weDevs, a local tech firm, experiences success thanks to their novel creation, Dokan
When we see success stories of freelancers roping in thousands of dollars into the national exchequer, we beam with pride. When a full-fledged IT firm ropes in international clients, that is when we really know that ‘Made in Bangladesh’ is not something that can only be attached to the RMG industry products, but every product we make. Enter weDevs and Md Nizam Uddin. He is the co-founder and CEO of weDevs. He is an ambitious entrepreneur and a team leader who likes to use his entrepreneurial skills to create things that help people. He is involved with a number of startups that use technology to improve people’s lives and humanity.
Whenever you check into an ecommerce website, your shopping senses prowl upon the brain, clicking on the ‘Add to Cart’ option. “We develop and sell plugins for WordPress software,’ says Nizam, ‘we specialize in developing some of the unique WordPress plugins out there. As of now, we develop and sell three distinctive WordPress plugins — namely Dokan, WP User Frontend, and WP Project Manager — that cater to different kinds of clients. Because of the uniqueness of our products, we have managed to attract clients from all over the world.”
So what is the reason behind their success? Giving away freebies, ‘freemium’ being one of their success mantra. “Our products are available in the free version,” he says, ‘when users are happy with the product or they need further features that are only available in the pro version, they can upgrade. At present we have 200k+ free users from all over the world. As long as the developers keep the international clients in mind when developing the product, clients from any country will be likely to purchase.
Another reason behind their success is their creativity. Nizam mentioned that only a handful of Dokan users are local clients. We made a world-class solution for multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace and named it Dokan — to promote the Bangla word and Bangladesh along the way. For businesses in other countries, they are using Dokan extensively mostly because there is no true alternative to it if all feature sets are taken into account. That is why Dokan remains our signature product to date.’
Response so far has been tremendous. “We equipped Dokan plugin with features that are pretty much non-existent with other plugins, which made it exclusive.” For example, you can find many plugins that give the functionality of developing a marketplace with multiple sellers, but they don’t have the feature of managing the whole marketplace from the front-end of the website.”
But just like any other company, challenges have always been part of their journey thus far. “If you talk to 10 software companies in Bangladesh, I’m pretty sure that at least 9 of them will say that the payment gateway is the biggest problem. Other than that, the environment of doing business in Bangladesh is favorable. ICT-related services are exempted from tax, living cost in Bangladesh is significantly low compared to the first world countries, which make it possible to spend less on human resources. The internet services in the country has become faster and more stable compared to the previous years which has resulted in better communication with overseas clients. There are fewer challenges today and the situation is getting better with the government’s ongoing support.”
Bangladeshi coders have great potential. Majority of developers are self-taught. Coders in Bangladesh are extremely passionate about what they do and they are keen to learn new things. Such curiosity is seen in many seminars, expositions and developer workshops that take place in various venues throughout the year.
These coders — whether experienced or newbies — are geared for success mostly because they go through difficulty when working. Despite the ongoing success in the country’s IT sector, there are still many obstacles that they need to go through like the lack of a proper payment gateway.
Nevertheless, Nizam is optimistic about the future. ‘Our next plan is to create an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that will cater to small and medium businesses. According to statistics from United States Census Bureau, three quarters of all U.S. business firms have no payroll. We are working on a new ERP system that will be based on WordPress — thus making it the first of its kind. 10 years from now, weDevs will bring millions of small business online through WP ERP and it will become a billion dollar company, InSha’Allah.’ We can only wish them all the best in their future endeavours.
