I was born and brought up in Dhaka. I graduated from North South University at the end of 2015 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering.
I have always been a curious child. While I always wanted to do something that could have an impact, I was not a very good student academically. Towards the end of university, I started applying for jobs and got selected for one of the top-rated software companies in the country. But it took them almost 6 months to finish the recruitment process. That’s about two semesters for me (I applied in the 10th semester). I realized that although it was okay for me since I was still a student, it has to be very frustrating for those who genuinely need a job.
I eventually turned down the job offer and started Unigigg – a career readiness and job application platform with a vision to bring down recruitment time and clear up the communication process. I stepped into my entrepreneurship journey with unigigg with zero industry knowledge and zero funding. While doing unigigg, I got an offer from a family friend to help him build a motorcycle taxi company which was eventually named AmarBike. Since I needed funding to keep unigigg afloat, I joined Amarbike. [At Amarbike] I realized that location is an important aspect that no one was trying to fix and get a grip on. We conducted a small research on it and figured out that in early 2017 delivery men were wasting 5000 hours a day finding addresses and calling people for addresses.
The problem looked legit so I pitched to my co-founders Sadman and Reedwan, both are my friends and both are engineers. They hopped in and barikoi started.
We gave the name ‘barikoi’ as ‘bari koi?’ is one of the most used questions in Bangladesh and we planned to answer it more accurately than anyone else.
Excerpts are from “Founder at Work: An Interview with Al-Amin Sarker Tayef, Founder and CEO, Barikoi published in Future Startup, on March 20, 2020, written by Ruhul Kader.
