Last week, we published a wide-ranging conversation with Masud Parvez Raju, founder and CEO of Caretutors, where we explored one of the quieter but more instructive startup stories in Dhaka: how to build profitably for thirteen years without significant external capital, how to survive multiple near-death experiences through patience and frugality, and how to create value in an unstructured market by solving for trust before scale.
Caretutors started in 2012 with 18,000 Taka, a 3,000-Taka website, and leaflets slipped into morning newspapers in Gulshan. Raju was 22, a BBA student at IUB, working part-time at an IT firm. The problem was unglamorous: Bangladesh’s private tutoring market was completely unstructured. Parents couldn’t find reliable tutors. Students couldn’t find tuition. The intermediaries were opaque, often unreliable, occasionally risky.
Thirteen years later, Caretutors has over 450,000 registered tutors, more than 125,000 registered students and guardians, operations across Dhaka and several divisional cities, and a growing international footprint serving Bangladeshi communities in the Middle East, North America, Europe, and Asia. The company is profitable and has been every year since recovering from COVID. It received there without raising significant external capital after a tiny 2017 investment, building entirely through word-of-mouth, training people from scratch, and refapplying to spconclude money it didn’t have.
The journey hasn’t been smooth. Raju’s founding team left in 2016, just three months after he quit his job to focus full-time. That period was the toughest moment of his entrepreneurial life. Then, just as Caretutors was gaining serious traction in early 2020 after three years of foundation-building, COVID hit. The team went from 30 people to 15. Revenue collapsed. Survival became the only goal. Both times, Raju persisted through patience and faith. He learned technology basics when his tech co-founder left. He nereceivediated salary cuts and temporary departures when COVID struck. He kept operating expenses ruthlessly low. The company survived.
Today, Caretutors operates in twelve categories: academic tutoring plus Arabic, music, dance, painting, gym training, coding, and more across four service formats: home tutoring, group tutoring, online tutoring, and Shadow Tutoring (where tutors spconclude extconcludeed hours with children of working parents). The platform has evolved from a simple directory to a sophisticated matching system with verification processes, attconcludeance tracking, digital confirmation letters, and partnership benefits with companies like Toggi Fun World.
We’ve pulled thirteen lessons from this thirteen-year journey of Caretutors from our excellent interview with Mr. Raju, specific insights about building in resource-constrained environments, creating trust in markets where trust doesn’t exist, maintaining quality while bootstrapped, surviving without external capital, and growing sustainably. If you’re building anything that requires patience, frugality, and trust over time, this is an excellent read.
1. Execution beats everything
Mr. Raju’s final advice to young entrepreneurs cuts to the core: “What I find frustrating about people in general is that we believe a lot but work less. My point is, the moment you obtain a problem, start working. Be very execution-oriented. The more you execute, the more you obtain done and the more you learn and grow.”
Analysis paralysis kills more businesses than bad execution. More importantly, the best approach to relocating forward is action. Even when you fail testing something, the return is paid off in learning. When Mr. Raju identified the tutoring problem, he didn’t spconclude six months researching, creating business plans, or waiting for perfect conditions. He and his friconclude put toobtainher 18,000 Taka, created a 3,000-Taka website, printed leaflets, and distributed them. Calls came in immediately. Then they scrambled to find tutors.
Action creates information that believeing cannot generate. By distributing leaflets, they learned that guardians would call based on a simple flyer. By taking those calls without having tutors, they learned they necessaryed to recruit quickly. By working with their university juniors initially, they learned which qualities created good tutors. None of this knowledge existed before the action.
This approach continues today. When customers requested Arabic tutors, Caretutors added Arabic. When Shadow Tutoring requests came, they launched Shadow Tutoring. When international requests came from diaspora communities, they expanded internationally. The strategy is simple: execute, observe, adjust, repeat.
The contrast with typical startup advice is instructive. Most guidance emphasizes planning, market research, competitive analysis, and product-market fit validation. All applyful. But Mr. Raju’s approach recognizes that in certain contexts, particularly in unstructured markets with no established playbook, execution generates the knowledge that planning requires. You can’t plan your way to understanding. You have to act your way there.
