Nasrat Khalid

Episode Summary

In this episode of My Space, host Manav sits down with Nasrat Khalid, the founder of Aseel app—a platform bridging the digital divide for artisans and communities in developing and underdeveloped countries. Nasrat shares his journey from growing up as a refugee to building an infrastructure that enables local artisans to sell their handmade goods directly to buyers worldwide, bypassing costly middlemen. He discusses the challenges faced in these regions, such as digital literacy, lack of fintech solutions, and supply chain limitations, and explains how Aseel tackles these issues with innovative technology, transparent marketplaces, and the involvement of local heroes. The episode also explores Aseel’s impact during humanitarian crises, its unique ID system for transparency, and the optimism behind scaling the platform across new markets like India and Pakistan. If you’re curious about purpose-driven marketplaces and the future of humanitarian tech, this conversation with Nasrat will inspire and inform.

Transcript

Manav [00:00:00]:
A seal is an Etsy GoFundMe combo for developing and underdeveloped countries.

Nasrat Khalid [00:00:05]:
You've got two parts of the world, one part that has access to the digital economy, and then the rest of the world that is left behind. We're closing that gap.

Manav [00:00:14]:
The challenges you had to go through in the last six years, there's a.

Nasrat Khalid [00:00:17]:
Lot, but these three are the main, the supply chain, the fintech, and the digital literacy.

Manav [00:00:21]:
Why you are the right person to build a seal.

Nasrat Khalid [00:00:24]:
I went on to work with usaids. We went on to become an IT person in the World Bank.

Manav [00:00:30]:
Every marketplace comes with its privacy concerns, scams.

Nasrat Khalid [00:00:33]:
We're building like an Omega ID card and giving you full clarity to straight up talk to the person who is creating these artisan products.

Manav [00:00:41]:
How much money have you raised in grants in total?

Nasrat Khalid [00:00:44]:
I think we've done around.

Manav [00:00:52]:
Hello, everyone. Today on the show, we have Nasrat Khalid. He's the founder of Aseel app. Aseel is a Etsy GoFundMe combo for developing an underdeveloped country. I'm really excited to talk to Nasrat because he flew in all the way from D.C. to meet me. So, Nasrat, how are you doing today?

Nasrat Khalid [00:01:11]:
I'm good. Glad to be here in la. I've been here in the past, but not so much. So it's first time really exploring the city and I'm gonna be headed to San Francisco. So I'm really excited. The weather was hot, but it seems to be getting better now.

Manav [00:01:27]:
Okay. I gotta say, I'm actually really impressed by the platform because a lot of these platforms have poor design and I really like your design choice and it looks very functional. Even your crowdfunding platform, it looks like a better version of GoFundMe. So can you take me through the product and explain what ASEEL is for someone who never heard of this company?

Nasrat Khalid [00:01:48]:
Yeah. So Aseel onboards underdeveloped communities to the digital economy. We mean by that is you have sort of looking at the early days of the Internet for the entire world. It seems like a new gateway of tools and features that could enable you to do great things. But as time went by, what the concept now is, Digital Divide came in between. And you've got two parts of the world, one part that has access to the digital economy, that is sell things, you know, get paid for things, and then the rest of the world that is left behind. So we're closing that gap and we want to invite the entire world, no matter where they are, to join this digital Party with us.

Manav [00:02:29]:
Okay, a little bit context for the audience. Nazrath has been working on a seal for the last six, seven years, and he has been working diligently to build the infrastructure structure, which, as you can tell, it's much harder to do in underdeveloped and developing countries compared to developed countries like us. So can you walk me through a little bit of the challenges you had to go through in the last six years, and then we'll dive right into your background, what you were doing before. Aseel.

