Em 2007-2008: A year in review
It’s been a year since I started blogging, started doing startups, started going on a daily job after my graduation and a whole calendar year has passed too (2007-2008 as well as 1429 to 1430 Hijrah). Life in university was quite different than it is in industry!
January 1, 2008 was the day when we launched PakMarkaz.net (PMN), my first startup (with Ammar Faheem). PMN was started to unite the voices of our nation – a place where they could share their thoughts. Due to some serious delay in enhancements and lack of features, we couldn’t continue PMN with the same throttle and both of us got busy into daily life leaving PMN a little on the side. Since I couldn’t participate fully, I left the project circle in the second-quarter of 2008.
While PMN was going low, STUPEFY (a close friend of mine) had an idea through which we could enhance his final year project and convert it into a venture that could help people around the country to make free international calls! Unlike any other venture, this project required couple of investment and we had no clue to if we would be able to generate any ROI because the system worked in an odd way – yes, that is what we used to think about it in the start! We started working on it from last week of January 2008 and used to work day and night on the weekends. Finally, after testing up couple of features we were confident that it would work with every other user. Held a usual brain storm session and named the product ‘Connect2Pk‘. Launched its beta version on March 3, 2008 and with no SEM or SEO skills, we started promoting the product through our contacts. MashAllah, it’s been 11 months since the venture is up and running with a user base of more than 13,000 users and counting! We’ve learnt a lot from it – in fact Connect2Pk has been the core part of my every experiment on the web. Improved the layout, applied various SEO techniques, implemented AdSense, generated around 25% traffic from my blog (in the early days), sent invitations through email and the best part is – provided rapid support to our dear users!
Hopes started gathering around when I saw Connect2Pk growing. And guess what? I had another startup fever :$ But this time, I wanted to build up a proper team so I did couple of meetings with my university group. We shared couple of ideas and finalized to work on one – “Qeemat – a community based pricing system!” We had a team of 8, big enough to even build a social network but may be not everyone was motivated or interested. I had been always excited about my ideas and really wanted to see it live but things started getting delayed. My friends selected me as their team-lead but still the deadlines were part of dreams. I soon realized may be it’s a wrong step to start a startup with a bunch of people and I separated out hearing comments ‘un-realistic deadlines’ etc. Anyway, I started working on my own and set up certain deadlines and Alhamdulillah – Qeemat.com was up & running on that specific point of time. The venture did get a good response from the industry but not much from the users due to which I never looked back at it to improve its set of features. (And I know that’s a wrong attitude!)
Connect2Pk was the only venture that was up & running then. Since things were running quite smooth – I had a chance to explore things. I played a lot with WordPress, even ended up developing a plugin for it. And trust me; I’m really a fan of WP today! I don’t care how bad its code might be (as couple of developers commented negative over its architecture) but it really makes our life easy in putting up small content based web sites and/or blogs.
(Oops! There is just one more to list down..) Back in mid-October, STUPEFY felt like testing another project. How about we aggregate news from local sources and put them in one single place? The idea appealed to me and I suggested if we could give user a more reader-friendly interface by the help of AJAX and DIV (I was inspired by the way Google Reader displays all RSS items). On November 4, 2008 – we launched PakHeadlines with a very basic set of features. This little project of ours still needs some pending work to be done and the response on the website has been so far a little below average. However, I hope if we’ll manage to implement the updates before it gets further late – we might get lucky enough to catch some more readers!
Hmm, that was all about my startup experience during 2007-2008. Today, I’m employed in TPS and working on ‘InSight – ATM monitoring and management suite‘ and was earlier employed at TeraData (from 07-01-2008 to 31-07-2008). I did a small post on my blog when I switched the job (you can read it here). Alhamdulillah things have been quite smooth up here. I am really getting to learn a lot. My colleagues are really amazing – at times I feel blessed! And they really appreciate (and respect :$) me about all the venture experience I’ve been through so far. Anyway, I believe a post like this should have been done earlier but I was quite busy with my job and was trying to concentrate totally on it due to some high priority task.
At the end, I would just like to share few main factors that I believe were the major cause of failure:
- Love your product and dedicate yourself 100% on bringing it right
- Keep struggling hard to improve it
- Even if you fail, you can always learn and improve
And for the last one, I would like to give credit to Jehan Ara who recently shared an amazing video on her blog. Thank you ma’am!
