you save time! 

Promising review: "If you have toddlers, get it — especially if you're on the fence. I needed something for grapes, blueberries, blackberries, and other small fruit and veggies we go through so much. My breakfast was getting cold long before I was done cutting fruit for two toddlers. Most cutters only do one grape or berry, but this one can do several grapes and a small handful of blueberries. We will definitely be getting a lot of use out of it in this house." — Kindle Customer

Get it from Amazon for $9.68 . 

9. A body scrub for buffing away red bumps. Use it one to two times a week for smoother skin — it's like a microdermabrasion treatment at a fraction of the cost and without having to leave the house. 

My colleague  Ciera Velarde loves this stuff, here's what she has to say about it:

"I've had keratosis pilaris since I was a teenager (it's especially bad on my thighs), and after trying dozens of products to treat it with no luck, this magical product is the only thing that's truly worked for me . I usually use this once a week for maintenance, but in the winter if I notice a flare-ups and I get have drier, rougher, bumpier skin, I use this twice a week, and any flare-ups disappear within the week. I scrub it over my thighs and then actually let it sit for a few minutes before rinsing it off. I have notorious sensitive skin, and I've never had an issue with this before. It's truly the best product out there for any fellow KP sufferers out there! "

Get it from Amazon for  $12+  (available in three sizes). 

10. A lightweight  running belt that'll make it easy to bring important items like your phone, keys, headphones, and wallet with you out on your morning workout without having to actually hold them or wear a clunky fanny pack. 

Promising review: "I’m a runner and a big problem in the past has been where to put the phone and other items! I do have another item similar that I can have for my longer runs as it comes with two bottles, but for all my normal runs, this item is the best! After a few seconds, I forget it’s even on! Haha I highly recommend for runners, it’s a must have! It will change your runs forever.  :) There are many pockets and a lot of different ways you can store it. I even tried to grab my bottle from my other one and see if it fits and works with this item, and it worked great! It's very high quality and it looks like it will last a really long time!" — Anjali

Get it from Amazon for $31.89+ (available in sizes XXS–XXL and in 13 colors).

11. A genius  sandwich bread dispenser  reviewers say helps keep loaves of sandwich bread  fresher longer  (think: weeks) because it's time we finally put an end to that annoying moment of discovering green spots a few days after grocery shopping and having to throw away half the loaf. 

Buddeez is a family-owned small biz based in Missouri that sells home goods!

Promising review:  "The Buddeez Sandwich Bread Dispenser is great! It does exactly what it was intended for.  I live alone and I don't quite go through bread often enough before the last quarter section of the loaf starts to go stale.  I was originally looking for something to put a loaf of bread in as a shell for my vacuum sealer, that would keep the bread from getting crushed from the pressure.  This dispenser solved all of my problems.  Thank you!" — DRMcQuaig

Get it from Amazon for   $12.49  (available in two colors).

12. A set of clothing storage bags featuring clear windows because every year without fail, you stow away all of your winter sweaters once spring hits, and then the universe laughs in your face and throws in a random freezing cold day. Now you'll be able to find the exact sweater you want to wear without having to ruffle through every storage container you own.  

Promising review: "Best TikTok find for storage.   These are the best storage bags/containers I have bought. So much so that I reordered and got three more not too long ago. One of them holds all the items from my six-drawer dresser, which included everything from tank tops to heavy sweaters and crewnecks . I also use it to hold my seasonal shoes, extra blankets, and yes, even more clothes! Since reordering, I now have six but I am only currently using four. They are machine washable and good to go in the dryer on low heat. Overall, it is worth the purchase!" — Harley

Get a set of three from Amazon for $19.99+  (available in three colors and various sets). 

13. A reusable  oil-absorbing face roller  that'll be a lifesaver for anyone who tends to get extra oily. Just glide it over your face, it's THAT easy. 

Promising review:  "First off, if you have extremely oily skin, this. is. it. I was so tired of getting blotting powder/wipes. It felt wasteful and always left residue on my face. I saw this on TikTok and NEEDED it. It was backordered but then I got an email saying it was in stock and I was SO excited. Not only is it affordable, but it's washable, which helps you save money and be less wasteful." — Kelsey B.

Get it from Amazon for  $13.40 . 

14. A set of shower door towel hooks because imagine how nice it's gonna be the next time you get out of the shower and your towel is RIGHT there within easy reach. It's the little things! 

Promising review: "A very sturdy shower hook! I’ve had these on my wishlist a while and I’m glad I got them. The rubber sticks well to the shower glass and they’re very heavy duty!" — April Bennett

Get a set of two from Amazon for $9.59+ (available in three colors). 

15. A  ScratchPad  — a genius tool that'll allow your pup to file their own nails. Say goodbye to scary clippers and noisy grinders you both hate and hello to this wonderful invention.

