Company
Payer is Startup of the Year at the Maldives Business Awards
We won Startup of the Year at the second Maldives Business Awards, a year after launching in Malé and in the middle of the unglamorous work of integrating a country's bills.
Haris ·
Payer Pvt Ltd was named Startup of the Year at the Maldives Business Awards 2019 tonight, at the gala at The Marina at CROSSROADS Maldives.
This was the second edition of the awards, which drew over 150 entries and more than 50 finalists across the Individual Excellence, Enterprise Excellence and Elite categories, with around 200 people in the room. Ooredoo Maldives took Business of the Year and Ismail Rasheed won Entrepreneur of the Year. State Trading Organization was the title sponsor for the second year running, with the Ministry of Economic Development as supporting partner.
What the year actually looked like
Awards compress a year into one evening, so it is worth writing down what the year was really made of, while we still remember it accurately.
It was integrations. Long email threads with providers about file formats. Meetings where we explained, again, what a digital wallet is and why money in it is still real money. Weeks spent on a single bill payment working end to end, reliably, at two in the morning, for a customer who will never know it was hard. We launched a little over a year ago, and most of the work since has been that.
It was also the year the answer started arriving faster. Dhiraagu bills went live at the start of the year. People began using Payer for the ordinary monthly things instead of testing it once and going back to the counter. That shift is the actual result. The trophy is a signal that other people noticed it.
Thank you
To the customers who send us bug reports at midnight and feature requests we end up building, to the merchants and providers who took a chance on a small company with no track record, and to the team who kept going through the year when nothing we shipped made the news: this is yours.
There is a version of this post that says we have arrived. We have not. Payments in the Maldives are still slower and harder than they should be, we are still blocked on things we cannot fix ourselves, and being the best startup in a young market is a smaller claim than it sounds. It is a good night, and tomorrow there are more integrations.