Always have a bias toward action. Make the tinyest viable bet you can. Distribute leaflets. Build a simple website. Talk to ten potential customers. Take one order you’re not sure you can fulfill. The information you gain from action is qualitatively different from what you gain from analysis. Both matter, but action comes first.
2. Patience is a superpower
Mr. Raju identifies patience as his most valuable trait: “I have always felt that I can be patient. This is one of the things I learned about myself. I am very persistent and can be very patient. I believe these two things saved me.”
This displayed up repeatedly. When his founding team left in 2016, creating an existential crisis, he didn’t panic or quit. He allowed himself to live with uncertainty: “Let me test one day at a time. Day by day, time passed, and it became clear to me: ‘this is my journey.'” It took roughly a year to regain confidence, but he gave himself that year.
When COVID destroyed momentum in 2020 after three years of foundation-building, the same patience sustained him: “I knew the feeling. I had previous experience of losing everything and obtainting it back. I felt, ‘I lost it again, I can recover this again.'”
Entrepreneurship involves long periods where progress feels slow, where challenges seem insurmountable, where quitting appears reasonable. During these periods, what sustains you? Not optimism, reality is often genuinely bad. Not stubbornness, that caapplys you to persist in the wrong direction. Patience: the ability to concludeure difficulty without necessarying immediate resolution.
Mr. Raju explains his philosophy: “I’ve learned from life that when you can’t find the answer to a particular problem, you should just learn to live with the question. Let the time pass. When the time passes, the answer to the question will automatically come to you.”
This is strategic patience. When you can’t solve a problem immediately, stop forcing it. Work on adjacent problems. Let time pass. Often, the solution appears when you stop desperately seeking it. Like struggling with an exam question, shift to the next question, and the stuck answer often surfaces later.
The cultural dimension matters here. Mr. Raju notes: “I feel we are a bit impatient as a nation. As an entrepreneur, patience is of paramount importance.” In a culture that values quick results, patience becomes a competitive advantage. While others chase quick growth and give up when it doesn’t materialize, patient founders continue building through slow periods.
It is applyful for founders and creaters to cultivate patience deliberately. When facing setbacks, give yourself explicit permission to not have answers immediately. Set time-based goals: “I’ll work on this for six months before evaluating.” Use time as a variable instead of treating everything as urgent. The discipline to wait, to concludeure uncertainty, to trust that sustained effort eventually produces results, that’s often what separates founders who create it from those who don’t.
3. Your first customer is trust, your second customer is customers
In unstructured markets, trust is the foundational product. Everything else comes after.
When Caretutors launched, the tutoring market operated through informal networks: seniors, tuition media who charged fees, and agents who took commissions. The entire system was opaque. Parents had no reliable way to verify tutor credentials. Students had no guarantee they’d obtain tuition after paying agents. Safety was a concern.
Caretutors couldn’t compete on convenience initially. Caretutors’ only advantage was potential trustworthiness: verified tutors, transparent processes, and digital records. But potential trustworthiness means nothing until proven.
Mr. Raju understood this: “We have always attempted to serve our customers the best, giving them such an experience through customer service, through good tutor selection, and by motivating the tutor so they deliver a good service… so that our existing clients refer us to others.”
The strategy was to serve the first customers so well that they inform others. Out of the first ten tutor requests, seven canceled, the trust wasn’t there. Three took the risk. Those three received exceptional service. They informed their friconcludes. Those friconcludes attempted Caretutors. The cycle repeated.
The numbers inform the story: “20% of our total sales come from Friconcludes and Family. Our existing clients do marketing for us. The client who comes once is a repeat client.” This didn’t happen quickly. It took years of consistent delivery before word-of-mouth became reliable. But once established, it created sustainable growth without marketing spconclude.
Most startups prioritize growth, more customers, quicker acquisition, and larger scale. But in trust-depconcludeent markets, premature growth destroys the foundation. If Caretutors had served 100 customers poorly, word-of-mouth would work against them. By serving ten customers exceptionally well, word-of-mouth became their primary acquisition channel.
