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Category: About Me

This Article Will Completely Change Your Life & I’m Not Click-baiting You

Do you know when a butterfly flaps its wings in South America, it can cause hurricane in North America. A butterfly can cause a major catastrophic event in a different continent. This is known as the butterfly effect. Although it is called the butterfly effect for a completely different reason, but the example narrated is real. And the takeaway is that tiny decisions you will make today will have huge consequences on your life.

Let me explain this further. I became a tech entrepreneur by accident. I encourage you to read how that happened. Had I not landed on a random web page that day which happened completely out of accident, I might not even be in this industry at all. If I weren’t in this industry at all, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. And if I didn’t write this blog, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Because you’re reading this right now, the outcome of your life has already changed. If you weren’t reading this, you could have been doing something else, that would have had a different outcome on your life. But this article has already changed your life and when I said I wasn’t click-baiting you, I meant it.

I can remember many examples of how small actions had massive affects on my life. I’m going to share another one below.

In 2013, our Adsense account was disabled. We lost so much money there, I don’t even have the right expressions to describe it. In 2018, someone launched a class-action lawsuit against Google inviting all other parties to file their claims. Who could have thought a simple form that my co-founder filled in under 3 minutes would mean we’ll be getting paid for everything that was held 6 years ago. That we’ll be winning a case against Google. Without ever hiring a lawyer or ever thinking to file a lawsuit against them. By simply filling a form digitally.

A simple digital form and a huge amount of money. It sounds unreal, even to me, but it isn’t. It happened because of a small action that had a major impact on our lives. And so if you’re not taking actions, you are playing with the outcomes of your life.

So go ahead and make the decisions that you want to make because down the line they will not only change your life, but those of thousands of others.

Life seems chaotic. But chaos has order. Chaos is deterministic but it’s also very unpredictable. It’s unpredictable because often we don’t know the initial conditions and actions. But if we did the unpredictable chaos becomes very deterministic. And so if you take the right initial actions today, you are quite likely to have a deterministic future, no matter how chaotic life may feel.

Leaving Your Own Business

There was an occasion when I had to move on and leave a large amount of money behind. I had to leave a business that I co-founded. I can’t say it makes me happy about it. But I will say staying back would have made me unhappier.

It’s a challenge where you choose an option that makes you as little unhappy as possible. And certainly, it isn’t an easy challenge. But I believe with all my head and heart, despite feeling otherwise sometimes, that moving on was the right decision.

I made my decision with the following in my mind

“If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.”

Naval Ravikant

Yesterday, I spoke to another founder who made a similar decision a few years ago. He left 7-figures on the table to move on for personal happiness. In the end life is a pursuit of happiness. Money is nice, but it’s not always the answer, especially after you have enough of it.

The Lazy Entrepreneur – And Why It Isn’t Bad

I achieved many of my goals by the time I turned 24, and most by the time I turned 28. Of course, my goals weren’t as big as many others have. They were rather small.

I tried to find happiness in things outside of work accomplishments and financial success and also tried to live a modest lifestyle. I also slowed down at 28 because I felt burnt out by working really hard in the past 10+ years. I felt that I don’t have the same kind of energy anymore that I used to have before, and I turned lazy.

I understand this could be a controversial opinion, and others may disagree. But I think laziness isn’t as bad as it sounds. In fact it can be good. Initially I didn’t like the fact that I’ve turned lazy. Even now, sometimes, I don’t like it especially when I FOMO about interesting opportunities. But I’m in a transition to becoming what I call the lazy entrepreneur. I haven’t achieved the status properly, but I wish to.

The lazy entrepreneurs don’t like working actively. They are tired of working. So they find lazy solutions to the problems that need to be solved. They like investing in things to create passive income. Lazy entrepreneurs also build lazy stock portfolios. But my favorite kind of lazy entrepreneurs invest in and empower active entrepreneurs.

Lazy entrepreneurs wish to move from being CEO of 1 company to having CEOs for multiple companies. Unfortunately, I have already achieved being lazy but haven’t yet mastered the art of being a lazy entrepreneur. Although, it’s a journey I’m excited about.

