Episode 97 – How Zain Mustafa Built a Tech Company from Scratch

Zain’s Bio:

Zain Mustafa is the CEO of Geeks of Kolachi, a forward-thinking software development agency. With over a decade of experience in the tech industry, Zain has led numerous successful projects, specialising in web and mobile application development. His expertise spans across full-stack development, UI/UX design, and digital transformation, making him a versatile leader in the field. Under his leadership, Geeks of Kolachi has become known for delivering innovative, high-quality solutions.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes

Introduction to Zain Mustafa

• Arsalan introduces the guest, Zain Mustafa, founder of a tech company started from freelancing.

Growing from Freelancer to Employer

• Discussion about Zain expanding his team from freelancing to dozens of employees.

Zain’s Greetings and Gratitude

• Zain expresses his appreciation for the opportunity to be on the show.

The Catalyst for Diving into Tech

• Arsalan asks Zain about the moment he decided to pursue a career in technology.

Early Love for Computers and First Coding Experience

• Zain shares how modifying games like Grand Theft Auto ignited his interest in coding.

Choosing Between Cricket and Coding

• Zain discusses his decision to focus on programming over a potential cricket career.

Do You Need a Computer Science Degree?

• Conversation about the necessity of formal education in starting a tech career.

The Importance of Community in Learning

• The value of learning alongside others and building a supportive network.

Working Remotely vs. In-Person Collaboration

• Arsalan and Zain discuss the pros and cons of remote work and personal space.

Adapting to Hybrid Work Models Post-COVID

• How companies are balancing remote and in-office work in a post-pandemic world.

Managing Remote Work Challenges at Home

• Strategies for setting up effective home workspaces despite family and space constraints.

Blurring Lines Between Work and Personal Life

• Arsalan shares experiences of extended work hours and lack of boundaries while working from home.

The Need for Social Interaction

• Zain talks about an employee’s desire to return to the office for human interaction.

Starting Geeks of Kolachi: Overcoming Early Challenges

• Zain recounts the struggles faced when launching his company and pivoting strategies.

Transition from Training to Development Services

• The shift from running a bootcamp to focusing on development due to financial constraints.

Scaling the Company During COVID

• How Geeks of Kolachi grew from 8 to 30 employees amid the pandemic.

Embracing Entrepreneurship Over Technical Roles

• Discussion on shifting focus from coding to managing and growing the business.

Building a Client Base Through Referrals

• The role of client relationships and referrals in business growth.

Establishing a Sales Team

• The realization of needing a sales team and learning from peers to structure it.

The Power of Online Presence

• How maintaining an online profile can lead to unexpected job and business opportunities.

Exciting Projects: AI-Powered Relocation Expert

• Zain describes working on an AI-driven platform to help users find optimal countries for relocation.

Collaborating with Industry Leaders on the Audi Project

• Insights into developing virtual showrooms for Audi using Unreal Engine.

Balancing Passion Projects and Business Needs

• The importance of guiding clients honestly, even if it means turning down projects.

Diverse Clientele: Startups to Fortune 500

• Geeks of Kolachi’s experience working with a range of clients across industries.

Technical Evolution and Focus on AI

• Zain’s journey from working with Angular to diving into AI and LLMs.

AI’s Impact Across Industries

• Discussion on how AI is revolutionizing various sectors and the surge in related projects.

The Democratization of AI

• The accessibility of AI tools like ChatGPT to the general public.

Advice for Aspiring Developers

• Zain emphasizes the importance of focused learning and community engagement.

Cultivating Curiosity in Development

• Encouraging developers to remain curious and continuously explore new ideas.

Services Offered by Geeks of Kolachi

• Overview of the company’s capabilities, including 24/7 availability and team structure.

How to Connect with Zain and Geeks of Kolachi

• Contact information and social media presence for those interested in collaboration.

Closing Remarks and Resources

• Final thoughts from Arsalan and information on where to find episode notes and links.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Arsalan Ahmed: Welcome everybody to another episode of Mentoring Developers. Today I am talking to Zain Mustafa, who is a co-founder—or just a founder, we’ll learn more about this—of a tech company that he started from scratch, starting from being a freelancer.