Nasrat Khalid [00:02:55]:
Yeah. So I think first thing that I would really like to touch upon is this concept of digital literacy. Right. When these tools. First off, the tools, the digital tools are designed for sort of English first audience. And there are a lot of countries in the world where people don' have a secondary language of English. So digital literacy plays a big role. So think of, for instance, Etsy or GoFundMe or, you know, Amazon and others. Even if they go to these underdeveloped countries, people don't have the skills to use these tools. So that was our number one problem. Secondly, there's a lot of infrastructure that doesn't exist. So for instance, payments is sort of, you know, look at Stripe and PayPal and so on. They have these initial sort of building blocks that they build on. For many countries, those building blocks don't exist. The banking, for example, is not able to support these fintech tools. Then you have the DHL and the FedEx and the big suppliers of supply chain in the world, and they don't cover some of these countries. So I couldn't go on about the issues that underdeveloped countries are facing that is stopping them from actually transacting with people in the US and other, you know, Western countries. I would say there's a lot, but these three are the main, the supply chain, the fintech, and the digital literacy.

Manav [00:04:12]:
Amazing. Okay, so I think the biggest that I like about a seal is that you're circumventing the middleman. So for example, if I want to buy a rug made by an Afghani worker, afghani artisan in LA, it would cost anywhere from two to $3,000. But you can straight up go on a sale, buy directly. You're circumventing the middleman, and you can buy it for like 500 to $1,000. So you're saving 2/3 of the cost. So can you talk a little bit about the business model of a seal? How people can basically buy such really artistic goods that takes a really long time to make? For example, we can take a rug for an example and you can save a lot of money and do good with that.

Nasrat Khalid [00:04:52]:
Yeah, so I think that was sort of initially my, you know, when I started the company, I came from a background where I had worked with like governments and the World bank and so on. And so for me it was really interesting. It was just me. I went to Afghanistan, I went to Egypt, Cairo and bunch of other countries. I went to India and just sort of looking at why A, these people can't sell online and then B, how do they sell without the Internet? The usual sort of commerce they do. So the case of Afghanistan you mentioned, right, the carpet guys, they've been doing carpet for like, some of them are like sixth generation carpet makers. And so when you look at how they sell, they would sell from their province to somebody in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. And from Kabul they would go to Karachi, which is in Pakistan. From Karachi they go to Istanbul. From Istanbul they go to Hamburg. And from Hamburg they come into D.C. from D.C. they come into California. So that entire process, you know, everybody is putting more margins on the product. And what we also was really sad to see was these artisans for six generations have been creating this beautiful globally known handmade carpets, but they still live in very poor conditions because when they sell the carpet to somebody in Kabul, that's the visibility that they get. And in there, you know, you've got, for example, it takes like six months to create an afghan 12 meters carpet because it's all made by hand and you usually have 12 people working on that one carpet. And so, you know, they look at their daily wages and then maybe sell that with like a 25% profit based on their daily wages, which means they are going down the rabbit hole. Right. They keep producing these carpets that are valued, you know, four times more in California and the money goes to other people in the process. So it felt like the mission is not just to make people save more money, but the mission is also to give them the respect that they deserv for their work.

Manav [00:06:53]:
That's the oldest tale of time where the real artist doesn't make the money, but the reseller ends up getting way higher. We've seen this with famous paintings as well, like Castle and all that they were selling on the pennies on the dollar and then the resellers would actually bank on the profits. Yeah. So I actually want to go back to your background a little bit because that's very important on why you are the right person to build a seal. So can you walk me through like how did you end up working at World bank? Because that' a common job, like people go after graduation?

Nasrat Khalid [00:07:27]:
Well, I think so sort of my, I grew up as a refugee in neighboring Pakistan at the time. Throughout that time we didn't really have access to go to universities and you know, all that because we, we were refugees. And so I came across, we, we had a school, my mom and dad had a refugee school that they were running and we were sort of part of that school, helping with everything given that refugees couldn't go to public schools. And that's the now, I mean, refugees in general, you know, they're sort of in the middle. They don't have the documents to go to a school. So we had our own refugee school created and there was a computer lab and I was assigned to the computer lab. So I grew up in a computer lab and I learned, you know, because you had to practice with students and teach them stuff. So I had to learn everything in order to answer students on their questions. So like, some of the students would be really cheeky with their questions. I get into Excel and try to ask you about this formula and you, you had to do it. So I really had to put a lot more effort. I love Internet working, which is the main thing that creates the Internet. Right. So routing and switching, that's sort of my initial passion in life was, hey, how does the Internet work? How do I send a message in my computer and it gets delivered to somebody in America in like seconds?