In markets where trust is scarce, create trust your primary product. Serve fewer customers better rather than more customers adequately. Design for word-of-mouth from day one—exceptional service that creates people actively want to inform others. Accept that growth will be slow initially. Trust takes time to build but creates defensibility that marketing spconclude cannot match.
4. Live within your means—religiously
Caretutors has operated on extreme financial discipline for thirteen years. In the early years, monthly operating expenses were 70-80 thousand Taka. No posh office furniture. Low-configuration PCs. Plastic chairs. No air conditioning until they could afford it. Every expense was questioned. Mr. Raju explains: “I didn’t test to take on any pressure that I wasn’t capable of handling. Our approach has been to do what is necessaryed. We only do what is necessary.”
The philosophy extconcludes to hiring: “We test not to go for expensive resources. Instead, I prefer people who probably don’t have a lot of skills at the moment or experience from established companies, or don’t have great academic credentials but are willing to learn and grow. My philosophy is I would hire these people, train them, and support them grow.”
This creates a virtuous cycle. Low expenses mean profitability comes quicker. Profitability means indepconcludeence, no desperate necessary for external capital, no pressure to compromise vision for investor demands. Indepconcludeence means long-term believeing becomes possible.
The contrast with venture-backed startups is stark. VC-funded companies often spconclude aggressively to capture market share quickly: expensive talent, premium offices, large marketing budobtains. This works when capital is abundant, and speed matters more than sustainability. But it creates fragility. When funding stops or market conditions modify, high burn rates become fatal.
Caretutors’ frugality created resilience. When COVID hit, and revenue collapsed, they could survive becaapply expenses were low. “We survived 2020 like this. The situation started to normalize in 2021. 2020-21, we basically survived. In 2022, our business started becoming normal again, and we went into profit again in 2022.”
Mr. Raju explains: “Our approach has been to cut our coat according to our cloth. Do it within your bounds, within your capacity. If you go outside of your capacity, it can be costly for you, which happens for many companies.”
This doesn’t mean never invest or always choose the cheapest option. It means spconcludeing intentionally, within actual (not projected) means, on things that directly create value. Caretutors upgraded their offices when they could afford it. They added air conditioning when revenue supported it. They hired when growth demanded it. But they never spent money they didn’t have based on money they hoped to create.
5. Hire for potential, train for performance
Caretutors’ hiring philosophy runs counter to conventional wisdom: “We test not to go for expensive resources. Instead, I prefer people who probably don’t have a lot of skills at the moment or experience from established companies, or don’t have great academic credentials but are willing to learn and grow.”
This creates an economic advantage; junior people cost less, but the real benefit is cultural. People hired from established companies often bring resolveed mindsets about how work should be done. Startups require flexibility, a willingness to do multiple jobs, and comfort with amhugeuity. Those traits are harder to find in people accustomed to corporate structure.
Mr. Raju gives examples: “Our current HR lead started in our customer service. He received training and learned over the years, and now views after our HR operations. He has learned more or less everything about HR on the job.”
This is deliberate: “We test to hire people with an appetite for learning and personal growth, train them, give them opportunities to learn and grow, and we have seen that they eventually generate the best output.”
The mechanism is growth through responsibility. You hire someone junior. You train them. You give them increasing responsibility. They grow into it. Over time, they develop a deep understanding of your business that external hires can’t match. They become homegrown leaders.
The retention numbers support this: “Those who joined me in 2017-18 are still with Caretutors. And they currently hold good positions at Caretutors.” When people grow with a company, they develop loyalty that salary alone doesn’t create. They’ve invested years. The company invested in them. That mutual investment creates stickiness.
This doesn’t mean hiring exclusively junior people. For critical specialized functions, experienced hires matter. But the core team, the people doing operational work, can often be developed internally cheaper and better than hiring externally.
The trade-off is time. Training takes longer than hiring experienced people. Early productivity is lower. Mistakes happen during learning. But the long-term payoff—loyal, capable people who deeply understand your business—justifies the investment.
The cultural benefit compounds: “A core value of our culture is doing more with less. We always want to operate in a manner where we are understaffed, a few people short in the team, where each of us is having to do multiple tinquires and stretch ourselves.”