[00:00:17] Arsalan Ahmed: Then from there, he was able to grow it and grow his team, his dozens of employees. He has some exciting stuff and it’s a lot of lessons that you can learn from his experience. So, welcome Zain. How are you?

[00:00:30] Zain Mustafa: Thank you so much for this opportunity. We have been talking back and forth and finally, it’s happening, so I’m doing great. Thank you.

[00:00:41] Arsalan Ahmed: Thanks a lot. So, we’re gonna get right into it. I know that in the past episodes we go into a lot of background about where our guests have come from. And we’re gonna get into that, but I think the most important thing is that you are successful, you are in tech, but what was a moment or experience that made you say, this is it, I am diving into tech? So was it a love for problem-solving, something you saw, a pretty cool gadget, or something else that you started, like, I need to be in tech.

[00:01:13] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So, from a very early time, I was learning to play with computers. Of course, everyone starts with gaming. So back in the time, like 2004 or 2005, I used to play a lot of games on the computer. That was the time I wrote my first code. It was me changing the possibilities of how the car reacts in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. So that was my first intro to how exactly the computer works. I would change the number for one car and try to change what are the possibilities. So that was actually my first intro to the tech field.

Later on, I also developed a lot of different hobbies. A big one for me was cricket. So when I was doing my bachelor’s degree, I was given an opportunity to pursue a professional career in cricket. So I was like, why not? Let’s give it a shot. So I spent like a year playing cricket and I figured out that’s probably not for me. That was the moment when I picked just one thing that I love doing since the early times. Then I started giving more time to programming, and since then, I haven’t looked back to any other thing that I could have done better.

[00:02:46] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. So everybody catches a bug at some point. It happens to everybody. The important thing is that when you get that itch, you know that you’re onto something important, and then you go for it and you don’t hold back because whenever you’re starting, you have difficulties. So I know many people who want to get into tech, who would love to learn software development, maybe do something cool with AI, but they have never done it, especially when they don’t have a computer science education. In your opinion, do you think you really need a computer science education to get started with making your own things on the computer, or maybe wait until you have a degree, or can they just get started? Maybe they’re 18 years old.

[00:03:38] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So I started learning programming in my high school times. That was the first course that I took. After that, I had to take literally three different courses—three back-to-back same courses—to learn programming. Same thing again and again for straight two years. And the fourth time when I was studying, I got a very good teacher who taught me the concepts of programming in a very funny way and also making sure that we do a lot of actual stuff.

So the fourth time when I learned programming, that is when I got to know about exactly how things are working. Just the basic stuff was very difficult for me to catch. So I think most of the people who are starting, they might find it difficult. But yeah, that was the case with me as well.

To answer your question, if the degree is important or anyone can learn to code: actually, the company that I run, Geeks of Kolachi, was actually a bootcamp training program for students. I was very inspired by the bootcamp programs in the States. They were like HackerRank, Flatiron School; they were teaching how to code to people who were in different fields. They got themselves into maybe accounting, finance, or electrical engineering and something like that. They lost their job and they put themselves into 16 weeks rigorous coding bootcamp program, and they were getting into Google. So it was really inspiring for me.

So when I finally made it to my first internship and then to a job, after spending two years, we were like, we should give back to the community. We should start something like that. So we started a bootcamp. Unfortunately, we couldn’t generate that much funds, so we were like, let’s just make money, then we get back to this again. So for the last six to seven years, we have also been running a program on the weekends in collaboration with a local university that teaches students how to code. But again, that 16 weeks program—I could see a lot of institutes online that were doing those programs, and people who didn’t know how to code, they would start from HTML, CSS, and end up being hired by Google or FAANG companies. So yeah, that’s something that can be done.

But again, the degree program actually gives you more than just the programming skills. It gives you a network that you can build on and also the confidence that you can carry throughout your life.

[00:06:47] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. It’s good to have community. Once you have people around you who are also struggling, and you have your triumphs together, you have your successes together, it builds community. Obviously, it’s a lot easier to do things in a group. So, you know, in the last couple of years, everybody’s working remotely.

