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Author: Hamad Dar

Taksim Square, My Turkey Love Affair & a Military Coup

Some people say that my repeat visits to Turkey are a complete waste of money. Some suggest that I should instead be going to a different county every time I plan a foreign visit. Despite what they say, somehow, I keep coming back to Turkey.

Today I was at Taksim Square and later visited Galata tower, which by the way, looks even better during the night. Taksim reminded me of a story, and I thought to share it with you guys. But before that, I want to give you some back story about Pakistani people.

Due to constant terrorist attacks in Pakistan, two things happened to Pakistanis. One that I’m proud of and the other one that I’m ashamed of.

I’m proud of the fact that Pakistanis live with tawakkul which roughly translates into trusting in God’s plan. Most countrymen are not afraid of death or misfortune on the same level as most other people in the world. Despite seeing so much, Pakistani people continued with their lives, became fearless in the face of adversity and started to live with tawakkul and hope that nothing bad will happen. And if it does, it is meant to be. This makes it easier and better to live life despite the adversity.

The second thing, which I’m ashamed of, is that with so much pain also came acceptance of pain to the point that some people stopped feeling pain at times. This roughly means that many people became impassive or beyhis, showed no emotion or became cold at the time of adversity.

I think both the things are linked. They are just different reactions to same events.

Now back to the Taksim story. It was June of 2016. There was a terrorist attack at Ataturk airpot in Istanbul. I was still in Pakistan at that time. I had a trip to Turkey scheduled for July 2016. I went ahead with my plan and came to Turkey. My hotel was booked at Taksim square. It was my 2nd day in the city and I started hearing helicopters, jets and gunshots. In the next couple of minutes, I found out there is a coup under process.

We were asked to stay in-doors through out the evening. There was a lot of violence during the night but everything had cleared by morning. Turkish people fought off the coup with bare hands and by morning they had won and had foiled the coup attempt.

Audio recording from the hotel room at Taksim square

There was a massive celebration the following day at Taksim square. I celebrated too and was able to spot other Pakistanis doing the same.

I’m happy that Turkey is able to come out of that time and I hope they will defeat the economic turmoil too.

Why I Use Accelerated Delivery For Facebook Ads

I haven’t met many people who use Facebook’s accelerated delivery for ads. The reason why people don’t use that option, beside the fact that many people don’t even know about it, is that accelerated delivery consumes your daily budget as quickly as it possibly can ignoring to spread it evenly through-out the day.

The problem with this kind of execution is that you’re basically asking Facebook to win all the bids possible in order to serve your ads which means you’re willing to pay as high as possible to get the results. Then why would I or someone else possibly use this option? There’s a very good reason for that and I’ll explain this just in a bit.

I scale a lot of my campaigns with manual bids. For example if a campaign is working well for me @ $100/day ad-spend but suddenly stops working for me at $200/day ad-spend, I can’t possibly scale this campaign using automatic bidding. I’d instead scale this campaign by placing a manual bid of say $20/purchase and setting the budget to $1000. If Facebook can find me $20/purchase, it will spend all $1000. If it can’t get me any purchase in that amount, no budget will be spent. If it can get me a few sales in that cost, the budget will be spent accordingly.

Even with manual bids, Facebook will also attempt to evenly spread my budget through the 24 hour period. However, that may be unnecessary with manual bids. When I’ve provided a cap per result, I would ideally like to spend all my budget even in a 1 minute period as long as the cost per purchase is met. And this is where the accelerated delivery does the job just right.

In summary, I like to run most manual bid campaigns with accelerated delivery in order to steal cheap bids as quickly as possible, even if that means spending day’s budget in an hour.

Pakistan-Turkey Dual Citizenship, Myth & Facts

Today I met a Turk who is a student immigration advisor. His firm runs ads on Google but has recently stopped advertising in Pakistan. The reason he did that is because their query volume increased by 1000% in the last week. All of their budget was getting consumed by leads that didn’t convert. That happened because a news story surfaced in Pakistan about Pakistan and Turkey looking forward to sign a dual-citizenship agreement.

The news was interpreted in Pakistan with an assumption that all Pakistanis will automatically become Turkish citizens and all Turks will automatically become Pakistani citizens. The news was fueled by all Pakistani newspapers who are responsible for giving that feel to the news. This was further fueled by celebrities such as Hamza Ali Abbasi who called this resurgence of Khilafat movement and further suggested that we should also have one currency like European Union (WTF, Hamza bro?).

The truth is that all of that is baseless. There is indeed a deal between the governments happening, but the deal only means that any individual is now able to keep both citizenships in an event he’s offered one such citizenship through regular means such as by marriage, investment, naturalization (spending time etc), or through any other means that existed before. This agreement is identical to how Pakistanis can keep both Pakistani and American citizenships at the same time. But not all Pakistanis automatically become Americans.