Manav [00:08:50]:
So did you study like computer science? What was your area of study?

Nasrat Khalid [00:08:53]:
So I self studied everything my entire life. I did study YouTube, didn't exist at the time, but later on, a lot of YouTube. I do have a master's degree in business management from the uk, but other than that I feel like everything that I learned was from self learning. Yeah. So then when I got 16, a lot of just being in the computer lab for all of my childhood and then getting a chance once in a while to go out and play football, soccer. Yeah. And yeah, 16 years old, I went back to Afghanistan. My first job was teaching computer science students. So everybody sort of did look at me as like this young guy who has a natural sort of ability to learn computer skills. It also helped a lot that given that there had been a war in Afghanistan for a very long time, you could think there weren't a lot of qualified people because. And then in general this is like 2010s early, you know, 2000s, 2005 to like 2015, they globally, I mean even now, globally There is a shortage of computers, scientists. So it helped that I had learned everything myself and had a passion for IT and people valued that in a place where there wasn't a lot of competition. I went on to work with USAID sort of projects. They were trying to rebuild Afghanistan. So think of 2001 to like until.

Manav [00:10:21]:
The withdrawal you had to relocate to Afghanistan.

Nasrat Khalid [00:10:23]:
Yeah, we went back, we happily went back because we were refugees. And to me it was like a life mission to go back and fix my country. I used to say that like aloud every single day. You know, we need to go back and would work with young people. Created like the IT association of Afghanistan, a research institute, everything that I could to support build the country. So throughout that they work with usaid, sort of building my reputation down there. Went on to become an IT person in the World bank and I spent around seven years with them. And then in 2018, I mean, the reason why I got into sort of big institutions that support development in these countries was pretty much the reason I left. I thought we're going to do really great work and to some extent on major infrastructure projects, I think these institutions do a good job. But in general understanding of how a community or a country should develop, I felt like we're not aligned. And so I left and I did work in other places, worked in South Asia, in other countries, and also a lot of focus on Afghanistan. Then recently more Turkey and then what.

Manav [00:11:34]:
Year were you like in the US.

Nasrat Khalid [00:11:36]:
So I came to the US in 2017 on a special immigrants visa. And since then I was like, you know, initially I consulted with the World bank and others, but then I was like, hey, the only way I think I can help these countries is to build my own platform, create the infrastructure and then scale that so we can go ahead and do better, more direct, rather than have political strings or, you know, a lot of bureaucracy involved in the process.

Manav [00:12:06]:
Great. So I want to like really touch on the marketplace and how it is a three way marketplace. And I just want to stress on the three way because it's challenging to build a three way marketplace. So can you talk about who are the three concerned parties involved in the marketplace and what's like the hardest part of building that three way marketplace?

Nasrat Khalid [00:12:26]:
Yeah, so E commerce has been really interesting. I think sort of the earliest version of the Internet was targeted for E commerce. So it's not a new sort of area. Think of like double sided marketplaces like Airbnb. You have host, you have a guest and they work together and figure out what the cost is how much they're going to pay, what the rules are, so on and so forth. Now you can't apply that in underdeveloped countries because of what I did mention. Problem number three in this case of digital literacy. Digital literacy means that even if you give the platform to somebody, they don't know how to use it because they don't know how to use a computer, a phone, they don't know English, and so on and so forth. So think of like going back to the example of the sixth generation carpet maker. They are busy making their carpets. That is what they do. And it takes a lot of time and effort to make the carpets physical with your hands. So they're not going to go and learn how to do search engine keywords or get really good photos of the products and keep talking to the customer. So we introduced the Atalan and the Atalan are heroes. So that's what makes the triple sided marketplace.

Manav [00:13:34]:
What does that mean in Arabic?

Nasrat Khalid [00:13:36]:
In Pashto it means heroes. Yeah. So heroes are the people and they work on both sides of a seal. The buy good and the do good. I can explain the buy good and the do good, but three sided marketplace means a, you have the producer of the item, the artisan, and then you have the person that is making the transaction possible. So taking the photos, the story, the videos, the products, and putting it into the platform, facilitating the transaction. And then you have the customer. So the three sides are the customer, the artisan and the hero, making the transaction possible.