[00:07:08] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:07:09] Arsalan Ahmed: We are sort of all isolated, and sometimes it’s hard. Personally, I like it because I’ve been working remotely for a decade. So for me, it’s—I like it because I get to spend more time with my family and I get to have an office. One of the bad things about working in America, at least in the last 15 years, is that you don’t have any personal space. Generally, you’re just in a giant hall. Like you have maybe a huge space. I’ve worked in a company—it was a Fortune 500 financial services company; I won’t name it—but I was a consultant and it was massive. It could’ve been easily 300, 500 people on one floor in an open floor plan. Everybody together. It’s like a chicken coop. So you’re, you know, it’s massive. It takes you five minutes to go from one end to the other end of the floor. No offices. We have no—not even cubicles. It’s open. And this is somehow, this is the thing to do in America these days.

But when I started, that was not the case. There were cubicles.

[00:08:22] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:08:23] Arsalan Ahmed: There were offices. And Microsoft, they still have offices. And so being able to close the door and have your private space to be able to do any creative work—if you’re doing anything that’s creative—I think you need a little space. You need to network. Yes, it’s important to have other collaborations, but you don’t always collaborate. Sometimes you just want to be in your space and do your thing.

[00:08:44] Zain Mustafa: Totally.

[00:08:46] Arsalan Ahmed: But I get to do that when I’m working from home.

[00:08:49] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, it really goes hand in hand. We do have open space, and still people will go into the meeting rooms though they don’t have any meetings. So they would want to have their private space. So I can totally relate to that. So we go hybrid; two days a week we work remotely and three days a week we’re in the office. So we are just trying things out, how things are looking. Since COVID, every company—I think more than 80 percent of the companies are at least hybrid, if not fully remote.

[00:09:21] Arsalan Ahmed: So I think—so you’re not in the States, and I know that it gets to be a problem—I mean, it’s a problem in the U.S. And I used to work for big companies. We would have—excuse me—we would mandate working from home because of COVID. And there were a lot of people that were not happy because they were not set up. They have a house, but they don’t like to work at home because they have family. And it’s very hard to find for them. They had to figure out a space, maybe in the kitchen, maybe in this living—in this part of the living room—because they don’t have a separate office. And this happened in the U.S. And I think it happens a lot more overseas when families are larger and spaces are more limited. So I wonder how you’re able to manage that. How do you manage people working from home? Is that because you just cut down all the meetings so they can just do their work, even if they’re in a noisy environment?

[00:10:19] Zain Mustafa: I think after COVID, everyone has started to realize they need to have some sort of space in their house. Before COVID, it was not normal. It was just normal in States because they were already working with a lot of companies offshore or nearshore. So it was not normal for people here. But again, things started to change and a lot of people have their dedicated desk at their home. We actually help a lot of our people working with us to set up their personal space—their personal desk, everything that was required. Even they had to take chairs from our office to their home so they can sit for eight hours. That is what we have done as well.

So I think it has become pretty normal here, working from home, and their families have also realized if the guy’s at home, he’s not available.

[00:11:17] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah.

[00:11:17] Zain Mustafa: Previously it used to be if he’s home, so he’s available—we can go into his room, we can talk, we can ask him to bring something from the market. But now they have realized that on the laptop, he’s working. So sometimes they’re faking it just to avoid people, but yeah.

[00:11:35] Arsalan Ahmed: I can understand that. It used to happen to me a lot, actually, because I was working from home all the time. Like, all the time. So when am I working and when am I not working? Because when I’m not working, I’m also on the computer. So when is—where is work? So what ended up happening to me was that two things happened. One is, my mother lives with me, so I go down to get some food and she thinks, “Oh, my son’s done. He’s done with his work.” And then, “No, I’m not. I’m still working. I’m just here to get some food and I need to go back.” But it was very hard even in the U.S.

