National Science and Technology Park organised a Cube 8 Focus Group session featuring Adnan Shaffi, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PriceOye, bringing together more than 17 founders and their team members for an intensive and interactive discussion on the practical dimensions of building startups that can scale. Drawing on his own entrepreneurial journey building PriceOye into one of Pakistan’s most recognised price comparison and consumer electronics platforms, Shaffi moved through a range of topics including customer acquisition, lead conversion, sales execution, and the principles of sustainable business growth, grounding each area in the specific decisions, mistakes, and lessons that his own experience had produced rather than offering generic frameworks that have not been tested against the friction of building a real company.
The session’s structure gave it a quality that distinguished it from conventional speaker events. Beyond Shaffi’s prepared insights, the focus group format incorporated live feedback on the sales pitches and value propositions of participating Cube 8 founders, creating a dynamic where the advice being offered was immediately tested against the real business challenges in the room. For founders at the stage of refining how they communicate their product’s value to customers and investors, receiving direct and experienced feedback on the specific language and framing they are using is considerably more useful than absorbing general principles that must then be independently applied without knowing whether the application is accurate. The interactive structure made the session a working session rather than a presentation, which is precisely the format that produces the most durable learning for founders who are in the middle of building.
The substantive content covered several areas of particular relevance to early-stage founders working to build their commercial momentum. Shaffi shared three key principles for building a scalable sales engine and high-performing sales teams, addressing the organisational and process design questions that determine whether a startup’s sales capacity grows with the business or becomes a bottleneck as the team scales. His insights on customer acquisition economics addressed the unit-level financial logic that separates sustainable growth from growth that consumes capital faster than it creates value, a distinction that is critical for founders who are under pressure to show traction but need to ensure that the traction they are generating is commercially sound.
One of the more distinctive elements of the session was Shaffi’s account of how PriceOye identified and captured a significant market opportunity by locating a negative Net Promoter Score gap in the consumer electronics purchasing experience. The NPS framework, which measures the difference between customers who would actively recommend a product or service and those who would actively discourage others from using it, is widely used in large companies but less systematically applied by early-stage startups. Shaffi’s use of it as a tool for identifying underserved customer needs rather than simply measuring satisfaction represents a creative application of a standard business metric, and the story of how that insight led to a market positioning decision that defined PriceOye’s growth trajectory gave Cube 8 founders a concrete and replicable example of how data-driven customer insight translates into strategic advantage. The session also covered the evolution of Pakistan’s startup ecosystem from its early fintech-dominated phase through the emergence of social commerce as a significant vertical, giving founders a broader historical and market context within which to position their own ventures.
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