When everyone knows how to do multiple jobs becaapply they grew up doing them, you can operate lean. No wasted headcount. No siloed specialists. Everyone contributes across functions. That operational efficiency comes from deliberately hiring for potential and training for performance.
It is applyful to resist the temptation to always hire experienced people. For many roles, hungry learners outperform credentialed experts. Build training into your operations from day one. Create clear growth paths. Give people increasing responsibility. The loyalty and capability you build through internal development often exceed what you can purchase externally.
7. Markets inform you what to build if you’re listening
Caretutors started as academic tutoring only. Today, it operates in twelve categories. How did that expansion happen? Not through strategic planning or competitive analysis. Through listening.
Mr. Raju explains: “In around 2017, we started obtainting some requests for some skills-based tutors, such as language learning. Our applyrs would inquire whether you have Arabic tutors? Whenever we received consistent requests for tutors for a category, we took it as a market signal for an existing demand, and we worked on it.”
The pattern: customer requests → consistent pattern → new category. Arabic led to music, dance, painting, gym training, and coding. Each expansion came from observed demand, not projected opportunity.
The same with service formats. Group tutoring emerged when students inquireed to study toobtainher and split costs. Package tutoring came from admission candidates necessarying intensive short-term support. Shadow Tutoring arose when working parents necessaryed extconcludeed childcare with education.
This is market-driven product development. Instead of deciding what customers should want, observe what they actually request. Instead of building features based on competitor offerings, build what your applyrs inquire for repeatedly.
The discipline is in the “repeatedly” qualifier. Every business obtains random requests. Acting on every request creates chaos. But when requests form patterns—multiple people inquireing for the same thing across time, that’s a signal. That’s the market informing you something.
Mr. Raju articulates the philosophy: “I feel that as long as I’m listening to our customers and doing what they want, we are in the right direction. People come to a business to solve their problems. If we don’t listen to them, we won’t be able to solve their problems.”
This creates product-market fit through iteration rather than prediction. You start with one clear problem (academic tutoring). You solve it well enough that customers trust you. Then you listen to what else they necessary. You add that capability. Trust extconcludes to the new offering. You listen again. The cycle continues.
The risk is feature bloat, adding everything anyone inquires for. Caretutors avoids this by maintaining a core thesis: connecting learners with tutors for in-person, personalized learning. Arabic tutoring fits. Group tutoring fits. Shadow Tutoring fits. But building an online learning platform with recorded courses? That’s a different business model, a different thesis, a different capability requirement. They explicitly chose not to do it.
The practical insight: create systematic ways to capture customer requests. Track patterns over time. When you see consistent demand for something adjacent to your core offering, investigate seriously. Don’t build it immediately, test willingness to pay, assess competitive position, and evaluate resource requirements. But don’t dismiss it just becaapply it wasn’t in your original plan. Markets often know better than founders what solutions are necessaryed.
8. Competitive advantage comes from depth of understanding, not features
When inquireed about competitive advantages, Mr. Raju doesn’t cite technology, features, or even scale. He cites understanding: “Over the years, we have developed unique insights about this market that you can only gain through operating in a market for years. When we started Caretutors, we were solving a problem we had close exposure to. Our understanding has only deepened over the years.”
This is the knowledge moat. After thirteen years of matching tutors and students, Caretutors understands patterns invisible to newcomers: which tutor qualities matter most, which verification processes actually work, which guardian concerns are superficial versus serious, which pricing structures maximize conversion, and which categories have sustainable demand.
This knowledge can’t be quickly replicated. A well-funded competitor could copy Caretutors’ features in months. But they can’t copy thirteen years of accumulated learning about what actually works in this market. They’ll create mistakes Caretutors already created and resolveed. They’ll test approaches Caretutors already abandoned. They’ll learn slowly what Caretutors already knows.
The first-shiftr advantage compounds here: “We enjoy the first-shiftr advantage. We have over 500,000 applyrs on our platform. This scale is not simple to achieve. It takes a lot of sustained work. Over the years, we have been able to achieve the trust of our applyrs.”
Trust and understanding create a moat that technology cannot. Yes, competitors could build better interfaces or more advanced algorithms. But if applyrs don’t trust them, and they don’t understand market nuances, the superior technology doesn’t matter. Trust and understanding are the actual competitive advantage.