Manav [00:14:09]:
Great. So I think when I, I open the app, the website, the platform is divided into multiple sections. So there is a section where you can just buy and sell goods. There's a section for crowdfunding, and then there's a section for donation. So how do you in your head like manage the different things? And can you talk a little bit about the for profit and then the nonprofit section as well?

Nasrat Khalid [00:14:29]:
Yeah. So looking into for instance, the buy good and the do good, it's important to take a step back and understand why this is all possible. Right. If you, why is it that you can't buy from the same artisan without a seal? And why it that you can't send humanitarian packages to these countries? It's because of the infrastructure. Right. So initially, for a very long time, all we did was create infrastructure. My main pain point was how can I be the artisan? How can I ship the product? How can the artisan without me working with them every day be able to. And that's the scale thing that we hopefully get into is how is that possible? So for four years we were really building infrastructure without thinking. We did have an early first market. We thought the artisan side is a really good market to get into because, you know, it's really untapped and it's really unfair in general. We sort of touched on that. So we built the infrastructure for a long time and then we deployed the buygood part of aseel and it was really doing well until Covid happened and then the planes were all stopped and sort of returning back from that. We wanted to test with Afghanistan because we know it's the hardest country that you can. It's a 1 out of 10 in that digital connectedness index that we sort of stuck. And our second country is Turkey, which is five out of 10. And all of these 4,600 developed countries that we'll go to will sort of mix between 1 to 10, probably not 10, but 1 to 7 in general. So we created the infrastructure then we created, we tested with bygood and then the government of Afghanistan collapsed and you could, you know, remember sort of seeing people hanging by the plane and you know, us withdrawing and things like that. Again, there's no planes and everything is sort of came to a halt. And we thought, why don't we, you know, it's a great opportunity for us to test the infrastructure again, see if this works. And so we did a spin off of Do Good. We came up with Dogood initially because there was no un, there was no major institutions. So we thought Dogood would be the way to go. And it really was. I mean, by now we've helped around half a million people. And that half a million people, you can track them through what we call the OMAID ID system. So when you talk about the infrastructure, what stops you? Fintech supply chain. Think of the enablers or the digital literacy. Then you have the identification. People don't have identification, so you can't scan them through. You know, are these bad guys? So we had to come up with our own infrastructure for identification. We call that omaid or Hope ID cards.

Manav [00:17:04]:
It's similar to, you know, Aadhaar ID in India.

Nasrat Khalid [00:17:07]:
I mean that's a government backed id. So this is.

Manav [00:17:09]:
You created your own.

Nasrat Khalid [00:17:10]:
Yeah, so and that's mostly biometric and biographic data. We do collect biographic data. So what's your name, what's your age, things like that. Where are you located? And then specifically we go to the poverty levels. So what is a person's income? If the income is less than $4 a day they are in our system, you know, sort of flagged and said, we need to help these people as soon as possible. Then we have the poverty, the poverty levels and food security levels. So specifically finding children, for example, that are malnourished. And without these, the infrastructure that we created for the ID cards, it would never be possible. So what I've realized in the last.

Manav [00:17:48]:
Six years is that backed by the.

Nasrat Khalid [00:17:50]:
Government of Afghan, nobody's backed. It's like my own system of ID card.

Manav [00:17:55]:
That's incredible.

Nasrat Khalid [00:17:56]:
Yeah, yeah.

Manav [00:17:58]:
It's like no one was doing it. So you took it as an undertaking.