Well, that’s about my past year – I would really love to hear some feedback and suggestions from my dear readers especially if they would like to drop their 2 cents to help me improve on the startups. Err..yes, I do have 2-3 ideas in pipeline for this year and InshAllah I hope to bring them in a more better & positive way.
Have a nice day!
21 comments
I’m impressed with your dedication and spirit. Your ideas are really cool though you shouldn’t give up in few months. PakMarkaz really have a potential to be a great success and I believe your ventures can go far and beyond because you do have a mind that can genrate unique ideas and have the energy to make them happen…
Hopefully 2009 will turn out to be even greater
Best of luck buddy
@Lubna
True, I should keep struggling with patience.. :$ Thanks for your feedback mate!
Active Bhai….. chaaa gaey aap tou….. me tou aur b pakka fan hogaya hoon aapka…… !!!
Humaray liyay b dua ki jiyayga…. Pata nahi hum kab karayngay aisay Hi-Fi Kaam
Kudos to you Mustafa and to Ammar and STUPEFY and all the young, passionate and enterprising people I have met in the last couple of years. With kids like you in our space, how can we be anything but optimistic about the future of our industry?
You have been a part of some great initiatives and I hope there are many more that are just waiting to emerge. In the meantime, TPS is a great place to be, to learn, to contribute, to be part of an award-winning team. Good luck and keep me in the loop so that I can talk about what you’re doing and involve you in whatever we are doing.
“My colleagues are really amazing – at times I feel blessed!”
only at times
I’m totally impressed and add me to ur fan list as well
…And now i really need those training sessions 
All prayers for your new, upcoming ventures
@Bappu
Thanks a lot kid! Try doing ‘the right thing at the right time’ and InshAllah you ppl will rock..
@Rambler
Yup, you people have supported me a lot in gaining the product insight and taking things to the next level! JazakAllah.
@Jehan Ara
Ma’am thanks a lot for dropping your comments. We’ll definitely try to work harder and take initiatives in a better way – and will InshAllah keep you in our loop!
The Law of Win/Win says, “Let’s not do it your way or my way; let’s do it the best way.”(Greg Anderson)
Good Luck for the next year!
Congrats on completing a pretty successful year MashAllah. Keep it up…u’ve to go a long away!
Btw I’m still confused about Insight and SMART :S….u ought to explain me..kal hi!
Hehe..achha, I’ll explain you
Great work!. Keep It up in 2009
yar i thought Qeemat ka idea chaley ga…….
kher phir bhi acha khasa experience ho gaya hia aap ko
best of luck in life
(:
“Love your product and dedicate yourself 100% on bringing it right”
You were aware where the pain was, cured it and then never paid a visit. Just my way of saying it: P Being an entrepreneur means someone who is crazy and loves his/her work. Good is okay but you should instill excellence to your products and services.
All the best for your ventures.
My prayers are with you.
BTW this post is an excellent piece of advice for someone like me who is stuck with a day job and wants to start ventures of my own. Wish me some luck
Hehe..good luck bro! (:
four more months – only – and then I’ll be done with my graduation, insha Allah! Lots of ideas, lots of plans.
@ Ma’am Jehan Ara: Thank you so much for those words of appreciation, you have always been an encouraging factor for all of us.
@ Mussu: It’s been one hell of a busy and adventurous year, hai na? =D All the best!!
Oyi! regarding Ideas… here’s one… it’s a long shot, but seeing the sudden growth of Paki Music scene, with channels like Aag TV flying out their pants to buy rights of new original music… AND… a vast Asian market to sell the product to… maybe you could work on something like the legal Napster for selling/promoting local music online… benefits:
* Sales Revenues + Adds
* Could maybe branch out in future as a partial independent record
label (like Guns n Roses’ latest album “Chinese Democracy” sold exclusively on WalMart as a retail product(as opposed to online sales in this case))
just a thought
Thanks kid! And all the best with your last year, really waiting to hear some exciting news from you (:
Good job Mustafa, the thing that impresses me about you and Basit is your drive to experience with ideas and dedicating yourself to it … connect2pk is one fine example… keep up your good work
“Not failure but low aim is a crime” – James Russell Lowell
@Karim
Thank you Karim bhai (:
Thank you Karim bhai, mustafa has been one great motivator to look for new horizons continuously.
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