I Love Rejections, And You Should Too!

I’ve been rejected so many times in my life. For a very long time I actually thought that I’m gonna have to struggle with food as soon as my parents stop paying my bills. I thought that because I was constantly getting rejected.

After finishing my high school (FSc in my case), I was rejected twice from joining the military in Pakistan. I’m not even sure today why I applied, and glad that it didn’t work out. I appeared on the NUST Business School merit list, but later turned down by them after the interview. They decided I didn’t deserve to study business in their prestigious school after meeting me in person. My provisional admissions in some other universities were also cancelled after the 2nd year (12th grade) results came in. My parents had even paid the admission fee. Pakistani kids can imagine that I was in real deep shit.

I joined the first university I could after that. I think spending 4 years there was a good experience. It helped me become who I am today. Bahria produced a ton of entrepreneurs from my peers. I got to know many people who are today massively popular musicians, movie stars, film-makers, photographers, bloggers, product creators etc.

If you’re in the digital space chances are you already know about Saad Hamid. Taimur Asad came out to be one of the most popular tech bloggers, not just in Pakistan but pretty much in the world. Ghaus Nakodari, the kick-ass founder of Jumpshare. Adnan Shafi, who recently raised $450,000 for his startup PriceOye. These are just the people I was friends with at college. There could actually be countless more.

I don’t think Bahria was doing anything special with education. I just think they weren’t punishing students hard enough, like other top Pakistani educational institutes. And I think that let the natural talent come out of all these people. Which is everything that matters in the end. So if you’re struggling with university right now, don’t sweat about it, everything can and will work out.

Anyway, back to rejections again. It took me 6 years to make a profit at Koolmuzone. And in the end I had to close that profitable business for very external circumstances. I’ll write about it someday.

When I finally got a break, I was turned down by the most prestigious accelerator in US. Some rejections taught me great lessons about myself and I got great value from them (accelerator rejection). Other rejections helped me learn about the sad state of affairs of so many institutions (Pakistan’s education system in general). And some rejections helped me realize how misfit I was and they were nature’s way of putting me away from the course not intended for me (military).

But none of them let me down, or stopped me from my ultimate destiny. Rejections will either add value in your life, or will be net-neutral, but in the bigger scheme of things, I don’t see rejections ever taking away value from your life. You have to keep trying and never give up. And this is mainly for younger folks, stop sweating about rejections. It all works out in the end. Not just for me, but for everyone. Everyone is someone in the end.

My Sweetest Failure Made Me $17,239.85

Everyone says it’s great to fail. They say if you don’t fail enough times, you stand no chance at succeeding. I agree with that. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about one particular failure. A blog that I abandoned. Yet, it netted me $17,239.85. Which by the way is not an arbitrary figure. I exported it from my bank statement to know exactly how sweet was my failure.

Sometime in 2010, I started a technology blog. I was supposed to write about jailbreaking iPhone, rooting Android and all the other crazy things that you can do with your phones. Except that I don’t do crazy things with my phones and I had no interest in writing in this area. I started it because I heard the CPMs (Revenue per 1000 ad impressions) in tech are great (and they were). I also started it because many of my friends and colleagues were doing great with their tech blogs. The blog was inspired by Taimur Asad‘s RedmondPie and Zawad Iftikhar‘s SegmentNext. Since it wasn’t something I was passionate about, despite a good start, I just didn’t have the patience to run it for the long haul.

Stats for RewriteTech since inception till date of publication

Personally I gave this blog about two weeks. Later I hired some writers and let them contribute content with no oversight by me but eventually stopped that too since I couldn’t see any growth. Over the past 9 years, I have passively generated $17,239.85 (average $160/mo) after costs from the leftover traffic that Google kept sending in small numbers. Like someone said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. This post is about that. About taking a shot. Almost missing it. And still walking away with a pile of cash. Could it happen, if I didn’t take this shot? Will it happen, if you don’t take a shot?

Proof of Concept

Having figured out the monetization aspect of digital publishing very early in my life, I should have done well soon after I discovered it but that didn’t happen. For the next many years since 2004, all I did was make pocket change every few months. In hindsight, I think here’s what happened.