Nasrat Khalid [00:18:02]:
I think that's what entrepreneurs are supposed to do. Right? I mean, if there is a problem and I can see, hey, if I'm going to give a food package, I need to know who the person is. And now again, the Umeda ID cards made something else possible that just doesn't exist in the world. When you give money to, say, UNICEF or somebody's campaign on GoFundMe, you don't really, really know where your money is going. I'm gonna say, I do a GoFundMe for $20,000 to support the conflict in Sudan. Now, your visibility of where the money went stops by me. You have to trust me that I will do the right thing and give the money to some organization. And we have to trust that organization. So with the ome IDs, what we enabled is proof of delivery for the first time. And that astonishes me. I was really happy that when we implemented that because when I do a package on a seal, I can select I a photo or a video of the delivery. And it's only possible because I know that the person has an Omega ID card. I can always go back and send them more things, hopefully until they become sustainable. And what I realized in the last six years is that if you create the infrastructure for these underdeveloped countries, you can do all kinds of magical things with it. And it is hard. It was hard. The fact that we did it for six years and there was a lot of people that I'm thankful to and I think I probably did like, you know, the demand of, hey, this is what we need to do. That's what we need to do. But the real work is done by the ASEEL team and volunteers and so on. So, yeah, with the Do Good, we're able to help a lot of people. And now we're sort of building those relationships with other NGOs, making them more effective by using this infrastructure to do good, which is their mission. So somebody wants to support children, somebody wants to end poverty, somebody wants to support, end hunger. Now they have a tool that they can use to deploy that rather than, you know, Save the Children as an ngo, is doing a lot of good work to support children. However, their expertise is not in logistics. They're not supposed to be handling shipments of medical items or food items. They should be focused on supporting children and understanding of what the state of malnutrition, for example, in a country is. And now with these tools, they are able to really take a step back, not worry about the logistics of it, and do their work better.

Manav [00:20:25]:
Great. So I think for people to understand a little bit better a seal is similar to doordash, where they have a buyer, seller, and like a person who delivers. So in this case, they have heroes whose job is to pick up the goods, deliver the goods. And I think the real value here that you've built, even in my opinion, even more than the software, is the infrastructure and the partnerships that are going to be coming in the next few years. I think the biggest criticism that people will have when talking about a seal is every marketplace comes with its fair share of privacy concerns or like scams. So what's your strategy to prevent any frauds, scam, any. Any of those kind of things?

Nasrat Khalid [00:21:04]:
Yeah, so I think sort of, you know, the fact that we're talking about transparency is also because we've been sort of the champions for it. Right. We have that big sticker everywhere we walk off, like, bring more transparency to the humanitarian space or bring more transparency to global commerce. And the fact that we're building like an ome, the ID card so you know who the family is. Right. And giving you full clarity or the ability to straight up talk to the vendor. Right. The person who is creating these art and products is taking us one step in the direction. So it's part of our DNA as a company to be transparent. And that has enabled us to do. To ask really hard questions. Right. The harder question is, hey, when there is a humanitarian emergency, we think that these international organizations will take care of it. We went in there and investigated. Well, I'm telling you, there is no tool that sort of tracks who the humanitarian package is going to. And you're supposed to do this program programming. You know, if we tell you about my experience of working with like these 10 years of international development major organizations, it's really big. We were going to help Afghanistan with poverty or hunger. It is $110 million project, and that's about that. That's the visibility that you get. And then every quarter you may get reports of like people supported 20,000. But you can't really dig deeper into that with us. You can really go down to the family timeline of where they came, where they are going. So I think eventually we will have a broad working group of a kind that looks into this and hopefully the DNA sort of that inception of putting transparency in there continues to evolve over time and we can change the entire space, bring a lot more clarity to people. So they start asking questions, I'm giving you the money. What are you going to do with it? Right. I'm buying this thing. Where did it come from? These are very important questions that we should be asking. There has been a lot of cases of like child. Absolutely. Labor looking at fraud and corruption at a really huge scales. And I think these technologies are going to enable us move that direction. And I will make sure that Aseel never gets to a point that it drops transparency as one of the main things that it should focus on.

Manav [00:23:26]:
One thing I'm bullish about Aseel is that timing is everything. Right. Remember when Webvan came out in 2002 it was a similar idea like Instacart, but it didn't do so well because the infrastructure was not there. But I think for Aseel, the timing now is good because as the younger generation is going to be taking over their family business, the family artisan business in Afghanistan or other countries, they are much more tech savvier. So they can easily upload the products on a seal, they can take better photos, they can, they know how to set up the store easily. So ideally I want to ask you like who is an ideal customer and who is an ideal supplier on a seal and if you have any stories that you can share like of someone before a seal and someone after a seal, like their life got transform. Like we've seen Etsy sellers like really blow up. So I want to like if you have any interesting stories about that.

