A new habit that I adopted in the past few years is ‘blogging’. I have been reading several blogs, stories from successful people around, learning from mistakes of experienced entrepreneurs, and just like all other people – I also have a list of people who I ‘admire‘ for their healthy contribution in my life. So I thought to share the list of people who helped me become what I am today.

After the limitless support of my family members comes the list of following people:

- Ra[y]za

Muhammad Raza, my school buddy – I was in 8th grade when we became friends and after buying my new PC, we used to share our stories about Need for Speed 3. Raza always used to crack down things, dig them to the deepest. We were once sharing some files for NFS when Raza made a webpage and hosted the file. Later, during lunch hours I asked if it’s possible to make a website and that hour marked the beginning of my web designing era. It was really fun to design personal home pages back in 2000 (I still have one hosted at: http://coolpoint.20m.com). He always helped me in picking up basic html concepts, file/hosting issues etc. And after that, he gave me a vision about web layouts and since then I’ve designed more than thousands of them! Thanks bro!

- TBT

Talha bin Tariq was a 3rd year student at my university when I was a fresher. Fortunately I got a chance to design an illustration for Graduate Profile 2004 and after seeing it he asked me to show him the rest of my portfolio (in Lab-1 of FAST-NU). He was the first person who encouraged me a lot and helped me to discover more in gfx. I was also offered to design illustrations for Online 17th and even after producing not-so-good results; he appreciated me and got the best out of me. I still remember that how with few quick-clicks in Photoshop, TBT used to create impressive outputs! His good quality knowledge about core, amazing after-effects on images and friendly behavior always made me enjoy his company =) There are few extra-ordinary students among each batch, and he was MashAllah one of them. Talha is now a Software Engg. at Microsoft and you can view his complete profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/talhatariq

- AhsanQ

Ahsan Qamar, my group member; my teacher – the one person who pulled me out of the failure curve and helped me to see the potential inside! I really had a poor start at university, although I had interest in web designing and development but never scored well in my exams. I always had a lazy attitude towards my assignments. But this one person dragged me out of darkness and helped me cover all the knowledge that I missed in classrooms. I still remember the Data Structure assignment nights spent at his place which really helped me to get a good grip on programming. Ahsan always used to understand things very quickly, remember each and every concept read just once, and program things in a very efficient manner – MashAllah! Most of the time when we had study sessions, Ahsan took the lead (with Shoaib Hafeez on support ). Today, I feel blessed having such friends, and the experience of failing and then going up really teaches you the importance of success, and this lesson one can not grasp easily by succeeding in one go. Ahsan Qamar recently flew back to his hometown (Rawalpindi) and will be starting his new job this week InshAllah. I’ll really miss him around!

- Asad

Asad Siddiqi, my mentor – yet another senior at FAST-NU but I got to know him after I graduated. I once added him for some freelance project on my IM and today, I chat with him just like my any other friend. During night-shifts at TeraData, I used chat with him and share recent happenings. While seeking new jobs, I used to consult him and he always gave me healthy advices. Although he is currently in NCR, USA but he had good knowledge about local software houses, their products and trends. And he really played a major role in helping me switch my job, in switching to a better place!

- Ammar

Syed Ammar Faheem, the little kid – committee interviews were on the go (during my final year) and I got a chance to interview this kid, both for ‘The Webmasters’ and ‘Interface’. Ammar used to manage PakMarkaz.net, so I visited the site and the colors didn’t appeal me much. Some mishap happened and I proposed not to induct this kid in both committees. But later on, we got him on board and the kid started to prove himself. We’ve worked together in Procom, Interface and even studied together during my last semester at university. And this little kid (not so little now ) is responsible for this space that I hold on the web – yes, my blog! Ammar was the one who pushed me to start blogging although I was reluctant to do so and always used to think: what’s the use?! But after starting it I realized the benefits it holds.  He has been selected as the President of Procom 2009 – proud of you kid! And I am really a fan of the ‘aggressive’ content writing he does.

(and the last one on my list is..)

- STUPEFY

Abdul Basit, just like my elder brother, and a business partner – it was the 1st semester, our group was sitting outside in the lawn (at FAST-NU) when I had a chance to chit chat with this geeky fellow. And our minds clicked on one thing that was “Flixin.tk”, a resource for IPT assignments. Much has happened until now and we’ve spent almost 6 years together. One thing not-so-immediately-noticeable about Basit is, “he is really soft-hearted” and he even agreed to that while we were practicing for MBA interview (5 good things about you) ; ) He always has wise opinion about things, better understanding of issues in life and really takes good care of things and people around! We’ve been running a venture since 1 year now Alhamdulillah and it is really fun working together. Basit has been always interested in core stuff and at times I feel too relaxed to even bother what’s happening on the backend. I believe not every friend of yours can become a business partner but I’m glad that we’ve been able to keep things separate both for our professional as well as friendly lives!

Before I wrap up this note, I would like to mention names of few more people who helped me to grab expertise in PHP/MySQL – Ammar Rafiq, Asim Imtiaz and Fahim Ilyas.

“A student never forgets an encouraging private word, when it is given with sincere respect and admiration.” ~ William Lyon Phelps

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!

Yup, the new PakMarkaz.Net is up! We have finally revamped the CMS. Authors can now easily post their articles, edit them and view their statistics. But that is not all. InshAllah we will be coming up with couple of more surprises. Stay tuned!

Karachi, Tuesday, 1st January 2008: A group of patriotic Pakistani’s has launched the PakMarkaz Network today. It is a website aimed at spreading awareness and a spirit of unity amongst Pakistani’s worldwide. The website, http://www.pakmarkaz.net has a solid mission statement:

“To unite, make aware, enlighten and empower the people of Pakistan by providing a strong platform to those who have a vision, and to those who wish to be guided, on the principles of Unity, Faith and Discipline.”

The PakMarkaz Network has over 30 authors who are all collectively known as the Ambassador’s of Truth. Visitors and readers may “Talk-Back” and express their views on all articles and content that appears on the website. The writers are students and graduates from leading universities of Pakistan who wish to bring about a positive change in the country and its people.

If you have the passion to write, blog and express yourself, we are looking just for you! About to re-launch, PakMarkaz.Net needs what we call “Ambassadors of truth”. We are looking for patriot Pakistani’s from across the globe to write on any topic they want to.

PakMarkaz.net has a broad scope, from news, politics and current affairs to technology, beauty, recipes, health, fitness and all that suits the everyday life of a Pakistani!

As an ambassador of truth you would be able to express yourself freely on the PakMarkaz.Net portal. Publish articles with only a few clicks, interact and discuss with people!

If you are interested to become an Ambassador of Truth, contact us with the following details:

1. Your Full Name
2. Your Contact Number (Cell phone preferred)
3. Your Areas of interest

Anticipating a positive response from everybody.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Mustafa Haroon
The PakMarkaz Network
mustafa.haroon@pakmarkaz.net