Chomok: on-demand grocery delivery

Chomok started after I saw that Chittagong, a city of 3M+, still had no local grocery delivery option. I built and launched the product, then ran daily operations with a small team through co-founder turnover, Covid disruption, and infrastructure growth.

Story

In late 2018, what was supposed to be a 3-month family visit to Bangladesh turned into 13 months. I had been in the US since 2006, and in those early weeks back home I noticed something obvious: Chittagong, my hometown and Bangladesh's second-largest city, had no local grocery delivery service.

I chose to go narrow instead of broad. Rather than competing in Dhaka first, I built for Chittagong.

Five months later, Chomok took its first order. The React Native app handled customer ordering. A Laravel backend with a customized Horizon dashboard managed the logistics chain: order intake, procurement routing, dispatch, delivery confirmation, and cash-on-delivery reconciliation. Infrastructure started on a DigitalOcean VPS and later moved to Laravel Vapor on AWS Lambda as demand grew.

The hardest challenges were not technical. My co-founder left three months after launch, so I stepped into operations, rebuilt the team, and restored full city coverage within weeks. Then Covid hit, demand dropped hard, and we pushed through more than a year of uncertainty before I chose to shut down in December 2021.

Chomok did not reach the scale I had imagined. It still became one of my most formative builds, teaching me logistics, execution under pressure, team rebuilding, and the discipline to close responsibly when the model no longer worked.

And it is He who spread the earth and placed upon it firm mountains and rivers, and from all of the fruits He made upon it two mates; He causes the night to cover the day. Indeed in that are signs for a people who give thought.

Quran 13:3

My co-founder (right) and I (left): Jan 17, 2019.

Making T-shirts for the marketing campaign.

Chomok signage in front of a local bazaar: May 3, 2019.

Wall paint in a residential zone: Aug 29, 2019.

Training the first recruit: Jul 20, 2019.

On a busy day, helping deliver orders: Jul 26, 2019.

Impacts

Launched Chittagong's first local grocery delivery service in a market with no established local provider.
Reached first live orders in 5 months with a complete flow for ordering, procurement, dispatch, and cash settlement.
Sustained city-wide same-day delivery for 3 years with a lean 4-7 person operations team.
Improved reliability under growth by moving from a single VPS to Laravel Vapor on AWS Lambda.

Challenges & Solutions

Challenges

There was no local playbook for grocery logistics, so supply chain, dispatch, and cash handling had to be defined from zero.
My co-founder left three months after launch, creating an operations gap at a critical stage.
Covid-19 caused a steep demand drop while the business was stabilizing.
A single VPS became a reliability bottleneck as order volume increased.

Solutions

Built a custom Laravel Horizon workflow covering each state from order intake to procurement, driver assignment, delivery confirmation, and cash reconciliation.
Stepped into operations directly, rebuilt the team structure in weeks, and restored full city coverage without pausing product delivery.
Kept a lean 4-7 person team, maintained service continuity, and extended runway for over a year before winding down responsibly.
Migrated the stack to Laravel Vapor on AWS Lambda to gain auto-scaling and better fault tolerance.