On September 12th, participants from IBA Center for Entrepreneurial Development, Innovation and Research’s CIE and CITE cohorts sat down with Hamza Abdul Rauf, Dr Basit, and Hanzala Raja for sessions built around a question that sits at the core of any entrepreneurial journey, what it actually takes to grow a business. Rauf brought direct founder credibility to the session as co-founder of Telemart, one of Pakistan’s leading e-commerce and retail brands, which he launched during his sophomore year at IBA and grew into a top omni-channel player disrupting the country’s largely fragmented consumer electronics market, work that earned him the CEO of the Year Award at the CEO World Awards as the youngest Pakistani ever to receive the honour at age 24.
The sessions covered revenue models across business categories, giving participants a structured way to think through how different kinds of ventures, from e-commerce to service and API-based businesses, actually convert activity into sustainable income rather than treating revenue generation as an afterthought once a product exists. Growth marketing strategies formed a second core theme, an area increasingly central to how founders scale customer acquisition efficiently rather than relying purely on organic growth or unstructured spending.
Hanzala Raja, chief executive officer of BizBuddy, and Dr Basit brought additional perspective on the mechanics of API-based businesses specifically, a category of startup that generates revenue through developer-facing infrastructure rather than direct consumer sales, requiring a genuinely different growth and monetization approach than the retail and e-commerce model Rauf built Telemart around. Covering both consumer-facing and infrastructure-oriented business models within the same day gave CIE and CITE participants exposure to two structurally distinct paths toward building a sustainable venture, rather than assuming every founder in the room was building toward the same kind of business.
Participants walked away with practical takeaways they could put to work directly in their own entrepreneurial journeys, straight from people who have already built and scaled the kinds of businesses being discussed rather than working purely from theoretical frameworks. The session continues IBA CEDIR’s established practice of pairing its CIE and CITE curriculum with practicing founders and operators, following the cohort’s earlier orientation session in August that welcomed 55 participants into the two entrepreneurship development programmes.
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