Four Lessons for Launching a Social Enterprise

(Illustration by Marina Muun) 

On November 28, 2017, the day we launched Mauqa Online (pronounced “mocha”), I (Muhammad) found myself knocking at the door of a posh Islamabad home and proceeding to iron a mountain of dress shirts, one by one, for more than two hours. The employer raised an eyebrow as she ushered me inside—I didn’t match the profile of typical domestic help in Pakistan. But we had received our first order for service, and it was proving more difficult than expected to build our workforce. On that day, I was the Mauqa workforce.

Mauqa Online is a social enterprise in Pakistan that offers pathways to employment for uneducated, low-income workers—especially illiterate women—by providing on-demand domestic helpers for services like housecleaning, babysitting, cooking, and elderly care. Almost every middle- and upper-class Pakistani household employs domestic help. But the ability to book and pay for verified and trained helpers through the click of a button was wildly new. By disrupting the traditional way of finding household help, my cofounder and wife, Suniya Sadullah Khan, and I believed that we could empower women, improve transparency and safety in the domestic labor market, and increase household incomes to provide a foothold out of generational poverty.

When we expanded Mauqa’s services from Islamabad to the much bigger city of Lahore in November 2019, it prompted reflection. While there is still a lot that we don’t know, we are keenly aware of several early mistakes. There is no universal path for social entrepreneurship, but sharing our lessons may help the next wave of leaders seeking to change the status quo for social good.

The Decision Makers

If we are ever crazy enough to start another social venture, we would do many things differently.

Lesson 1: We would not discount the friction presented by tradition and would approach decision makers more quickly. We anticipated that Mauqa would encounter skepticism from those paying for the service, given the trust required to welcome a stranger into one’s home. In fact, customer demand hasn’t been a problem. Paradoxically, the real challenge has been building a team of people to take these jobs—whom we call “helpers”—despite the abject poverty of their surroundings and their families’ desperate need of income.

When we spoke with potential helpers, many quickly said yes to the promise of a job with flexibility to continue caring for their own families. But many hires were no-shows. We subsequently learned that these women often met resistance from the patriarch of their family (usually their father-in-law). We were accused of running a prostitution den, pelted with stones, and blamed for ruining cultural values.

We tried various outreach strategies and messages, and took too long to figure out that we needed to seek out those who were key decision makers, even if we didn’t endorse the outsized power they wielded. It wasn’t as much about getting them to change as about recognizing and overcoming our own biases. For Mauqa to succeed, we needed to speak respectfully with the family patriarch, hear his concerns, and seek his blessing. We discovered that inviting his input on work hours, transportation options, and pickup locations acknowledged his role and preserved his need to feel respected, while also creating space for women to enter the workforce, usually for the first time in their lives.

We continue to calibrate the compromise between patriarchal control and women’s empowerment. Currently, all of Mauqa’s female helpers act as willing partners in engaging their family patriarch because it creates unprecedented independence for them to work outside of the home.

Lesson 2: When at a fork in the road, just move. A learning mindset enables quicker decision-making. Entrepreneurs often have to make decisions without having adequate data. In such situations, it is tempting to delay action and search for nonexistent proof. Reframing these decisions by asking, “Which path will enable greater learning?” yields better results than fixating on the probability of success. When we got too attached to our preconceived ideas, we got stuck recirculating the same approach, or stalled entirely, thereby blocking opportunities for critical learning.

We didn’t always suffer this problem. For example, the month before our official launch under the Mauqa name, we ran a small advertisement in social media to test the demand for temporary household help. Running a short trial under a different name alleviated some stress about the risks of failure. People responded with interest, and proof of client demand advanced the next steps in building our supply of helpers.

We have developed several rules of thumb for maintaining this learning mindset against the paralysis of rumination. First, we ask ourselves if the decision is easily reversible or not. It’s a waste of time to agonize over decisions that can be tested quickly and easily reversed. Second, we create hypotheses and then design small tests to learn as quickly as possible. We set a specific date to take stock of what we learned and incorporate that learning into the next steps we take. Third, we use ready-made solutions to engage and get feedback from our users before building out custom tools. At Mauqa, we used Facebook Messenger chatbots, Google Docs, and Typeform, among other tools, to cobble together low-cost prototypes. We found early on that running back-end processes manually helped us understand all the steps, information, resources, and talent needed. Fourth, we define how small experiments relate to our broader goal. Breaking bigger problems into smaller pieces aids learning and lends a sense of progress.

