PujiGori — Bangladesh crowdfunding platform

Bangladesh has a large and active diaspora with a strong culture of community giving — but no structured digital platform for crowdfunding campaigns targeted at local causes, small businesses, or personal projects. Existing platforms like GoFundMe and Kickstarter have limited payment coverage for Bangladeshi contributors.

PujiGori's founders wanted a platform that felt native to the Bangladeshi market: Bengali-language support, local payment methods (particularly bKash, Bangladesh's dominant mobile money platform), and campaign types suited to local fundraising norms — community projects, small business capital, and personal causes.

The core engineering challenge was the payment layer. bKash operates a proprietary API with sandbox limitations and production approval requirements that added friction to the build timeline. Our founding engineer built an abstraction layer over both payment providers so that the campaign contribution flow is payment-provider-agnostic — contributors choose their method, the backend routes and reconciles accordingly.

Campaign state management — draft, active, paused, funded, failed, withdrawn — required careful database design to handle partial refunds and disputed campaigns correctly. All fund movements are logged to an immutable audit table.

PujiGori launched with its first live campaign within six weeks of engagement start. The platform's bKash integration made it the first crowdfunding platform in Bangladesh to support mobile money contributions natively. Campaign creators reported the dashboard as straightforward enough to manage without a tech background.

bKash API documentation has significant gaps — particularly around webhook reliability and callback retry logic. Future builds using bKash should budget 1.5× the integration time of a comparable Stripe integration, and should build explicit idempotency handling from the first commit.

We'd also invest more heavily in the campaign creator experience upfront. The platform worked for technical early adopters, but the onboarding flow needed a second pass before it was genuinely accessible to non-technical campaign creators.