And then the second thing was I ended up working all the time. So I’ve—usually in large consulting companies, you work from Monday to Thursday at the client site. And then there, Friday, basically you—Thursday night you fly back home. So Thursday you work until about 3, 3:30, and then you take your flight back home. And then Friday, you’re at home, kind of relaxing, a little bit of work. But when travel stopped, so there was no such thing. There’s no Thursday night I have to catch a flight. There’s no Monday morning, oh, you know, coming in maybe at 10 or 10 a.m. from the flight. No, you have to start at 6, 7, 8 in the morning. And then you work all day, and then after that, stay late because you have to go somewhere. You don’t have any reason. So there were times on crunch projects that people would work nonstop.

There was a time I worked three days without stopping. Three days. I’m not talking about three days and then go to sleep. Three days, just maybe an hour or two of napping here and there because it was a critical project. And not just me; it was like 20 people. Nobody’s sleeping. This happened. This could never happen if you were traveling because you’re in a hotel. You have to take a flight, which has a thing. So we did some ridiculous stuff—impossible. We did a two-month project in four days. That’s how it happened.

[00:13:50] Zain Mustafa: Of course, it has its goods and bads. Of course, a lot of people have been more productive.

[00:13:58] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah.

[00:13:58] Zain Mustafa: At the same time, I recently interviewed a guy. So he was working with Walmart as a quality assurance engineer. So I interviewed him why he is willing to join. So he was like, “I’ve been working remotely for the past two years now, and I am sick of my room. I just need to get out of that room, need to communicate, need to network with people, need to see more faces on a daily basis.” So yeah, for some people, it’s—they want to get back. They want to come on a lower salary. So he was like, “I can negotiate a bit on the salary. I can come on a lower salary. Just take me out of my room.”

[00:14:40] Arsalan Ahmed: Wow. Yeah. Change is good. I like change. So let’s talk about your company. So you started this company. This was a training company in the beginning, then you started doing more services. And the question is, you were a co-founder, you had other founders. So you started this company. It’s not a small feat to start a company because it’s dangerous. It’s not dangerous; it’s scary. And people are like, okay, you are now responsible for your own income. So what was the craziest thing that happened when you started Geeks of Kolachi, moments where you thought, what have I gotten myself into?

[00:15:25] Zain Mustafa: So, as I mentioned, we started as a training bootcamp company. We had three to four students who were coming on a daily basis, and into the third month of our training program, we had no money even for our internet use. So internet was cut off, and we were like, what are we doing exactly? We’re not even making money to make ends meet, let alone making profit out of it. So that was something—we realized teaching alone won’t work for us.

So we were previously doing development. We were spending like two to four hours making good money. But when we got ourselves into training, a lot of our time would go into training those students, and no time, no energy left for the other work. And I was at the time also studying my last semester in university. Two or three things happening at the same time. So that is when we decided we’ll go into making money for ourselves, and of course then we’ll think about how we can contribute to the community.

So the first two, three years, starting from 2017, we were adding two, three resources every quarter. And when COVID came, we had lost two of our main clients at the time because of COVID. And they were heavily e-commerce dependent products that we were working on. But luckily enough, we started receiving more and more requests after two or three weeks of that time. And the projects that were coming in were because of COVID. So some projects that we lost, but a lot more projects came in. So that is when we scaled from an eight-people company to a 30-people company.

So the office that I’m sitting at this moment can accommodate a hundred people in one shift, and we work in two shifts mainly. The sales team usually works in the night as well. We do have some salespeople working in the daytime; mainly our developer team works in the regular hours. So yeah, the challenges have been changing throughout this time. The problems we had when we were a five-people company were different. We were different in age. I was 23, 24, had different responsibilities. So things have changed, and we try to accommodate and solve one problem at a time. So whatever we see, we saw the problems that’s there, we try to just solve that problem. Of course, in business, every day there is a new challenge, and you find yourself in a situation where you think, maybe I should opt for something else. Or you get thoughts of, this might end up not in a good place. But somehow or the other, if you are true with yourself, with your people that are working with us, and also to the clients especially that we are serving, somehow or the other, we were getting clients from left and right we didn’t know about. So that has happened quite a lot. And I think that’s the thing with business: you never know where your next client will be coming from.