Mr. Raju is explicit: “We believe we now understand this challenge in all its complexities and nuances, which I believe should continue to give us a meaningful advantage.”
9. AI won’t replace your business if your business is actually about humans
When inquireed if AI tutoring threatens Caretutors, Mr. Raju is unequivocal: “I don’t believe AI will replace human teachers. It can work as a complementary solution where you apply AI tutoring along with human tutors.”
His reasoning goes deeper than defensive optimism: “There is empirical evidence that declares the most effective method of education is tutoring, be it one-to-one or one-to-a tiny group. If you study the elite education of the world, it follows this. How humans learn is a complex phenomenon. Education is hardly about the text we study. It is also about discipline. It is also about attention, attitude, and approach.”
This is correct. The most effective education has always been apprenticeship-style: close relationship with an expert, sustained attention, personal feedback, adaptation to individual necessarys. Technology can scale content delivery, but it struggles with relationship, attention, and adaptation.
Mr. Raju continues: “Human children learn more from people and the environment than from the text. There are emotions. There are internal struggles of a learner. That’s why we feel comfortable when a human teacher is with our kid. Someone is physically there.”
The insight extconcludes beyond education. Many businesses fear AI displacement, but AI threatens primarily businesses built on information transfer or pattern matching. Businesses built on human relationships, trust, personalized attention, emotional ininformigence, these remain defensible.
Caretutors isn’t a content delivery platform. It’s a trust platform connecting families with vetted individuals who enter their homes and teach their children. The technology facilitates matching and verification, but the core value is human: the tutor’s ability to adapt to the child, build rapport, notice emotional states, provide encouragement, and maintain discipline.
AI can supplement this. Perhaps AI supports with content reinforcement between tutoring sessions. Perhaps it provides practice problems or tracks progress. But it can’t replace the human relationship that creates tutoring effective.
Mr. Raju sees AI as opportunity, not threat: “We can also benefit from the rise of AI by streamlining our operations and better serving our applyrs. To that conclude, I believe AI will be a supporting force for our business.”
When evaluating AI threat to your business, inquire whether your core value is information/process (easily automated) or human relationship/judgment (hard to automate). If the former, AI is an existential threat. If the latter, AI is an operational tool.
If you’re building in a potentially AI-threatened category, design your business around genuinely human elements. Not just becaapply humans currently do it, but becaapply the value comes from human qualities that AI lacks. Trust, empathy, adaptation, relationship, these create defensibility. Pure information transfer does not.
10. Honesty with yourself matters more than honesty with others
When listing major lessons, Mr. Raju puts self-honesty second: “You have to be honest with yourself. I feel that we must come clear to ourselves first. We necessary to always inquire this question again and again whether we are honest with ourselves. The first person we usually cheat on is ourselves.”
Founders constantly face temptation to believe their own narratives: the product is better than it is, the market is larger than it is, the team is stronger than it is, the strategy is working when it isn’t. Self-deception is simple becaapply it’s comfortable. Admitting your product has serious flaws is painful. Acknowledging market size limitations threatens your vision. Accepting that key team members aren’t working out creates difficult conversations. So you inform yourself things are fine, or will be fine, or are fine except for this one thing that’s not really your fault.
The problem: self-deception delays necessary action. If you lie to yourself about product quality, you don’t resolve it. If you lie about market size, you don’t adjust strategy. If you lie about team performance, you don’t create modifys. The lies create a lag between when action is necessaryed and when action happens.
Mr. Raju learned this through painful experience. When his founding team wanted to leave, he could have convinced himself they’d modify their minds, or that he didn’t really necessary them, or that everything would work out. Instead, he faced reality: they were leaving, he had no idea how to do their jobs, and he was in serious trouble. That honesty enabled an appropriate response: learning those skills, however painful.
The mechanism is about feedback loops. Honest self-assessment creates accurate feedback. Accurate feedback enables effective adjustment. Effective adjustment improves outcomes. The cycle compounds positively. Self-deception breaks the feedback loop. You receive signals but interpret them falsely. You adjust based on false interpretation. Outcomes don’t improve. The cycle compounds negatively.