Without this agreement in place, all Pakistanis had to give up their Pakistani citizenship in order to acquire Turkish citizenship and vice versa.

Pakistan already has such deals with many other countries including muslim countries such as Egypt, Syria, Jordan & Bahrain. Pakistan also has this treaty with many western and European countries. A treaty of this kind with Turkey is a step in right direction, but it isn’t what everyone has concluded it to be.

Shocking Facebook A/B Test Results Due to Page Name

I just concluded an A/B test that I ran simply out of curiosity. I first created a total of 10 campaigns targeting different things and having different creatives. I then created identical copies of these 10 campaigns.

In summary, I had 20 CBO campaigns divided into group A and group B. I created 2 brand new Facebook pages; one for group A and the second one for group B. The only difference between group A and group B was that the page names from which the ads ran were different. The adsets, targeting, creatives and everything else was 100% identical. On these 2 different pages I even uploaded identical display pictures and content.

The results came out to be very shocking for me. I use the word shocking because the price per result wasn’t slightly higher on one page than the other. It was more than 100% higher which means if CPA was $10 on 1 page, it was $25 on the other page.

The takeaway is that Facebook page name has a massive role in your over-all ad performance and cost per result.

How I Found Success On Airbnb As A Host in Pakistan

I haven’t frequently hosted properties on Airbnb in Pakistan but I listed one property in 2018 that I rented to sublet just for learning purposes and found success with it.

While there could be many tricks and hacks you may use to find success on Airbnb, my personal favorite is simply a pricing hack that I’ll share later in this post.

I think everyone agrees that the core success of any property comes from how good the property is, and what is the value for money. So you certainly cant discount that advice. Your property photography needs to be really good for the whole thing to look good and your pricing needs to be competitive with what others are offering in the neighborhood.

The second most important thing for your Airbnb listing is your landing page. It should be super informative. There’s little need for you to get creative, just look at the highest rated properties, and try to copy everything that they’ve done on their landing pages. Try to provide as much information as other top properties have done. If you don’t find anything extra ordinary in the neighborhood, explore properties in other countries such as US and UK and find the best parts for your sales pitch.

The third thing, that I was able to really make money from, is simply a pricing hack. When you search a property, Airbnb displays the base fare on the front-page. If you have ever booked a property, you may have noticed how your $50/night and 10 nights never add up to become $500. Instead, you’re always paying $750 or something. This happens because when you open the property, the pricing now includes price per number of guests staying, weekend pricing, cleaning fee, airbnb service fee etc.

Since I was only interested in rentals that were at least a week long, I set the minimum length as 7 days, and took advantage of the weekend pricing. I set the base pricing as $50 or about 20% lower than my competition. By doing so, Airbnb not only ranked me higher than my competition but I also looked more interesting and generated a higher clickthrough rate from my audience. My weekend pricing was twice as high ($100) as my base-fare and since the rentals were always week long, there was no way to avoid weekend pricing.

In the end, my pricing structure would sell 5 nights for $50/night, and 2 nights for $100/night cumulatively giving me $450/week or an average nightly rate of $65/night.

After taking the final pricing into account, I costed about the same as my competition, but appeared 20% cheaper, appeared higher in airbnb search ranks, and had a better click-through.

This is just one of the many ways you can take advantage of the Airbnb pricing system to generate higher revenue and occupancy rates than the rest of the neighborhood.

PS: This was only an experiment that I ran a couple of times and not something that I presently do.

Why I Like Facebook’s CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)

Facebook launched campaign level budgets in the mid of 2019. Initially, I was skeptical but I’ve started to like CBOs a lot. By using campaign level budget, I can now test 5-10 adsets in the same budget that I needed before to test 1 adset.

Facebook simply spends higher budget on the adsets within a CBO that are more worthy of my budget and spends lesser budget on adsets that are more likely to burn cash.

There is always a risk of missing out on a potentially winning adset but the reward overshadows the risk. In addition, you could still define minimum spend per adset within a CBO to ensure that each adset gets a bare minimum spotlight. Although, I generally advise against that.

My only problem with CBOs thus far is the organizational structure. Prior to CBOs, I only had to create 1 campaign per product. My campaign could then have hundreds of adsets.

Now I’ve to create multiple campaigns per product with each campaign grouping similar adsets together. Because of this, I’ve to create 10s of campaigns per product. The downside is I can’t group together data for 1 product without using filters which is just an added inconvenience

If Facebook introduces something which is above the campaigns level only for sake the of categorization, I’d really like that.

Izteraab, Restlessness & Early Retirement

A few days ago I did a twitter rant about the inability to find equilibrium in life. You can read the rant below

My friend Haris pointed out that this is because the natural human state is not meant to be at rest. In fact, the natural human state is izteraab or restlessness and instead of avoiding izteraab one needs to embrace it.