Nasrat Khalid [00:24:18]:
So I think the trend is very interesting right now. Also on the more developed countries part, around 80% of young people professionals surveyed mentioned that they feel like they don't have a purpose. Right. And that's very, very important. And we see that around us and you know, people don't have a purpose. Depression levels are at all time high. We're all grapp with a very huge mental health crisis and this is only going to get bigger. I think looking at underdeveloped countries, you know, as a liability is the wrong approach. Instead they should be Looked into as a. As an opportunity to give meaning to other people's life. Every time we see somebody in an unfortunate position, I think our approach needs to change to that, to those people saying, hey, well, here's an opportunity to give somebody purpose in life so they can support. And we know that every time somebody supports somebody else, there is an element to it which is selfish, which is you want to feel good. That's why you support somebody else. So I think regardless of like, hey, a seal cuts the prices, you know, you get a carpet for two times less. The ability for you to buy from a woman, you know, elderly woman who is using her hands to create a handmade item. And you knowing that you can get in touch with them, you can get them, you know, custom orders with your name on it and on the product, it gives you the ability to feel good. And I think as we go forward, we sort of build the infrastructure, but we're not selling the infrastructure. Well, Christina in California is sort of our customer profile that we look at. And she doesn't care about the infrastructure, but she does care and knows that they have two, three children that without her support, they would have not done as good as they did when Christina supported them. And then imagine bringing all your friends into that and the amount of really good work we can do together, different campaigns and. And so on and so forth. I think on the underdeveloped countries part, you know, communities that we support, a lot of that mentality of, hey, let's outsource this to really big institutions doesn't work. Right. We know that by engaging everyday people from the US, from Canada, Australia, Japan, Europe, into these missions will make it possible for. We have a saying in Farsi. Khatra katra, darya mesha. It means small, you know, drops make a river. And so rather than relax, relying on the World Food Program to end hunger, parts of it, we might actually do it.

Manav [00:26:56]:
Yeah, I love that. I do want to jump into some juicy numbers which the audience came for. I think I want to give the listeners, if you can talk a little bit about your. How much money have you raised in grants? I don't know if you're going to reveal the revenue numbers, but I want you to share some juicy numbers. How big is the team? Like, if you can.

Nasrat Khalid [00:27:14]:
Yeah. So in terms of how we built the initial. And that helps that my background is with international development agencies and so on. The first time we went to create the handmade part of ASEEL, it was called Afghan Artisan Onboarding Program. 1 It was a $60,000 grant from USAID through a contractor that they were working with. I were really happy that, you know, people trusted us with that, and that sort of enabled this. And then when the. The government of Afghanistan collapsed, we started with a decentralized aid pilot one. And so you can see the theme for us is to do pilots and then keep building on those p and bring different grant makers and organizations to take part in that in those pilots. So the decentralized aid idea was to enable everyday people in everyday shops to participate in getting the food security levels lower. And so that was a $700,000 sort of grant partnership, you can say. And then the second one was decentralized aid pilot 2, which was pretty decent grant. In total, I think we've done around $1.1 million in partnership and also grants. And then now we're building a decentralized aid pilot three, which is going to enable 20,000 families to get sustained amount of support. And that we're designing to be a $10 million project with different players coming in and working through this. So you might be thinking, okay, decentralized aid pilot 1, 2, 3. Where is is this going? Right? With this third pilot, we're trying to figure out what does it take to get a country that is in a deep sort of red humanitarian state and then take that to a yellow. So it sounds like we're really going to be able to use the entire community, young people, local shops, with the money that we get from other places. And if we were able to get, for example, Afghanistan, we've also responded to the earthquake in Turkey, and we're going to expand into other countries. But my main mission is, hey, we were able to go into a country that has a 1 out of 10 infrastructure, and we were able to get that country from a red to yellow and hopefully to a green, that gives us hope to sort of end global hunger. If we can study where the entire world is, which countries are sort of bringing in a lot of weight into the hunger state of the world, and then we can deploy decentralized technology. I mean, look at. I have a number for you. In New York. Every day there is 3 million food deliveries, right? Wow, 3 million. Now, you know, as soon as we start thinking about feeding other people, it seems like that is a very hard thing. But it's mainly because we rely on these international organizations. We're not relying on Uber eats everyday people economies of scale. And so, yeah, I think that sort of decentralized aid pilot 3 is going to enable us to sort of set the stage for that red to yellow. And then we will keep building on that until we get for instance Afghanistan to agree. And if we can do that, we will made a case to end global hunger. And crazy as that sounds, it is possible based on what I'm seeing with my work in the last six years. Absolutely is. So I'm based in dc, I have a team in Turkey, in Istanbul and we have a team in Afghanistan and then a bunch of other young people who are working with us freelance from other places as well. In total our team is 60 people full time. And as you can imagine being a startup founder, everybody needs to be hands on, everybody needs to do their daily updates. We have a Slack channel for that. Yeah, we're going forward as if we are another tech company based in Silicon Valley with a big global presence.