ScratchPad is a small business based in Atlanta, Georgia that sells, well, the ScratchPad, a fancy name for a nail file for dogs! 

Promising review:  "Highly recommend this product! After three months of challenges to cut the nails of our German shepherd, this product saved the day!!! We are now able to file his nails in a noninvasive way. Excellent customer service and fast international shipping." — Michelle Rosenberg

Get it from  ScratchPad  on Etsy for  $46.95+  (available in three materials and four styles).

16. An under appliance microfiber duster because let's be real — how often do you actually clean underneath your oven and fridge? If you even own anything for cleaning that space. This is gonna make it simple to reach into those crevices and keep it tidy where you can't see. 

Promising review: "I use this under all my appliances and it works great. It fits under my fridge, freezer, range, washer, and dryer, and then I just vacuum it off and done! I also use it on my wooden blinds — just slant them all down and run this over them and poof — clean. Works great!" — CM

Get it from Amazon for $16.95 .

17. A pair of horizontal glasses to make watching TV, WFH, reading a book, or simply scrolling TikTok and laying down at the same time a neck strain–free experience. These are also especially helpful for anyone who might be on bed rest for medical conditions and could use a simpler way to enjoy their favorite forms of entertainment. 

Promising review: "I didn't know what I was missing until I used this. My life is now complete. If you enjoy comfort and lazy binge-watching but don't care how ridiculous you look wearing these, then you have found Nirvana. My glasses fit in these just fine. Takes a minute to get used to, then it becomes your reason to live. Expect people to laugh at you, but forgive them for they know not what they are missing." — Michael Boyd

Get them from Amazon for $14.88 .

18. A Shower Cat hair catcher — a simple wall-adhesive solution you need if at any point your shower wall or door has resembled a yuckier version of an abstract painting, except instead of colors, it was just all the hair you shed. 

Shower Cat  is a small business established in 2021 specializing in products to prevent shower clogs. 

Promising review: "I first saw this product on TikTok and I knew immediately that I needed it. I just moved into a new apartment and I didn’t want to be how I used to be, where I’d just let hair go down the drain and plug it eventually, or peel it off of the drain after each shower. It works great but I probably need some practice with it. I currently just floss my hair through it so it will hold them and there are a few stray hairs that don’t stick. I would recommend to anyone who is tired of putting your loose strands of hair on the shower wall." — Cari Schwartzkopf

Get it from Amazon for $14.95 . 

19. And while we're on the subject of hair shedding in the shower, a pack of disposable shower hair catchers you simply place over your drain so your hair doesn't go down and clog it. Simply peel and toss when it's full and replace with a new one! No snaking needed! 

Promising review: "I saw these on TikTok and bought them when I was visiting family. Tried them out and left a few behind for family and sent a few home with family — everyone is now ordering them and using them. They work great. Each one is on its own plastic shield. Just peel off and center onto your floor drain. I leave mine on for two to three weeks. I'm the only one using my shower, but if it's a shared shower probably wouldn't last that long. It's still a great way to catch hair before going down the drain, because we all know, people say they use the traps but they really don't. A must-have!!" — C. Crocker

Get a pack of 25 for $11.99  (also available in packs of 50 and and 100).

20. A bottle/jar opener to make quick work of unsealing sauces, jams, beverages, and so much more. The best part is it goes underneath your cabinets so it won't take up valuable kitchen space AND might even add an element of mystery as your guests watch you effortlessly pop off the tops of jars and bottles. 

Promising review: "I very rarely write reviews, but as a person with arthritis in my hands, this product is a godsend! Installed it under my cabinet, and it opens any jar/container from the smallest (16-ounce plastic soda bottles) to the largest pickle jar I have. One of the best inexpensive purchases I've ever made. Buy it!" — Vicky Reed

Get it from Amazon for $18.55 .

Read our full  EZ Off jar opener deep dive .

21. A magnetic purse hanger because if you're a bag-lover, chances are you're also familiar with the struggle that is going to a restaurant or a public restroom and having no place to put your pocketbook! All you have to do with this is attach the metal hook to your bag and use the magnetic hook against a metal surface to hang your bag!  

Bagnet is a woman-owned small biz that sells magnetic bag holders and phone slings.

Promising review: "This is the best bag holder ever! I was completely blown away, the magnet is SO strong. Works in so many places: in restrooms (try the hinges if the door isn't metal), at restaurants (on tables, chairs, even under the table), at the gym to hold my water bottle and keys so they don't end up on the floor. But my absolute favorite place to use it is on my car! I can attach it to the side of my car while I unlock it without having my hands full and leaving me vulnerable. If you have ever felt nervous trying to fumble with all your stuff while trying to unlock your doors in a dark parking lot, you need this! My only regret is that I didn't know about it sooner. I am going to get one for everyone in my life for Christmas. Any person who carries a bag should have one (or two). Seriously, it's life changing​." — robert rodriguez

Get it from Amazon for $21.99+  (available in 16 styles). 

