Hamad Dar's Blog

Motivating The Motivator

My friend Zeeshan is a true awami person. He connects with people on a very unique level. He also has a rare ability to connect with people from all walks of life. I can’t do that. It’s a skill that I don’t have thus far. And I know very few people who can connect with people on this level.

His life story is very motivating for everyone because he didn’t just accomplish success in business. But he successfully defeated all life-struggles and hence everyone can relate with him.

I can only connect with people who are interested in internet marketing and entrepreneurship and even there, I probably only connect with a very small subset. But that doesn’t matter. Every person comes with a unique set of skills and everyone doesn’t need to learn to do everything. Individuality is the only thing that the world needs.

However, I connect very well with Zeeshan and he listens to me and gives value to what I’ve to say and if I can ever motivate him to do anything in life, he can do the rest for everyone else. So in a way my small actions, can have a large impact.

As long as we make our small contributions to the society, in our own small ways, they can go a long way.

He just published his 2nd Vlog, so check it out.

Signing Up For Gmail in 2004 Was Painful AF

I signed up for my first gmail account in July 2004. It was magical. Hotmail offered 2MB storage at that time. But Gmail thought of offering 1 gigabyte. This blew everyone away. After all, there’s no comparison between 2 megabyte and 1 gigabyte. There was only 1 caveat.

Gmail, for a very long time, was an invite only network. Only existing users could invite other people, and that too in limited quantities. It was similar to Orkut, another Google product, that you could only join by invite. The funny thing is that a ton of Pakistanis had both access and invitations to Orkut. But no one I could find had access or invitations to Gmail. So the struggle began.

My elder brother found a website called GmailSwap.com where you could offer services against a gmail invite.

Me and my brother tried to offer a bunch of services but nothing worked out. No one was interested in whatever we were offering. We weren’t creative, I guess. Or may be we offered Pakistan-relevant services that no one in the community had any interest in.

1 day I posted a swap service request that I’d spy anyone in Pakistan against a gmail invitation. A German-Pakistani found the post amusing but wasn’t interested in spying anyone. Instead he was interested in a pirated copy of Entity’s Paradigm (EP)’s debut album Irtiqa since he couldn’t buy it legally in Germany. I happened to own the album but only on cassette. Because I didn’t have the money to buy the CD, I converted the audio cassette to digital MP3s and then shared the album with him over the dial-up.

He wasn’t exactly happy with the results but rewarded me anyway for the effort.

I finally signed up on the super sexy 1 GB gmail account.

Who could have known, I’d despise it in the future.

Zeeshan, YouTube & Beyond

I met Zeeshan aka ZSM nearly 10 years ago. I met him after reading this article. He just had his 100th story get on Digg’s front-page which was a very big deal for me since I hadn’t had my first at that point. For people who joined social media later, Digg was like Reddit, only bigger.

To put things in numbers, 1 story getting popular on Digg would roughly mean 50,000 unique visits. 100 popular stories would approximately mean 5,000,000 visits. Assuming an RPM of $5, which is quite low, this should have generated $25,000. In 2008. By a 17 year old. Before Facebook, Twitter & YouTube were a thing.

Zeeshan also happens to have a rare disability called ‘rickets’ that has caused deformation to almost all the bones in his body. But I’ve found him more ‘able’ than most other people I know, including me. Since he doesn’t talk a lot about his disability anymore, I’m not going to do any further talking either.

Zeeshan’s story is extra-ordinary. What he achieved was special. Way more special than what anyone else I know achieved. But Zeeshan in the last couple of years, was very ordinary. He was ordinary because like most successful people, he had found his comfort-zone. He seeked happiness in things outside of work, which I completely understand. But once you do that long enough, you become very ordinary. And somehow, I feel special people shouldn’t be ordinary. They can be ordinary for themselves, but not for the rest of the world. And the world deserves to see more of Zeeshan.

Today, I think would be the first day of that happening. Zeeshan has just started his YouTube vlog. His challenge to himself is 1 vlog a day for at least next 365 days.

My predictions for his YouTube channel are below.

He will cross minimum 250,000 subscribers before year ends, without a Rupee in ad-spend.
He will have minimum 10,000,000 views before the year ends.
At least 1 of his videos will hit 1 million views. There’s a 50% probability that this will happen. But if he gets married in last quarter of 2020, there’s a 95% probability of this happening.
All these predictions will only come true if he completes 365-day challenge.

I’ve recently developed a habit of making public predictions. They can be embarrassing if you’re awfully off. But they are fun and challenging. They also improve my chances of predicting better in the long run.

Anyway, if you’re interested in more of Zeeshan, here’s his first Vlog.

Growth Risks With Facebook’s Machine Learning

Facebook has very advanced machine learning capabilities. More often than not, you’re better off reaching your customers for a cheaper cost by reaching a broader audience instead of a narrow targeted audience. But how is that possible? In theory, targeted audience should work better? But with strong ML, the broader audience delivers better and cheaper results provided that the initial customer dataset was correct.

But what happens if you get the initial data wrong? It puts their ML chase your customers in the wrong direction. Let me explain.