It wasn’t until 2009 that I realized the true potential of the internet and what the internet economy was going to be like in the future. You see, until that time I hadn’t met or known or heard of anyone in Pakistan who had made a full-time career (or even pocket change) by running his business exclusively on the internet. It was January of 2009 when I finally read a report about a couple of teenagers in Pakistan making north of $5000 a month by writing blogs. After reverse engineering those blogs, I had finally learnt that it is possible to scale my business beyond $20 per quarter. All I needed was a proof of concept.

My other big mistake was not moving early on to a paid domain and hosting plan after I had received my first check. It was only after I studied their blogs, I realized the importance of having a proper Top Level Domain in order to run a full time internet business, without which my websites were as good as they are on the dark web where you could only access a website by knowing the exact URL. All these years, I had completely missed out on understanding that without having my websites ranking in search engines which wasn’t possible without a TLD, I was never going to be able to drive enough audience to consider this a career. Without having a proper TLD, I was never going to have serious ad networks like Adsense approve me.

Six days after the proof of concept, I bought my first .com domain.

The Gold Rush

By 2004, I was running three websites. My personal homepage, a Pakistani music blog and a web forum. All on the free domains with .TK extension provided by the government of Tokelau an island in the south pacific with a population of 1500 people. The goal of the government of Tokelau was to create awareness about their country in the world in order to raise money to fund education, medical & development of the 1500 residents of the island.

Around the same time, I learnt about the commercial aspect of the internet. While I wasn’t eligible to sign up on the mainstream programs like Adsense for not having a .com domain extension, I quickly found an alternative program called MarketBanker, later rebranded as AdBrite. After serving ads for 10 months, MarketBanker sent me the first pay-check. My mother found it lying around in the lawn outside our house. It took 8 weeks to arrive, 6 weeks to cash and 20% of the money was lost to bank fees and commissions.

Although the check was only for $22.08 and it took 10 months in order to make this money, I was very excited as I realized this was going to be much bigger than just a pastime hobby.

An Accidental Marketer

When I look back today, it is nothing short of a miracle that I ended up becoming an internet marketer. The way these events unfolded almost feels like it was written in the stone. It was 2002, I had only just become a teen and was browsing on a dial up internet in Islamabad, Pakistan.

It was a privilege to have internet in Pakistan back then. In fact I think it was a privilege to have a computer at all. I don’t think we could afford it either. Not easily at least. It’s just that my father was really passionate about technology. So much that he decided to spend a big chunk of his savings to buy a computer.

I was trying to download a piece of software that would tell me in real-time the download and upload speed of my internet. As soon as I clicked on the hyperlink, I got a message notifying me that the site had run out of bandwidth. A message by Brinkster, a web hosting company. Except that I didn’t know what the bandwidth meant or what the web hosting means or what the heck was Brinkster. It certainly was not the name of the software I was trying to download.

On the page I saw a sign up button. I thought may be I need to sign up here in order to get the software. A few minutes later, I had signed up for brinkster’s web hosting service giving me a whopping 30 MBs of free hosting space but I still didn’t have my software, and I still had no clue what I signed up for.

Feeling confused, I called my father and made him look into whatever I was doing. After researching on it for a couple of hours, he explained to me what a web hosting means, what I signed up for and what can I do with it now. In the next couple of days, I built my first home page and hosted it on Brinkster. It is how I took my first step towards what I was going to be doing for the next decade and a half.

Reboot

This is my second time starting a personal blog. I started the first one a few years ago and wrote only a few posts in the entirety of its existence. Last year when I looked back at my posts, I disagreed with many of my own opinions and so I decided to delete the blog. Today, I think that was a mistake. I think it is incredibly important for everyone to put their views out in the public.

As Fred Wilson on his blog says

I would encourage everyone to share your views, opinions, and predictions publicly. It is a practice that produces great value for me and I think would produce similar value for others.

Going forward I plan to write something here everyday not just hoping to share something useful with anyone who reads this blog but also to create value for myself through feedback and comments.