Manav [00:31:03]:
I wanted to say kudos for getting the grants because for people who have never applied for grants, it's the hardest thing you could do because the government is extremely slow and it's highly competitive as well to get a grant. So great job on getting the grant. Let's do like a mock up. I'm an investor and you're pitching me a sale and Nazareth is raising a seed round right now. So what am I investing in and where will be the funds allocated to take a seal to be the biggest marketplace like Etsy for these underdeveloped and developing countries?

Nasrat Khalid [00:31:35]:
Well, I think the major reason why we don't invest in underdeveloped countries a lot is because of the risk. And so I knew stepping into this that I need some kind of a de risking mechanism here to make everyday investors comfortable, you know, VCs or others who are used to, you know, investing in products that are for the US to start with. So the de risking part of that is that the infrastructure is built. So what do I want to do now? I want to design the product as seal to be used by everyone in developed countries to find a purpose. Now the way that the product is right now is sort of. You mentioned that it looks really good and all that, but to me it seems like it's just the bare bones, right? The bare bones that makes you buy something from a country like Afghanistan and you can see that it works, the bare bones to give a pack package and receive a video proof of delivery. Now that I think changes people's mindsets. But how can we design the platform to be used by millions of people to find purpose and do good? I think that's my next step. So I didn't really look into sort of, you know, making a lot of money, pushing through sort of specific revenue targets. We did have it, but it was mostly about building the infrastructure. So congrats to the team on building the infrastructure. And whoever comes in now is already de risked in terms of, hey, does this even work? Of course it works. There's a product. You have got over $3.5 million worth of sales done and you have operators that are passionate for six years in building this. So from now on it's all about bringing in the every everyday people. And how do we do that is a very interesting question that we can talk about.

Manav [00:33:24]:
One suggestion I was telling Nasrat off the record was to launch in India. And I feel like India is an ever growing country, like really, really massive population and really young people. I think it has the highest young people population in the world right now. So I was recommending Nasra to launch in India. What are your plans with India? Well, first off, I've spent even Pakistan as well. So India and Pakistan, so sort of.

