Qaflah conducted a session titled A Taste of Entrepreneurship at Habib University’s Career Fair, engaging a room of freshman students from Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Humanities programmes in a structured, activity-driven exploration of what building a business actually involves from its earliest stages. The session was facilitated at the invitation of Lubna Ahmed and her team, and was designed to meet students at the very beginning of their university journeys rather than waiting for them to encounter entrepreneurship through a formal course or elective later in their academic careers. The format reflected both the early stage of the audience and the design thinking orientation that runs through Habib University’s academic culture, which meant that rather than delivering a conventional lecture on problem discovery, the Qaflah team walked students through the full arc of early-stage business building using interactive activities, real local case studies drawn from the Pakistani market, and sustained discussion that drew on the students’ own thinking and questions.
The session was structured around five sequential stages of business development, Build, Sell, Learn, Grow, and Decide, giving students a sequential framework for understanding how a business evolves from an initial idea through the iterative process of testing, selling, learning from market feedback, scaling what works, and making the ongoing strategic decisions that determine whether a venture continues, pivots, or closes. This kind of sequential, experience-based framing of entrepreneurship is considerably more useful for students at the freshman stage than abstract theoretical models, because it gives them a mental map of the journey they would be undertaking without requiring them to already have a specific idea or business context to apply it to. By anchoring each stage in activities and local case studies rather than imported examples from Silicon Valley or other distant contexts, the session gave the content an immediacy and cultural relevance that generic entrepreneurship programming often lacks.
One of the more substantive observations the Qaflah team raised during the session addressed a structural shift in the entrepreneurship landscape that is particularly relevant for a generation of students who will build their ventures in an environment saturated with artificial intelligence tools. The point made was that as artificial intelligence makes it possible for anyone to build and launch a product within a day, the barrier to building has effectively collapsed, but the barrier to capturing a paying customer’s attention has increased substantially in the same proportion. When the supply of products and solutions grows without limit because the cost of creating them approaches zero, the scarcity shifts entirely to attention and trust, and the skills of positioning, sales, honest marketing, and customer relationship building become more rather than less important. The students received this observation actively and took the conversation further, raising sharp questions about ethical business practices and the challenge of building impact-driven solutions on sustainable business models, which led to one of the more substantively interesting discussions of the session around the fundamental tension in social entrepreneurship between the person who benefits from a solution and the person who pays for it.
That tension, which sits at the heart of many of the most important entrepreneurial problems in markets like Pakistan, does not have a simple resolution, and the Qaflah team was candid with students about the difficulty of building businesses where the beneficiary and the customer are not the same person. The discussion brought the conversation back to the foundational disciplines of entrepreneurship, including clear positioning, real sales capability, honest marketing, and the development of an Ideal Customer Profile specific enough to actually be reached and tested in the market. Every student left the session with a workbook designed to let them work through the Build-Sell-Learn-Grow-Decide framework independently when they decide to begin building their own ventures, and with the knowledge that Qaflah’s platform and tools are available to support them when that moment arrives.
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