Started while studying; Tk 18 lakh invested in a Jashore software firm with 23 staff

According to a BSS report, in 2015, while studying electrical and electronic engineering at a private university in Dhaka, a young man from Sharsha upazila in Jashore decided to build a career in information technology. He first opened an e-commerce site selling various products, and that was the start of his software company. In 2017, when the Software Technology Park opened in Jashore, he came back to his home district, enrolled for a master's in computer science at Jashore University of Science and Technology, and took an allotment of 1,140 square feet in the park. He moved the Dhaka company to Jashore. So far Tk 18 lakh has been invested in it. The firm now does software development, networking and data work and employs 23 IT staff; he expects the headcount to grow several times over. At the start, his father and the rest of the family did not want him to go into business; he later convinced them. In his view the big challenges for young founders are raising funds, winning customers, building skills and operating costs. Competition in local and global markets is fierce, which makes winning customers hard, and banks impose many limits on IT financing. He wants easy-term bank loans and tax and VAT relief until a set level of growth is reached.