Most advice about starting an eCommerce business in Pakistan is written by people who started with capital. This case is useful precisely because it wasn't.
In 2021 Mustansar Hussain was working a factory floor in Gujranwala for somewhere around Rs 18,000 to 20,000 a month. A friend mentioned people were earning by selling SIM cards on TikTok Live. His first sale took about three and a half minutes and earned Rs 1,500 in commission — more than a full eight-hour shift. That single comparison is the entire origin of the company.
The short version
He didn't wait for good equipment, a brand identity, or capital. He started with a borrowed formula and a cheap phone, reinvested almost two-thirds of his first payout back into stock, and built a rule that every unit must clear Rs 1,000 of profit after every cost. The discipline, not the virality, is what made it survive.
The build, step by step
The first batch failed. He tried making the hair oil himself and the formulation wasn't right. What eventually worked was a recipe from a hakeem — one passed down from an Indian hakeem to the man's grandfather — refined through repetition.
He filmed on a Rs 17,000 phone. No camera, no experience on screen. He chased production channels in Lahore and Gujranwala hoping for a break that never came the way he expected, then borrowed friends' iPhones instead, asking them not to delete footage because he had no storage of his own.
The first real click was not original footage. It was a reused reel with his own voice-over added on top, cut in CapCut, which he taught himself by trial and error — often re-recording a thirty-second voice-over for two hours because a passing street vendor ruined the take. That post reached roughly four million views and generated about 1,500 orders in a single day, against a starting stock of fifty units.
The first units shipped with no sticker. He had negotiated his way into buying just fifty bottles from a wholesaler who normally sold cartons of 150. The branded sticker would have cost Rs 3,500, which he did not have. So Pakistan's most-copied oil brand launched in plain brown courier flyers with no branding at all. The first order didn't arrive until nearly five months after launch, with the unsold stock sitting visibly in a corner of the house the whole time.
The decision that actually mattered
His first cash-on-delivery payment was around Rs 21,000. He put roughly Rs 13,000 of it straight back into raw material for the next batch.
I have watched a lot of first-time sellers get their first real COD payout and spend it on themselves. It is the most common way a promising store dies in month three. Reinvestment discipline at that exact moment is the difference between a business and an episode.
The unit economics
Organic growth eventually plateaued around 1,200 to 1,300 orders a month. Paid advertising across Meta, Instagram and TikTok pushed monthly volume to roughly 11,000. Ad spend now runs at about 23 to 25% of revenue.
Behind every price sits a hard rule: at least Rs 1,000 of clear profit must remain on every unit after ad spend, courier and packaging. That is the single most important sentence in this case study.
Most Pakistani sellers price off competitors and then discover their margin at the end of the month, by which point the money is gone. Pricing backwards from a fixed profit floor — deciding what you must keep, then working out what you can afford to spend — is what lets you scale spend aggressively without scaling losses.
Influencer marketing at zero cost
Long before any paid campaign, he was securing placements from creators who normally charge substantial fees, for free. The method was not a pitch deck. It was short, personal, respectful outreach — approaching a creator as he would a sister and asking if she would try the product.
One creator with around three million followers, early in her own career at the time, reportedly cried at being addressed that way and has promoted the brand organically ever since, always sent product free. His summary of why it works: speak from the heart and it reaches the heart; speak from the tongue and it only reaches the ear.
I would put it more prosaically. Transactional outreach gets transactional results — one post, paid for, forgotten. Relationship outreach compounds. In a market this relationship-driven, that gap is enormous.
Honesty as positioning
The brand's pitch line is blunt: use it once, and if your hair isn't visibly better after a single wash, throw the bottle in the bin. He is equally direct about what hair oil cannot do — it strengthens and nourishes existing hair, it does not regrow hair on a bald scalp, and any brand claiming otherwise is lying.
His read on the Pakistani market is that the bar is lower than founders think. Unlike a saturated market where brands compete on incremental features, here the thing to clear is simply delivering exactly what you promised in the video — and most sellers still fail at it. Being honest is not a moral flourish in this market. It is an available competitive advantage that almost nobody has taken.
Customer service: quality over volume
Support reps are told to fully answer twenty inbound messages rather than half-answer fifty, on the logic that eighteen well-handled conversations convert better than fifty rushed ones. Every message that lands on WhatsApp — even a stray "hello" — is treated as a live customer. Average cost per converted order through WhatsApp follow-up runs around Rs 10 to 15, against paid acquisition costs many multiples of that.
That is the cheapest revenue in most Pakistani stores and it is almost universally under-resourced.
If you are starting from zero
- Start before it is perfect. Perfection arrives through repetition, not planning.
- Set a profit floor per unit and price backwards from it.
- Reinvest the first payout. All of the temptation is in the other direction.
- Do outreach as a person, not as a brand.
- Answer fewer messages properly rather than more messages badly.
- Aim for what a modest job pays first. Three orders a day is likely better than most salaries — start there and let it compound.
If you are earlier than this and want a structured path from first product to first hundred orders, I have written a full guide to starting an eCommerce business in Pakistan.