When building a Facebook page, growth is going to depend a lot on you first 100s or 1000s likes. Hence getting your first subscribers or customers wrong, can put you altogether in the wrong direction. I can think of 2 reasons why that could happen. Firstly, your upcoming page subscribers are likely to come from the network of your existing subscribers due to sharing and other engagement. And secondly, the engagement behavior of the first data set of subscribers with your content will define how engaging your page is and eventually define the placement of your page in the newsfeed and other Facebook algorithms.

So getting the initial dataset of subscribers/customers is extremely important. It is why I’m generally way more careful in the start when building a Facebook page or an e-commerce store through Facebook ads but later on take the liberty to test all kinds of traffic. It keeps my seed-data clean. The data that is going to be used to build the entire user-base later on.

If you have a question, please feel free to ask in comments.

Three Types of Founders & Financial Planning

I think I can categorize founders into three types when it comes to their financial management with regards to running a business.

The fist type of founders, and I think these are found in most abundance, do not really like to make projections and plan finances. They are extravagant with their expenses and while many times they are really good at generating revenue and achieving growth, they are still often seen in debt, or raising more funds, or struggling in general most months than they are not, despite the high amount of revenue. I’d say it’s a miracle if any of these founders and their companies survive in the long-term. The only reason they may is because their business model is extra ordinarily profitable and can afford a lot of money wastage.

The second type of founders like to make too much projections, and cut cost everywhere. They believe in MVPs and lean-startup models. They don’t spend money on creating features that someone may or may not use. They test everything with a small amount of people using unscalable methods to generate data. Their future scaling decisions are also data driven. They sometimes cut so much costs that they are often seen working long hours. They also struggle with hiring and team building because of their lower cost mentality.

The third type of founders are somewhere in between. They appreciate projections and financial planning. They love MVPs and lean-startup models. But they spend a large amount of money in building team, delegating tasks, and also on R&D which eventually results a lot of times in wasted features and money. But they do it because in the long-term it’s worth it.

In Pakistan, most of the founders I’ve met are the first type while I feel most founders should aspire to become the third type of founders.

How Crypto-Assets Will Play Out In The Long Term

Idea of the internet and the TCP/IP protocol was formally adopted in the 80s. In the 90s we started to see some of the companies reflecting some of the things that can be done on the internet. Amazon was founded in 1994 and Google was founded in 1998. But the internet bubble called the “dot com bubble” burst in 2000. It is when we saw the stock market crash, and most internet companies from the era simply failed and disappeared.

The bubble was real. A lot of companies with bad business models raised wild amount of money and created no value. A few companies survived. At the peak of bubble, Amazon’s stock was worth nearly a $100. At the bottom of the crash, it was nearly $5. Today, it stands at a whooping $1870. So in hindsight, Amazon and companies like Amazon weren’t the problem. Internet wasn’t the problem either. The internet created real value as we all can see today. The problem was excessive speculation and get-rich quick sentiments and since it wasn’t sustainable the market crashed.

I feel crypto-assets are a lot like that. The idea of decentralized crypto assets was first properly proposed in the 90s by Nick Szabo. By 2009, Bitcoin, the first crypto asset of it’s kind was released. By 2013, we had many more crypto-assets including Namecoin, Litecoin & Ethereum. But I’d say the crypto bubble burst in 2017.

I think the crypto-winter might last as late as 2027. During the crypto-winter, most crypto-assets that exist today will have disappeared forever. But there will be Amazons and eBays of crypto-assets, the ones that will survive. By 2037, they will value collectively in trillions of dollars.

2037 will be a great time for crypto-assets, just like 2019 is a great time for tech industry in general.

All of this is speculation, of course. I don’t have the crystal ball. But it is what I believe in. What I also believe in is that the history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes.

Disclaimer: The information provided is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered legal or financial advice. To the maximum extent permitted by law, I disclaim any and all liability in the event any information, commentary, analysis, opinions, advice and/or recommendations prove to be inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable, or result in any investment or other losses.

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.

Why Shane Used Two Identical Laptops For Work

In 2013, I and my co-founder Saad, travelled to NYC to meet a native-ad company we worked with. We were one of the largest publishers for the native-ad company at that point, and they took a lot of interest in our business. They wanted to learn more about us and our work and so we were invited to their office to deliver a keynote, where we also met one of our relationship managers, Shane.

We also met Shane a few days later on a cold December night, while he hosted us for a mouthwatering steak. Later he invited us to his place which over-saw the breathtaking Hudson river. An unrelated but interesting event, he invited over another friend who smoked weed at his apartment which I saw happen for the first time in my life. On his bed, I saw two MacBook Pros, identical to each other with the same specs and colors. I was surprised and I wondered why would someone buy two identical laptops. And so I took the liberty to ask.

I was shocked with the answer I got. Shane had two MacBooks because one of them was given to him by his employer – the native ad company while the other one was his private property. I learnt that Shane also gives out freelance consulting on the side and doesn’t do it on his employer’s MacBook.

The reason why he doesn’t do it is because of “conflict of interest” which is roughly defined at Wikipedia as a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another.

And by Shane’s definition of conflict of interest, using his employer’s MacBook to generate freelance consulting revenue on the side is a violation of trust put in him by his employer.

Since then, I’ve taken conflict of interest very seriously. I have kept it close to my heart. I’ve avoided it as much as practically possible for me. I’ve encouraged others to do the same and I hope and expect that Pakistani entrepreneurs will start to avoid or mitigate conflict of interest seriously.