Nasrat Khalid [00:33:49]:
That India, Pakistan, Bangladesh is India is up top my list because I lived for a while. I know Hindi probably, you know, I think 80% you would know, you know, Mujendi Atih Lake. When I talk, it's very clear that this guy is not an Indian. You know, I love India. I've been all around the country. I understand, for instance, the artisans in Rajasthan, they sort of go through the same problem. You may think they are helped because India is a big hub in technology, a leader. But realistically, there's not much work done for those artisans. And I also think in addition, addition to that, while India has been a country that has had a rapid growth, there are still inequalities in the country. And I have seen that by working in the slums in India where we would do, for example, poverty analysis, got a lot of friends in there as well. So I feel like once we're done with this testing in Afghanistan, in Turkey, and we have the customer side of this open to everyday Americans and Australians and so sort of India then becomes a hybrid for us. It's a pickup and a drop off country. We can buy handmade things from there, but we can also sell it to people in India who have that buying power now. So I'm really bullish on India. And it's in our top six countries list that we want to go to. But we know that the amount of investment required to go there to cover sort of those different regions is going to be a little higher, harder for us now. And it's the perfect time. We're raising around, we're thinking of expanding. So we're going to consider that and I hope to be reached out by a few people who can help in the process. Because Aseel in general, it's a community led effort. If you think of like when the government of Afghanistan collapsed, I think everyone came together. You know, Americans who had been there, Afghans in country, you know, Afghan Americans that I'm really proud of and I consider myself as one now. It was a whole community effort. People create cameras, campaigns, distribute them by people in those countries. So I would love to engage more with my Indian friends and hopefully we launch there soon.

Manav [00:36:03]:
Amazing. Yeah. So I think NASRAD has done a great job answering all my questions. Last thing I want to touch on, which we haven't talked about in this podcast, is you've been a PR genius. I see a lot of companies struggle with pr and you got featured by the Time magazine. You got. You were in TechCrunch. So tell me how you were able to get featured in all these platforms. But also I want you to also talk about how were you able to acquire sellers and buyers on the platform initially? What was your marketing engine? Were you running ads? Were you mainly reliant on pr? How did you acquire customers?

Nasrat Khalid [00:36:38]:
So I think one of the things about my journey, and I'm lucky in that way, that I didn't go through sort of the traditional route you study, I guess if you look at the Silicon Valley side, you study in Stanford and you go to YC and that's your company and you build it. I grew up as a refugee, couldn't study. So my route of everything is pretty different. It's very organic. I think in terms of being there with different PR agencies, a lot of them sort of reach out to us because what we are doing is very different. We don't really follow. We study a lot. I am a reading machine. I read all day long, I listen to books all day long. But by the end of it, we do what we think is, is the right thing. So, for instance, we didn't really position ourselves for funding rounds. I don't know a lot of VCs. What we have done is somebody's shown interest, we've talked to them, we've created a pitch. If it works, it works. It doesn't. It doesn't. Right. What is important is to build the infrastructure. And so that's what we have been doing. And now it's the first time that I feel like, hey, naturally speaking after all these years, we should go and do fundraising. And so I'm doing fundraising now. And in that natural flow of how it should be in terms of getting customers, I think these geographies that we're targeting are not available online in the usual sense. So you can't go to Etsy and find a vendor in Afghanistan because it doesn't exist. Right. You will be able to buy from other people who are in America who have bought it from them. But people like to buy directly. That's the transparency part there. So when we did launch our Afghanistan, my best friends have became all the Afghanistan, Afghan Americans, and we did launch Turkey. Then I have best friends who are all Turkish. And I think as we go to more countries, the organic growth of this and the word of mouth is just, you know, an Afghan American who's never lives in Ohio picks up the phone and he calls his cousin. He's like, did you see this app that's coming in from Afghanistan? Now they can connect to their roots. It's been a lot of that. And then I've received a lot of support from people who are genuinely interested in doing good. They think there is not a lot to be be monetized by doing good, which has been the trend in the past. But I have this Purpose Economy book that I'm reading, and it says that in the past, it was, you know, the agriculture revolution and economy, and then you had industrial and you have the information. The future is going to be the purpose economy. And so if that is the case, we are well positioned to be the leaders of the purpose economy because this entire platform is built, Built for a purpose. And so the. The returns on that are crazy. I would say so. Yeah. I hope I've answered your question.

Manav [00:39:26]:
Oh, you did. So I really want to thank Nasrad because he came all the way here and he explained everything. Nasrad is one of an exceptional social entrepreneur who's building something cool, but it also has a great purpose and has real world ramifications of solving world hunger and also helping the underserved people. And we always need more entrepreneurs like Nasrad. So I'm happy you came on the show and I'm looking forward to be part of your journey and seeing how a seal grows in the coming years. Thank you, Nazrat.

Nasrat Khalid [00:39:58]:
Awesome. Thank you so much.