I rather find it strange that in US import air and sea manifest isn’t available publicly online¹, in Pakistan every single import by air and sea is available online by Pakistan Customs. It’s a very crowded portal all FFs / Customs Brokers and their Tele Reps are busy calling customers right away the shipment lands into Pakistan by collecting data from there.. importers here are overwhelmed by phone calls and emails., its called import general manifest IGM and portal is updated on an hourly basis.

Exports data is tricky. It’s not available online. Having said that both imp-exp data ain’t so helpful. As it may seem.

As outbound marketing has lost its mojo long ago due to spam. It’s all about Inbound now. 90% customers we had acquired in the past 2 years were entirely through SERP organic ranking., and AdWords.

Even our 50k subscribers strong newsletter doesn’t help much. We now only send once a month at maximum just to keep the list from being stalled and avoid too many bounce back due to inactive email addresses. That doesn’t go well with anyone. Either MailChimp or SES.

A lot of email addresses become invalid due to people leaving etc even in a month., and if you don’t email in 2-4 months it easily breaches the allowed hard bounce limit of 0.5%  and risks account suspension.

1. The US Customs however provides the manifest data to Commercial Software Companies, who would sell it online for a subscription ranging from $100 to $250 per month.

Qatar Airways is pouring on the freighter capacity, using all-cargo aircraft and passenger planes in cargo-only mode to meet high demand for moving fresh produce and meat, pharmaceuticals and general cargo in Australia, India, Kuwait, Oman and the Netherlands.

Literally QR (Qatar Airways) is keeping the lights on here in Pakistan too, under current circumstances. EK (Emirates Airline) is either profiteering or may be it’s their inadequate strategy to cope with the COVID-19 crisis in our market., because normally they are very nice.

Just a few months ago, discount hotel chain OYO seemed unstoppable. The India-based startup touted plans for global expansion and saw its valuation double to $10 billion in October. But in mid-January, the company began sweeping layoffs that have seen thousands lose their jobs. Last September, Fair.com, a car-leasing startup that raised nearly $400 million in a funding roughly a year earlier, acquired one of its rivals, Canvas, only to slash 40% of its workforce weeks later. The goal, according to a memo at the time that Fair.com directed CNN Business to from its then-CEO, was to “be a smaller team, focused on doing fewer things well.” One laid off Canvas-turned Fair employee said it was “a rollercoaster.” (Fair declined to comment beyond the memo.)

Actually the ‘startup’ model always been around the ‘hyper-growth’ at any cost¹. So they could outcompete the established players or get too much head start over the new comers., or otherwise just grab as much market share, in a shorter period of time, as they can. 

However it comes at a price and price is what VCs are willing to pay or at least used to pay for the hyper-growth. Traditionally businesses grow organically, as did our. However VC-Startup partnership totally changed the economics and dynamics of the businesses. 

Anyhow speaking of Flexport specifically, I guess laying off merely 50 personnel does not even count as opposed to other larger lay-offs, for instance Oyo another Softbank funded startup laid off over 3300 personnel.

1. However in the aftermath of WeWork fiasco, things are changing quite rapidly, in particular Softbank has made a major shift in their strategy, they are trying to minimize losses and seek profitability in the near future for their funded startups., by reducing headcounts and overheads.