[00:18:47] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. I think that’s the sticking point—or let’s just say that’s the most important part of being successful. So as a software developer, you have two different paths: you can become an employee or you can become an employer, or you can be a freelancer. But either you’re an employee or an employer. I know a lot of companies in the States where they start as developers, and then they get two people, start a company, and they have projects, and now they have more work because the same company maybe wants another project, or maybe another company says, “Hey, can I do this too?” And so they get one more person, and then they grow like this, two to three to four. They stay very small, and obviously that is very organic, but they’re working the whole time. They are working as the core development team. They’re not managing as their primary concern; they’re consultants, they’re billing the clients themselves. And then they usually have partners. So two people together, they’re 50 percent partners, for example, and the four people, 25 percent partners. That kind of a thing happens a lot. I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t scale. At some point, your hours are limited.

So it looks like you’re not going for that. You’re going for scaling out. You’re like, “Oh, I need a hundred people.”

[00:20:06] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:20:07] Arsalan Ahmed: Maybe I don’t need to do the core tech work or the actual billable work myself, but I want—because your main concern is not being a technologist. That’s what I’m understanding of it. Correct me if I’m wrong.

[00:20:24] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:20:25] Arsalan Ahmed: You’re trying to be an entrepreneur.

[00:20:31] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, that’s kind of correct. The time when we started, we were like two friends just doing our freelancing work. And with time, we started to develop more client base; more people got to know about us, and the people we work for were getting back not only with their work but also giving referrals to their friends and family. So since we started getting more work, we first—for the first three, four years—we wanted to improve on the quality that we are providing and also the rate that we are offering our services on.

So for the first three years, we were like a 10 to 15 people company just focusing on—like, it was early time for us as well. The time I started doing Geeks of Kolachi, I was two, three years into the industry. So I had to also build my experience. So when it was like two, three years old, we then thought about why not add more people if we are receiving more referrals? So why not just go for it, hire more people?

So one of the interesting things that happened—and I heard it also happened a lot of times in Silicon Valley as well—so we were in an office, we had like 30 people capacity, actually 24, and we occupied 30 people in that office. And at that time, we were changing our office literally every year. So we would get an office for 10 people; it will fill out within a year to what we planned for two years. And then we’ll change to a 20-people office. So we changed to that, and that happened for the first four years. So we sat back and gave it a thought: every year we have this problem, let’s just solve this once and for all.

So we built this beautiful office with glass rooms, meeting rooms, and an amazing town hall to play table tennis, and everything is there. And we planned for a hundred people. What happened was when we moved into the new office, things started to change. So that is when the market was settling in after the COVID breakthrough in technology. So everything was working out in technology in COVID times; everything wanted to go digital. But when it was getting normalized, a lot of people pulled their investments off the internet. And also we were heavily working on blockchain and NFT technologies, and NFT was down to 2 percent of the total market cap, and the clients that we were working with had no money left to pay us, let alone make their profits.

We were having our office of a hundred people, only having 30 people in-house. We planned to add 70 more people within six months’ time, and we lost two of our main clients. And it was the great depression coming again. But somehow or the other, we tried to sail through that period as well for two, three months. Before that, we didn’t have a dedicated sales team. So we would get our clients through referrals and repeat work that we started off back in 2017.

[00:24:12] Arsalan Ahmed: Right.

[00:24:12] Zain Mustafa: So let’s suppose we worked with a client initially for two, three years, and the CTO—when the company exited, the company we were working for—the CTO started his own different company and the CEO started his own company. So we would get like two customers on board. So that is how we were getting our business. Everything was great. Whenever we used to talk with our friends, they were like, “How many salespeople do you have?” And we’ll be like, “What’s that, bro?”

[00:24:43] Arsalan Ahmed: We don’t have any sales.

[00:24:44] Zain Mustafa: We just have the great work to show to the people, and that’s how we’re getting sales. But when we lost our client, we were like, what to do? What process can we follow? So we were like talking to—going back to those friends and asking them, do you have a sales team and how is that structured? And I’m very thankful to the community here in Karachi especially, the friend circle that I have developed along that time. So we built a sales team that helped us sail through, and alhamdulillah, we have been growing since.

