Three crashes. One company in 100+ countries.

0. Why I keep telling this story

Most founders only tell you about the win. They put a logo wall on a slide and call it a journey. The real journey was four years of telling my parents the next idea would be the one. The real journey was watching cofounders take day jobs while I held the lights on. The real journey was calling Zohaib at 1am to say, "I think we should kill this one."

I keep telling this because I owe it to the version of me that was standing there, broke, doubting, three failures deep. He needed to hear that the next attempt could be the one. So this page is for that guy. Whoever he is, wherever he is reading this from.

I have told this version of the story publicly before. Dawn published a profile of me in 2017, titled "Behind every successful start-up, there are failures. This is one Pakistani entrepreneur's story." The page below is the version with all the context the newspaper had to cut for length.

1. GameOChat 2013–2016

~ failed, and it taught me everything ~

The vision

Build a multiplayer gaming platform where users could not only play games together, but also create them. We wanted to be the place where casual gaming and creator culture met. On every device. All at once.

What we tried

We went into stealth mode. Three years of stealth mode. Android, iOS, Web, and Windows Metro, simultaneously. We thought "launch big or don't launch" was a strategy. It is not. It is procrastination wearing a deck. We made the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2013 National Finals as team "TechnoCrafts" along the way. The trophy did not save us.

What broke

Two things, at the same time.

One. We diluted our focus across four platforms before we had one user. Every bug fix had to be replicated four times. Every design change required four discussions. We did not have the team for that. Almost no startup does.

Two. The Unity Platform launched while we were still building. They did our entire engine, better, free, and overnight, and we were still arguing about which navigation pattern fit Windows Metro best. Our differentiator evaporated. Our headstart evaporated. Our morale evaporated.

The lesson I carried out

Stealth mode is a trap. Ship the smallest possible thing as fast as possible. Let the market correct you while you are small enough to turn.

I have not built in stealth since. I never will again.

2. Educating Dreams 2014–2015

~ failed, and it taught me everything ~

The vision

An education-tech play. The details matter less than the moment in our arc. This was venture number two, attempted while the corpses of GameOChat were still warm. Most teams fracture here. Friends start interviewing at MNCs. Cofounders go quiet. The phone calls that used to last four hours start lasting four minutes.

What broke

Traction. We did not get enough users to know if the product was working. The harder failure was emotional. Two failures in a row makes you wonder if the problem is the idea, the team, or you.

The lesson I carried out

Separate the failure of the idea from the failure of the team.

Zohaib, Shakir, and I sat on a Karachi rooftop after Educating Dreams folded and made a single decision. The team was not the failure. The team would keep going. We just needed a different idea, and a different mechanism to fund the search. That is when OuzelSystems started taking client work, which paid for the third attempt, which paid for the fourth attempt, which is now a company in 100+ countries.

The institutional memory of a team that has failed together is one of the most undervalued assets in startups. If you have it, do not give it up easily.

3. RemindZapp 2015–2016

~ failed, and it taught me everything ~

The vision

An app that let you send trackable reminders to your friends. We were incubated at The Nest IO (now Katalyst Labs). We had the mentorship. We had the office. We had what looked like, on paper, the best shot we had taken in years.

What we tried

Six to seven months of focused development. Friends and family said the idea was great. Mentors nodded. Beta users came in. Technically the app was a win. Notifications fired. Tracking worked. Design was clean. By every internal metric, it was the most polished thing we had ever shipped.

What broke

We had built a Vitamin, not a Painkiller.

Nobody woke up in the morning desperate for a way to send a trackable reminder. The pain was not acute. The behavior change required to use the app every day was not justified by the value the app provided. Friends and family said yes because they loved us, not because they needed it. We had run our entire validation through people who had a social incentive to lie.

The lesson I carried out

Validation has to come from strangers. People who owe you nothing will give you the truth. Friends and family give you applause.

That sentence is the most expensive sentence I have ever bought. It cost three years and an app. I will say it for free to anyone who asks.

4. Why Social Champ worked

I want to be careful here. There are a hundred reasons Social Champ could have failed too. Many companies with better ideas, more capital, and more talent did fail. But the lessons above did three specific things for the fourth attempt.

From GameOChat: we shipped Social Champ as a single rough scheduler in weeks, not years. No stealth mode. No four-platform launch. The first version was, frankly, embarrassing. Embarrassing is fine if it is in the wild.

From Educating Dreams: we kept the team intact. Zohaib coded the first backend as a birthday gift to me. That is not a thing teams do unless they have weathered failures together first. The team was the moat.

From RemindZapp: we validated with strangers immediately. I tweeted Guy Kawasaki, the inspiration for the entire idea. He responded. He used it. He pointed out bugs. He endorsed it. That validation came from someone who had no reason to be polite.

The fourth attempt was not smarter than the previous three. It was just informed. That is the only difference between a serial founder and a first-time founder. Information that is paid for in failures.

5. The five rules I now live by

1. Ship before you are ready. Stealth is a hiding place dressed up as a strategy.
2. Validate with strangers. If your mom likes the idea, it does not count yet.
3. Vitamin or Painkiller? If users do not feel acute pain, you are selling a vitamin. Reprice and rescope, or move on.
4. The team is the moat. Pick people you can fail with. The idea will change. The cofounders should not.
5. Money is fuel, not the destination. The work is to leave the world a little better than you found it. Money is what lets you keep working.