Photo: Ashraf Uddin Apu
What led you to move to Green and Red technologies and leave your previous job?
Before joining G&R, I worked with Qubee. I decided to join Qubee to get a little taste of the corporate world. As I understood the basics and complications of brands, I wanted to experiment a little more with my career and jump into online local startups. G&R, as a product, had the right potential to fuel my ambition and hence I moved.
What do you find most interesting while working in Green & Red Technologies?
The first thing that strikes me is the culture here. G&R being a local tech startup has the interesting culture of binding people together, starting from the CEO to the executives. There’s a lot of positive energy while we casually brainstorm and discuss new ideas which keeps things interesting. Also, we are very active on sports and social media. What’s more is that we give our employees the opportunity to pursue their own projects while they are at work.
Being the head of sales and marketing, what is the biggest challenge you face? How do you tackle it?
Well, coming from Qubee to G&R the first thing I was concerned with was the level of literacy in the agencies. Clients and advertisers knew the concept of digital media but did not have an in-depth knowledge to actually reap the benefits of this medium. So instead of promoting G&R, I tried to spread knowledge among people about online media. Another challenge was to make people understand that G&R is not an agency but a technology company which understood online media very well and knew how to turn clients into stakeholders who understand the ecosystem better.
What are the unique selling points of your company and how is it different from the rest?
G&R is a technology company and not an agency which is a unique selling point in it itself. We are the only one that serves ads with a technology that explains so much about the user. This helps advertisers learn a lot about their target market. In a nutshell, we serve over twenty million ads a day and we can reach more than eight million people on a weekly basis. So it justifies us being the largest online digital marketplace at the moment in our country.
What would you say is your driving force?
I used to be an introvert. Coming from a middle class family and my father being in the army, I lived inside a cocoon and was unaware of how the world worked. Therefore, I feel my driving force came from the tonnes of exposure I got later in life. With diverse experiences, I gathered more knowledge of the world outside. Finally, switching myself to be a ‘yes man’ in everything also worked wonders for me.
Apart from that, you are actively involved with many training program, workshops and events such as Tedx. Tell us more about these events and what you want to achieve through these programs?
These are my personal hobbies and my involvements in these programs have no connection with my job at G&R and Genex. Basically, Tedx is a community where we bring in interesting people every year and come up with ideas in a diversified form. We try implementing these ideas in bringing a change in the society. Tedx was organised independently by volunteers and wasn’t funded by any big sponsor. However, Tedx enabled a platform for the crowd to listen to people’s unheard stories and get inspired in the process. I have also been involved with Google Business Group for the last couple of years. In the last two years, we have been positioned number 1 in ranking amongst other Google Business Groups in the world. Since I am involved with this community, I am being able to represent a part of what Ted is doing in Bangladesh. As a social connector, it’s my responsibility to help people connect through a platform.
What do you personally want the company to achieve in the next few years?
Given a couple of years, G&R should become a leading technology company with multiple products that are helping local content developers earn money and turn one of the fastest growing content platform in Bangladesh mobile. This will help those content providers monetise them as well and eventually help advertisers reach millions of Bangladeshis using mobile devices.