People laughed when he started an e-ticketing startup in Pakistan. Now it’s the go-to place for movie, bus, and event tickets

Little did Faizan Aslam know when he took his young bride to a movie that the experience would lead him to his startup, BookMe.

Aslam lived in Sahiwal, a small town in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The nearest good cinema hall is in Lahore, a two-hour drive away, and it’s almost always crowded. So his wife and he set out well in advance to catch the movie on time. Alas, when they got there, all the seats were already taken. This happened twice, and Faizan, a software engineer, decided to do something about it.

The solution he came up with was BookMe, an online ticket booking portal for movies, events, and bus services. Accessible via a website, an Android app, or even SMS, BookMe was the first of its kind in Pakistan.

BookMe was founded in November 2013 and incubated in Plan9, Pakistan’s first and largest tech incubator. The site launched in March. Now in residence at the PlanX tech accelerator, BookMe gets around 350 orders during weekdays, and almost twice as many at the weekends.

Friction in the fledgling ecosystem

When Tech in Asia first wrote about BookMe, it was little more than a month old.

Then, the biggest challenge before the startup was to figure out how to collect the payments for tickets sold online.

Electronic ticketing is still new in Pakistan, as is ecommerce in general. Credit card penetration is low; internet connectivity is patchy; and net-banking is tough. “Most vendors were using zero or outdated software to manage their operations. So we had a tough time bringing them on board. With no online payment facilities, one has to collect cash against the e-ticket. That’s really hard. But that proved to be an opportunity in disguise. We solved that problem by bringing banks and telecom companies on board,” Aslam tells Tech in Asia.

Like any other startup, BookMe too made its share of mistakes. They bit off more than they could chew at the outset. The opportunity that Aslam had stumbled upon was huge. BookMyShow, a similar ticketing site in neighbouring India, for instance, raised US$25 million from investors, who valued the site at INR 10 billion (US$166 million). It started out with movie ticketing, and quickly expanded to cover sporting events and music concerts. The coup d’etat was becoming the ticketing portal for the Indian Premier League (IPL) – cricket is, after all, a religion in India.

Seeing what was happening across the border, Aslam piled his plate too high at the start. “We tried to jump into all possible ticketing opportunities, like events, plays, sports, and so on,” he recalls. But soon he realized it wasn’t a good idea to spread out so thin in the early phase. “If we were to focus on just movies and bus tickets, that would be more than enough.” So, BookMe trimmed itself to those two categories.

“We also thought our free ERP [enterprise resource planning] was the best out there and so every company would replace their system with ours. But soon we realized that it was not going to happen. So we came up with some really cool ways to integrate our system with theirs,” Aslam adds.

Currently, BookMe’s revenue model is a 10 percent cut of the ticket price.

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