22. A water bottle featuring a side pill organizer compartment so you can easily bring your medication on the go (and ensure you have water to wash it down with). 

Promising review: "This water bottle has helped me so much with the convenience of taking my meds at night. I always forget or say I’ll do it later bc I have to grab a drink for the meds. So I have a daily alarm now and my meds and water are right at my bedside. No issues whatsoever. I love that I can stand the bottle or lay it down, it doesn’t spill or leak, and the top doubles as a cup. Worth every penny." — Natalie Hayes

Get it from Amazon for $15.99 .

23. A memory foam pillow designed to adjust to your preferred sleeping position because whether you're a back, stomach, or side sleeper, you deserve a comfortable night's rest. 

Promising review: "I hardly ever write reviews but I have to for this. I saw this pillow on TikTok and it got me curious so I immediately came to Amazon. OMG, it’s such a game changer. I’m a side sleeper and this pillow is heaven . It’s some of the most comfortable sleep I have had in ages. I love it so much I bought a second one and have my eye on the body pillow. Obsessed! You need this in your bedroom." — MT

Get it from Amazon for $72+ (available in two sizes).

24. An self-cleaning litter box  so your purr-fect bestie's potty break is odor-free, and you don't have to change the litter or scoop 💩 until the tray is full!

Each litter box comes with a pre-portioned package of litter that you pour into the tray. It will start cleaning 20 minutes after it's detected that your cat has left the box. When the tray is full, simply remove it and dispose of it.

Promising review: "I was a little skeptical about paying so much for a litter box but definitely made the best decision. There is literally no smell and the litter lasts for at least 30 days for my cat. Before we got this litter box, we were changing the litter every two days and that was sometimes stretching it out too far to where it smelled throughout part of the house. My cat is 14 and had trouble adjusting to the crystals so I called the helpline and they gave me some tips to get her using it and now we have no trouble what so ever. Would definitely recommend this litter box to anyone!! Easy to put together and comes with your first disposable tray and crystals. " — Aldrich

Get it from Amazon for $169.95 .

25. A narrow ice cube tray for making ice that'll actually fit inside your water bottle. Cold water stans rise!!!

Promising review: "These stick ice cubes are fantastic for bottled water! Really like that they have lids = no spilling on the way to the freezer, (or picking up odd tastes inside the freezer). And the ice is easy to remove without much breakage." — Diana H.

Get it from Amazon for $9.99  (available with or without covers). 

26. A handy dandy weeding tool so you can easily pluck up those unsightly plants without having to bend, pull, or kneel. 

Grampa's Weeder is a family-owned small biz that sells tools to make weeding easier!

Promising review: " I saw this tool used on TikTok, so we decided to try it out. It works really well — is not difficult to get to the root of the weed, and is fairly simple to use, as well. We would recommend this tool to anyone who finds it difficult to do the crouching required to pull weeds." — Mary  

Get it from Amazon for $39.99 .

27. A divided pot great for making two different elements of your meal in the same place OR for cooking different versions of the same food if you happen to be prepping for a picky eater.

Promising review: "I have a picky household so this works perfectly to reduce the amount of pans to clean. Made taco meat and burgers at the same time. Pan was an easy swipe of a sponge to clean. Really pretty pan too." — Amazon Customer

Get it from Amazon for $54.49 . 

Reviews have been edited for length and/or clarity.

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Hp partners with google to bring project starline out of the lab and into the workplace.

By Alex Cho, President, Personal Systems, HP Inc.

May 13, 2024

Delivering the Next Generation of Communication Devices for Authentic Human Connections

With more than half of meaning and intent communicated through body language versus words alone, an immersive collaboration experience plays an important role in creating authentic human connections in hybrid environments.

Project Starline is a breakthrough communications technology by Google that offers a genuinely realistic meeting experience. Using advancements in AI, 3D imaging, and other technologies, Starline creates a unique, lifelike interaction that feels more like being together in the same room than conventional video calls.

We are excited to share that we’re partnering with Google to start commercializing the Starline experience in 2025, with a focus on connecting distributed teams and individuals in the workplace.

HP's expertise in computing, combined with our leadership in Poly audio and video technology, makes HP well-equipped to deliver the solution needed for this new and innovative experience. Our strong partnerships in unified communications, audiovisual technology, and the collaboration space, along with our global presence and salesforce, will help bring the unique Starline experience to more people worldwide.

We are proud to partner with Google to bring this technology to market, harnessing the power of AI to shape the future of collaboration. We look forward to sharing more details later this year.

Read Google’s blog post on the partnership here .

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