In Bangladesh, as across the world, millions of people log into Facebook every day.
But rather than looking for escape from the stresses of the workplace, for many of those people Facebook is the workplace.
That's because, behind a screen of cat memes, is a thriving network of thousands of entrepreneurs using the social media platform to take advantage of the country's rapidly growing e-commerce scene.
Low start-up costs and an established user base mean that Facebook is an obvious choice for small, local merchants to reach wider, increasingly international, consumers beyond their traditional market.
Indeed, today, more than 8,000 of the country's online retailers, selling clothing to cosmetics, run through Facebook, according to the e-Commerce Association of Bangladesh.
ShopUp
Afeef Zaman, Siffat Sarwar and Ataur Chowdhury, co-founders of ShopUp.
The difficulty for those entrepreneurs, however, is gaining access to the capital to build up their stock and serve their new, enlarged audience. Though Bangladesh has an established microloan system — loans specifically for small entrepreneurs in less developed economies — it's hampered by cumbersome assessment processes and high interest rates.
That's where Afeef Zaman, Siffat Sarwar and Ataur Chowdhury come in.
The trio of twenty-somethings have created ShopUp, a platform designed to automate the credit assessment process for small business owners, cutting wait times by weeks and reducing interest rates from 18-20 percent to 3-5 percent.
That also means slashing minimum loans from $2,500 to $300 and tie-in periods from one year to three months — a major win for fledgling entrepreneurs with less money to commit.
"The problem was not with default rates," 26-year-old Zaman told CNBC Make It. In fact, microlenders enjoy some of the lowest default rates in the world. BRAC, the world's largest non-government development organization, enjoys a repayment rate of 98 percent.
"It's that the existing methods for assessing microloans are too lengthy and costly, meaning many businesses struggle to get up and running" he said.
While ShopUp doesn't provide the loans itself, its algorithms mean that more microlenders can assess more loans more quickly — something that Zaman described as such a "burning problem" for BRAC that they signed up to work with ShopUp in just 35 minutes.
In addition to helping with financing, ShopUp provides technical and business support to help small business owners get up and running on Facebook and other social platforms. It also works with DHL to automate the delivery process for domestic and international sales.
That means more people will be able to build online businesses, which is vital for a country in which more than 55 percent of people are self-employed, according to data aggregator IndexMundi.
“For a lot of people, entrepreneurship is a dream. For people in Bangladesh, it’s a reality," said Zaman, who noted that the country lacks the levels of multinational employers enjoyed by many other economies.
ShopUp believes their platform will be especially game-changing for Bangladeshi women. Currently, less than 30 percent of Bangladesh’s workforce is female, according to the International Labour Organization, and fewer still are business owners.