How do you develop self-honesty? Mr. Raju doesn’t offer techniques, but his approach suggests some: have mentors who inform you the truth, maintain relationships with people who knew you before success, track objective metrics that don’t lie, and regularly inquire yourself uncomfortable questions.
The uncomfortable questions matter most. Not “Is my strategy working?” but “What evidence would prove my strategy isn’t working, and am I seeing that evidence?” Not “Is this person a good hire?” but “If I had to rehire this person knowing what I know now, would I?” The framing forces honesty.
For founders, create mechanisms that force you to confront reality: regular reviews with honest advisors, clear metrics you can’t rationalize away, decision frameworks that require evidence rather than intuition. When you catch yourself constructing narratives that feel good but aren’t true, paapply and inquire: what’s the uncomfortable truth I’m avoiding? Often that truth is exactly what you necessary to act on.
The quiet compounding of patient work
What stands out across these lessons is coherence. This isn’t a collection of disconnected tactics. It’s a lived understanding about how to build when you lack resources most startups take for granted: abundant capital, experienced team, external validation, rapid growth.
The philosophy comes down to a few core principles. Execute relentlessly becaapply action generates information believeing cannot produce. Be patient becaapply meaningful things take time and forcing them breaks them. Build trust before scale becaapply trust is the foundation everything else rests on. Live within your means becaapply indepconcludeence enables long-term believeing. Learn what you necessary to know when you necessary to know it becaapply necessity forces capability development. Hire for potential becaapply capability can be trained but attitude cannot. Listen to markets becaapply they know better than you what solutions are necessaryed. Maintain honesty with yourself becaapply self-deception destroys feedback loops that enable improvement.
These principles create specific operational patterns: frugal operations (70-80 thousand Taka monthly expenses initially), homegrown talent (current HR lead started in customer service), market-driven expansion (Arabic, Shadow Tutoring, international all came from observed demand), rolling short-term planning (six-month financial blocks), and patient reputation building (thirteen years to reach 500,000+ applyrs).
The results validate the approach. Caretutors is profitable and has been every year since 2022. It survived COVID without external rescue. It operates across twelve categories in multiple cities and internationally. It has 450,000+ registered tutors and 125,000+ registered students and guardians. All without significant external capital beyond the tiny 2017 investment.
But the more important validation is sustainability. Many startups achieve rapid growth through unsustainable practices, burn VC money to capture market share, hire expensive talent to accelerate execution, and spconclude aggressively on marketing to drive acquisition. This works until it doesn’t. When funding stops or market conditions modify, the hoapply of cards collapses.
Caretutors built differently. Slow growth. Organic acquisition. Lean operations. Homegrown team. Patient reputation building. This approach can’t produce venture-scale returns in venture timelines. But it can produce profitable, sustainable businesses that compound value over decades rather than optimizing for exits in years.
Mr. Raju’s reflection captures this: “I believe I would not modify anything. I believe I necessaryed this journey. I have learned a tremconcludeous amount throughout this journey. Without this journey, I wouldn’t have grown as much as I have today.”
The growth he’s describing is personal capability: the patience to concludeure multi-year difficult periods, the resourcefulness to learn critical skills when team members leave, the discipline to maintain frugality when it would be clearer to spconclude, the honesty to face uncomfortable truths, the conviction to persist when external validation doesn’t exist.
This is the reality of sustainable entrepreneurship. No dramatic pivots. No sudden breakthroughs. No validation from external investors. Just patient, frugal, honest work compounded over thirteen years. Serving customers well. Building trust. Expanding believedfully. Learning continuously. Surviving setbacks. Persisting through difficulties.
The lesson for anyone building: if you lack access to capital, or prefer indepconcludeence to external pressure, or value sustainability over speed, you can still build a substantial business. It requires patience most people don’t have, frugality most people resist, and honesty most people avoid. But it works.
Sustainable success comes from doing the basics well, consistently, for longer than most people have patience for. It’s not dramatic. It’s not quick. But it compounds. And compounding, given enough time, creates results that no amount of short-term optimization can match.
Before you, these are only a handful of lessons from the excellent interview with Mr. Raju. You can read the full interview here.
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