Lesson 3: Race to show product market fit, and then make a big effort to raise twice what you think you need. Everyone says fundraising is hard and it will take a long time. For some reason, we didn’t think it would be challenging for Mauqa. We may have suffered the hubris of Muhammad’s recently minted master’s degree or been enamored of the promise of impact investing to pour resources into places that were too daunting for traditional investment. We also waited too long to feel confident that we had a fundable idea. In retrospect, we should have realized that our model worked when dozens of customers kept coming back, and a handful of helpers engaged productively with our platform, doubled their family incomes, and referred their friends. We had validation of Mauqa’s value to our customers and helpers, but we were too slow in making the case for the funding we needed to grow rapidly once we knew it worked.

If we ever launch a social enterprise again, we will cultivate relationships sooner with more potential funders. It took more than a year and a half of courtship and negotiation to raise the funds for Mauqa’s growth, and when we finally signed a contract, months passed before any funding reached our account.

We also found that some investors were hesitant to fund a venture in Pakistan. If given another chance, we would be more thoughtful about legal structuring and try harder to anticipate possible changes in the regulatory landscape, especially in an emerging market, where deals can take twice as long to come through.

We advise getting your fundraising pitch and support materials ready as soon as you have proof of product-market fit and get over insecurities about asking for money. We’ve realized that funding enables everything we care about—the increases in family income and women’s empowerment—to happen. As we have built Mauqa’s leadership team and grown to care about each of our helpers, our confidence in the financial and social value that Mauqa is creating compels us to get out there, tell our story, and make our case. Growing into that confidence took time, and social entrepreneurs need to get there as fast as they can.

Lesson 4: Beware the allure of “heropreneurship.” Publicity in service of the social enterprise’s mission is good. Publicity in service of ego is deadly. Our advice to downplay your own personal brand may feel jarring to some readers in the era of social media. But we have seen that our personas as founders can outgrow our competence. Though it’s easy to create vanity metrics out of social media, and some funders may like those metrics, they rarely correlate with impact.

Mauqa’s first website had a photo and story about us on the front page. The Stanford Graduate School of Business published a profile story on its website, and a Forbes article lent credibility with potential partners. That early coverage was helpful as we worked to build trust in the idea of Mauqa, but it also distracted. As soon as the Mauqa brand could stand on its own, we relegated that photo and story to an obscure “About Us” page. We want the work to speak for itself.

We’ve also found that a measure of personal anonymity can be very helpful in the early stages of building a venture. Things fail, ideas falter, and prototypes break. Protecting our privacy helped protect our agility to learn, iterate, and pivot. We’ve seen social entrepreneurs who tied their personal identities too tightly to their early articulation of their visions, and how that can be a barrier to changing in ways that might better support learning and ultimately better serve the mission.

Tie Everything to Mission

Turning Mauqa from an idea into a living, breathing organization powered by our talented team and dedicated helpers has brought us desperate lows and splendid highs. It would be a disservice to the women who gain agency and power through Mauqa to keep the lessons from our lows to ourselves.

If we were to do it again, every message would have to tie in to our mission. Nowadays when we consider accepting an interview, posting on social media, or writing an article, we ask ourselves: How will it advance the mission? Will it bring in new customers, recruit and retain helpers, and attract funders? How much time will this effort take away from Mauqa’s core work?

The COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for social enterprises, including our organization. We contracted operations to keep helpers at home during shelter in place and lost all earned revenue. Surviving has been possible only because we continued to adapt, engage with decision makers who could help us define next steps, and cultivate a wider circle of funders, having learned from our earlier mistakes.

Read more stories by Muhammad Mustafa, Suniya Sadullah Khan 
 & Amanda Greco.