I started writing this blog in order to finish my early retirement experiment and re-engage with work on some level. It was an effort to resume what I term in my rant as light work. Next thing I knew was that I was working full-time running e-commerce stores, content arbitrage and more.

After going through the experiment of early retirement, working lightly, and then working full-time, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can not and should not avoid work. I haven’t bought freedom from work completely probably because I don’t want to. The only freedom I’ve bought is that I can and should work on things that are most meaningful and fulfilling for my personal happiness and not whatever pays the biggest buck.

I’m also willing to engage with whatever pays the biggest buck as long as I can find people I can invest in who can then carry on that work.

Our Number 1 Winning Strategy: Test Everything

Some people make it seem like that creating viral content is a science. I think there’s some data analytics to it but it’s not entirely science.

In my opinion creating viral content means putting a ton of content out for your audience, studying consumption based on user behavior, and trying to replicate that again in the next piece of content.

It may sound like bit of a science, but the root of all viral content comes down to just pure testing.

These days I spend a lot of time and money running ads for our e-commerce store. The key to running ads right is to test everything; creatives, targeting, copywriting and all permutations of all variants.

In the end, I keep the ones that work, and stop the ones that don’t.

Product video ads aren’t much different either. I believe that before the consumers have received and used the product first hand, the product is only as good as it’s creative.

Sometimes we take segments of what works within multiple creatives and stitch together to make what now works as a whole.

In the end, for me, it’s just testing, looking at results, and improving based on the data.

The Right Way to Talk to AI Support to Lift Limitations

A few days ago, I spoke about the visa restrictions on the internet. I also wrote a bit about how you can circumvent those. Today, I’m going to write about a certain kind of visa restriction that I often face.

Large platforms treat users from different countries differently. They do that to apparently keep their platform “safe”. To keep the platform safe, they look at the data they have on each country, the amount of spam/scam etc happening from each country or region and then develop rules to treat each user accordingly. In theory, this means it’s harder to use these platforms from Pakistan than it is from US even if all you’re trying to do is use the platform the right way.

One such restriction that I’ve always seen happen is completely losing access to account. For example in the past, I’ve lost access to my Facebook personal account and Facebook ad accounts. Google Adsense is also more likely to get disabled in Pakistan than in US. There’s always the option to appeal for both these platforms but appeal often results in nothing.

A friend of mine devised a strategy to deal with these appeals. His theory is that all account closures happen with no human intervention. The decisions are completely taken by the machines. He also believes, and I agree, that in most cases the appeal process also happens without any human intervention. So how can you convince a machine into accepting your appeal?

My friend uses emotional signals to deal with this. If you’re apologetic or regretful in your tone of appeal, your appeal is never going to get accepted. You’re guilty and you’re showing it in your tone. Instead, my friend is angry, distressed and disappointed when he’s appealing; and I’ve seen it first hand that the appeal is much more likely to work.

I Couldn’t Afford Anything

I couldn’t afford anything. Like most other people in Pakistan, I couldn’t either. When I started my first blog, I couldn’t buy the domain or the hosting. When I bought my first .com domain in 2009, I couldn’t afford a separate hosting package.

I paid 1600 Rs for 1 year of domain inclusive of 1 year of shared hosting that couldn’t take 10 sessions in parallel. But I went ahead, and still shared that hosting with my friend Awais Imran aka WaisyBabu and hosted his site ArtsyHands alongside my site. The small blogging and tech community was very inclusive and believed in giving.

Uzair Sajid aka UzEE, who was also a student at that time, would help me modify my theme because I didn’t know how to. Salman aka SKDev, may his soul rest in peace, would do serious development work for me, for absolutely no charge.

Writers wrote for free for the love of music until KoolMuzone could afford them. Photographers and videographers covered concerts for KM, also for the love of music.

Faizan Shoaib became our product manager, for absolutely no compensation. He worked with us, at no cost, from 2009 to 2012. It wasn’t until 2019 that I met him for the first time.

My cousins and friends abroad would help me receive $20 in their PayPal and travel all the way to Western Union to send that money over.

My younger brother, became editor in chief, without me asking and eventually assumed co-founder role.

It all worked out in the end. I couldn’t afford anything or anyone. I couldn’t afford myself, let alone any employees. Still, it all worked out. It worked out because I guess I wanted it all to work out.

Not just for me, it worked out for all my friends who struggled alongside me. If you’re wondering that you can’t make it because you’re poor or foolish or no one would help you or teach you, then you’re wrong. All you have to do is reach out to people or learn on your own and take actions. If you keep taking actions long enough, it will work out.

That’s my promise to you.