Five years ago in an instantaneous act, Iran’s Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare announced a new directive under which the ministry was required to execute limited telecommuting plans to work with its employees. It was considered as one of the most innovative ways to elude bureaucracy. “If the business climate is to be created to suit the talents of our country, we need a fundamental re-engineering of human resources,” the deputy Minister stated in an interview about this controversial act. Since then, this idea started to grow in the government’s body and the private sector.
This is the story of Nima Nourmohammadi, the entrepreneur who used this opportunity to create the most active online teleworking platform in Iran, Ponisha, now home to tens of thousands of freelancers and projects in constant development.
From Tradition to Digital Revolution
Before starting Ponisha, Nima went along a traditional career path which required his complete physical presence at work - without exception, as Iranians still cannot tele-drive a car despite Google's progress. He got his start as a taxi service driver in Tehran when was 19. During his constant struggle with traffic jams and learning English, he drove for a foreign passenger.
Stewart was a senior Nestle executive on a mission to develop “Nestle Iran”, and he brought Nima aboard. Throughout his time of cooperation with Nestle Iran, he learned practical marketing and branding which he later leveraged in his own business. His biggest project was helping with the launch and management of Nestle Pure Life drinking water, but after 10 years of commitment, Nima went off to pursue his own dreams outside of Nestle Iran.
An Entrepreneur Looking for Persian Safety
Here’s the inspiring part of Nima’s story: he didn’t actually plan to start up a huge online business. Instead, he had a simple incentive: “to own something so you can invest in it, something that no one can take it away from you,” he says.
His first such investment was running a beauty salon, which failed. The most cost effective and practical answer to that was owning a domain name.
He started with online real estate classifieds. He launched iHome, but despite his knowledge of marketing and sales, he “knew nothing about real estate or online businesses,” he says. It would prove to be another important learning experience - but still not his big breakthrough. iHome took three long years to become profitable, and although it’s still active today with live transactions, Iran still doesn’t have the online infrastructures to handle "real estate sized” transactions.
A Golden Rule to Keep a Small Business Alive
On the course of his online ventures and struggle with developers, whom be both loved and hated, he started to learn code and design. His goal was not to become the CTO or design lead, but to simply make a functional relationship with designers and developers. This became the catalyst for his most successful project.
As per his usual procedure, he was planning to work remotely as a test project with a developer to decide if he’s the right candidate to revise iHome. Ponisha would actually grow out of the test project Nima used to examine his collaboration with his newly hired developer.
The project was a neat success and he became interested in the telecommuting business model. He found a developer and they started a 9 month, 24/7 marathon to launch the first version of Ponisha. They kept the two man team for nearly three years and remain a deadly duo to this day. The entire Ponisha platform works with no more than 4 people.
Nima has left Tehran for a quiet and green village in north of Iran and his team members also live across different provinces across the country. All of the team now follows their own advice: they collaborate remotely, without a central office, and they have a very good reason for this. In his marketing years with a low profit margin product such as drinking water, Nima learned well that there’s a golden rule to keep a small business alive: Keeping costs low. Nima argues that this is a simple strategy “Because you don’t pay for rent, bills and other office costs and people work with a lower price as they don’t have to spend time and money on transportation”.
Iran or Not, Teleworking is in Cretaceous Period
The Iranian government became interested in telecommuting five years ago relatively for the same reasons - the huge cost saving opportunity. However, that interest didn't last long, and the initiative was stopped after 3 years for "lowered performance, lack of telecommuting infra-structures in the country and the loss of work force’s fixation on their organization." It doesn't seem like Ponisha's success is any reflection of decreased performance.
This was around the same time that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that the hundreds of employees who work from home must now come into the office or quit their jobs, because "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home." From the look of things, teleworking still has a long way to go before attracting the big fish. For the same reason, some might argue that the key to Ponisha’s success and survival is that they keep the project scale and transactions under a certain range, keeping Ponisha on small projects and out of big trouble. Today almost 200 freelancers per month make money on Ponisha, an online teleworking platform with 66,000 mostly Iranian subscriptions.