Nalikes Studio · Co-Founder & CEO · 2022–2026 · Crypto Product Studio

Built a crypto development studio from $0 to $1M ARR, and owned the entire engine end to end.

• Grew the company from $0 to $1M ARR as the person responsible for revenue. I sourced the leads, qualified them, booked the calls, closed the deals, and wrote the contracts.
• Closed retainers of $7k to $20k per month on 6-month terms, with average contract value north of $100k.
• Built the outbound sales system from scratch: ICP, offers, scripts, automation, discovery, and closing.
• One of the first people to build a structured outreach process on Telegram for deal sourcing. Also ran outreach across Discord, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Email, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
• Traveled to major crypto conferences worldwide, including Token2049 and Consensus, to source deals in person.
• Hosted a podcast on my YouTube channel, interviewing founders on how to build successful companies and products in crypto. 
• Hired and led the delivery side too. I recruited 100+ developers over time (20+ at peak), negotiated offers, brought on project managers, set the vision, kept the team motivated, and stepped in whenever things broke.
• Collected video testimonials directly from clients. 
• My clients went on to win. A few of the products my team shipped:
  • DecaSwap, built under the guidance of JP Thor, founder of ThorChain (~$2B protocol). 
  • Shadow War, a 5v5 web3 action game that raised $5M in Series A funding. 
  • RISE Chain, an Ethereum L2 that raised $8M (Galaxy Ventures, backed by Vitalik Buterin). 
  • Power.win, a licensed crypto gaming and entertainment platform that raised $5M (led by Polychain Capital). 
  • Hiway, a direct-to-fan distribution platform for independent filmmakers, co-founded by Zach Rothwell — a 14+ year film distribution veteran who has managed 1,000+ titles as head of international sales at High Fliers Films. 

ChatGPT Wrapper · Co-Founder · 2022–2023 · Bahrain

• ChatGPT wasn't available in Bahrain, so we built the access layer. The launch went viral  within days and demand was immediate. People wanted it and were willing to pay for it. Our servers went down under the load, which is the best problem a product can have.
• We partnered with Local BH  to build it out properly and launch further.
• Then OpenAI launched in Bahrain and put ChatGPT on WhatsApp, and the gap we were filling closed overnight.
• We had built something people wanted, which is the hard part. What we didn't have was a moat. The lesson I actually took from it is bigger than that: when your product sits on top of a foundation model, the model provider will eventually build your product themselves. They did.
• This was the first time Paul Graham's essays stopped being theory for me. Do Things That Don't Scale , How to Get Startup Ideas , Startups in 13 Sentences .
• I came out of it able to build an LLM product end to end, and with a clear view of which ones are worth building.

Co-Founder · 2021–2022 · Bahrain

• A play to earn game, built with co-founders, and one of the first NFT projects to come out of Bahrain.
• We did $100k in NFT sales and built a community of 5,000+ people. I ran that community directly, hosted Twitter Spaces regularly, and spent most of my time on the part nobody talks about: keeping several thousand people interested in something that doesn't exist yet.
• It's also where I actually learned the crypto space from the inside rather than from a distance, which is what everything I've done since has been built on.

Voicemate · Co-Founder · 2021 · Bahrain

Turned the AWS hackathon prototype into a real product: sign-language translation.

• Launched publicly with Bahrain's Ministry of Information Affairs and the UOB Cloud Innovation Center.
• Tackling communication access for 400M+ deaf individuals worldwide.
• Pitched to startup accelerators in Bahrain, including Flat6Labs. It was our introduction to the startup world and fundraising, and we later carried that experience into raising for Yalghaar too.

AWS AI Hackathon · 2020 · Bahrain

Developed an AI-powered voice-to-sign-language translator (and vice versa).

• Won 1st prize at the AWS AI hackathon (MENA region).
• Prototype was further developed in partnership with AWS and Tamkeen, and became Voicemate.

2019–2021

• Book Hub.
  • I came across dropshipping and wanted to try it, so I started an online bookstore for hard to find books in the GCC and ran it with a friend for a few months. It did not stick.
  • Everything I had done until then was digital services. This was the first time I handled physical products, and that alone made it worth doing.
• Yalghaar .
  • A self improvement content brand that grew from zero to 100,000+ followers, with brand deals from companies like Speechify .
  • I started it because I was watching those videos anyway. I was getting motivation, guidance and hope from them at a time when I needed all three, so I began clipping the best parts and posting them.
  • They took off. Some of the shorts  did 75,000 and 150,000 views. There was a TikTok too with videos in the millions of views, which I deleted to turn it into a Nalikes account. Stupid mistake.
  • This is still the most fun I have had building anything, and it is a big part of why I keep coming back to the idea of doing something with reach.
• Hackathons.
  • Started entering them with friends to find out what I could actually build.

Funoon · Founder · 2017–2020

• The opportunity was sitting in front of me. A lot of students at my university had money and no interest in doing their own work. That is true almost everywhere, because the system rewards the degree and not the learning.
• It was my first real experience of dealing with customers and delivering work on time.
• I figured out how to hire people from anywhere in the world. At one point I had 30+ writers working for me.
• I had not graduated yet, and I was managing work for PhD students and C-level executives at Fortune 500 companies like Aramco.
• Almost all of the growth came from word of mouth. At some point there was more inbound than I could handle, so I started turning clients away and passing work to other writers.
• This is the business that stabilised my family.
• I scaled it, then handed it to my brother and taught him how to run it.
• It was rebranded to Scribe , and it is still operating today.

• Since we were immigrants, my parents had to start their lives over from scratch with me and my brothers.
• Both of them worked around the clock, to the best of their abilities, to give us a good life and a better future. I am and always will be grateful to them.
• My mother was a teacher her whole life. She taught at school during the day and tutored more students at home in the evenings.
• My father did all kinds of jobs and ran all kinds of business experiments. He tried harder than anyone I know, but for several reasons it never quite stabilised.
• Money was a constant problem, and it brought a lot of other problems with it.
• I went to Little Flower School  in Dubai, then Pakistan Urdu School in Bahrain, which is now Iqra Private School .
• I was too young to earn, so the only way I could contribute was to be a good student. I was always the top student in my class.
• I helped around the house wherever I could, and tried not to add to what my parents were already carrying.
• The rest of my childhood was football, video games, movies and studying.
• My mother would send me to my uncle's printing shop . My father took me to his office and along on his projects. I was watching how work actually gets done long before I understood that was what I was doing.
• Everything I know about business started there.
• I learned early that if I wanted something, I would have to make it myself.