Meet the entrepreneurs with the ticket to a multi-million dollar industry.

Byline: Taimoor Hassan

E-ticketing has finally found its place in Pakistan. But will Easyticket.pk and Bookme.pk be the next big thing, or are they just preparing the field for bigger companies to come in and reap the rewards?

It was in 2015 when Monis Rahman was prompted to put his entrepreneurial expertise and technological prowess into action and set up a purely digital e-ticketing system to sell tickets for buses, cinemas and events online. He had been observing the need for e-ticketing for some time, but it was actually a personal experience that edged him on to actually do something about his idea.

He went to watch movies with his kids, stood in line, only to be told a little later that there were either no tickets left, or that only corner seats were available. That was when the seeds of Easytickets.pk were first sown and Monis decided to partner with a movie theatre and bring the ticketing system online. Fed up with the hit and miss nature of getting tickets for movies in Pakistan, Monis thought there should be a convenient way to book tickets. Instead of travelling to theatres only to be met with disappointment, there should be an online mechanism for reservation - as it existed all around the world.

Easytickets.pk is now a major player in the e-ticketing industry. Long gone are the days of getting to cinemas hours in advance and anxiously waiting in lines with fingers crossed that tickets still remain for a particular show. Now, a reservation is a click of a button or a tap of a finger away, and if you still can't get one because the movie is hot on the market, at least you don't have to be told so after making a lengthy trip to the theatre just to catch the latest rom-com.

But Easytickets does not stand alone in Pakistan's e-ticketing ring. In the other corner, lean, mean and giving it stiff competition is Bookme.pk led by Faizan Aslam, a rather new entrant in Pakistan's startup ecosystem.

Faizan was visiting Lahore from his hometown of Sahiwal, when he and his wife decided they would make use of the trip and go out for a show. It was a classic dinner-and-a-movie plan, simple enough that you wouldn't count on any hitches - except that when they got to the cinema, the couple couldn't find a ticket. Disappointed, they decided to try their luck another weekend, travelling all the way from Sahiwal to Lahore just to watch a movie, but to no avail - they still couldn't get their hands on tickets. And that is when Bookme.pk was born.

Ticketing isn't a particularly talked about industry. It isn't exactly the most exciting thing in the world. But even in the world of ticketing, there are fascinating lessons in entrepreneurship.

This piece tells the story of two new-age players disrupting the traditional status-quo of a seemingly boring industry. Both these individuals come from very different backgrounds, yet are operating in the same city, in the same market and along the same technological lines. For the reason of this rather colourful contrast, this piece has confined itself to the profiles of these two players, and the statistics provided by them, in order to gauge their progress in an industry which has traditionally been resistant to technological advancements.

Who are they?

Monis Rahman has had convincing entrepreneurial achievements prior to forming Easytickets.pk. A Silicon Valley trained tech-entrepreneur, Monis received his education in engineering and computer science from the University of Wisconsin, followed by graduate level coursework at Stanford and a stint at computer giant Intel as a computer engineer. It was here, Monis says, that he learned his true abilities, designing the branch prediction unit of Intel's titanium computer processing chip. Later, he started his own computer chip company in Silicon Valley. He did not settle, however, quickly moving on to start an online business, quick to grasp that the online economy was the future.

Monis was among the crop of Pakistani entrepreneurs who witnessed first hand the internet boom in the early '90s in the US, which stimulated multi-billion-dollar investments in the Silicon Valley and gave birth to Google, Yahoo and the likes. He is also among the early entrants in Pakistan's tech-enabled startup ecosystem, starting his first online business, a social networking site called Naseeb.com, in 2003. In 2006, he started Rozee.pk, which was originally meant as a hiring tool for his original startup, Naseeb.com.

Since then Rozee.pk, has become a household name. While he doesn't really have a scientific method behind the number, Monis estimates that Rozee.pk has helped...