[00:25:24] Arsalan Ahmed: That’s great. So what happens when you’re talking about sales, obviously talking about outbound sales. So you’re reaching out to people: “Hey, do you need my service?” And there’s obviously also the inbound where people are coming to you because they’ve heard about you or they found you on the internet or they googled you and they found you. So it’s for some people who are listening who may not be aware, they’re obviously trying to generate business for yourself. Now, obviously, you can also do the same thing if you’re an employee. So I like to always bring it back to our listeners because a lot of them might not know exactly how to use this information.

If you have a profile online of your work, in the shape of a very good LinkedIn profile or a website that highlights your achievements, then it doesn’t have to be for sales in a business context. It could be to get a job. Employers—I have found, personally know people who have gotten jobs through people contacting them after seeing their profile and like, “Oh, you’ve done all this. We need somebody like you.”

[00:26:47] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:26:48] Arsalan Ahmed: This has happened, and they actually get jobs. So it’s relevant for both contexts.

Okay, so without giving away too many secrets, what’s the most exciting project you’re working on right now? Anything that you’re excited about?

[00:27:03] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So that’s almost every project that we’re working on. We’re always excited to make things work out for our clients. So that’s a political statement. Honestly, there are a few. So there are two of our clients—same client—we’re developing two portals for them, AI-generated, AI-driven products. So one of them is an AI-generated relocation expert. So in Pakistan, there are a lot of people who are interested in relocating. So that product basically identifies which country is right for you and how you can get there. So all the process that is involved, which visa category more aligns with your degree, with your experience, and what else that you can achieve to make it more smooth. So that is one product, which is live, and we, I think, hit more than 50,000 users on the platform only last year. So that’s one interesting.

Apart from that, we have had many experiences. Like one of the projects that I personally got myself attached to was one with Audi. So in COVID times, the dealership was closed, but they were still delivering their cars. And another problem was whenever there is a launch of a new car, what they’ll do, they’ll deliver that car into that market. So if they are launching Audi e-tron GT, they’ll send that car to San Francisco, to Dubai, to Tokyo, and then take the pictures of that car with the environment and then add into the brochures or social media marketing that needs to be done.

So an interesting approach that Audi came up with was they’ll generate pictures and videos through Unreal Engine that will be streamed into a web application where the dealership can select their environment, be that Dubai, San Francisco, New York. And after selecting the environment, they can select the car they want brochures for or videos or pictures for, and they can select all the things that are there in the real environment. If they want nighttime and it’s raining, that can be done. And if you’re seeing Audi e-tron and the new cars that are coming in from Audi, you will probably be seeing that platform-generated content. So we were doing that in 2020-21, and it was really amazing. It was so uncanny in terms of how it looked. It was so real, and we could generate videos of like the doors open, the lights open, and from interior and exterior. And the impact of that software, like reaching millions and millions of people, the software that we worked on. So it was really a humble experience being able to contribute.

On top, the developers that were working with us were the contributors of React.js, Vue.js—they were actually the creators of Vue.js.

[00:30:32] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah.

[00:30:34] Zain Mustafa: To the people who are not very technical, it’s the library used to develop web applications. So we got to work with a lot of amazing talent in that project, and everything was right about that. And when we were closing that, the people who were working with me were—they just wanted to continue working, continue contributing to the project. So yeah.

[00:30:58] Arsalan Ahmed: That is exciting. Was it AI-based generation? Because that’s pretty early for AI.

[00:31:06] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, it was not really AI. It was like Unreal Engine. They would create the background, they’ll create the animation for the cars, and Unreal Engine already has a lot of things available in it.

[00:31:25] Arsalan Ahmed: The assets, yeah.

[00:31:26] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:31:27] Arsalan Ahmed: The video assets or the actual images, they would obviously—Audi would provide the team.

[00:31:35] Zain Mustafa: Exactly.

[00:31:36] Arsalan Ahmed: And then—

[00:31:36] Zain Mustafa: Exactly.

[00:31:36] Arsalan Ahmed: Use that to—

[00:31:37] Zain Mustafa: Exactly.

[00:31:38] Arsalan Ahmed: Unreal Engine is—that’s pretty amazing. Yeah. Awesome. So here’s a question: Have you ever had to choose between a project you are really passionate about and it doesn’t make any money, or the other one, oh, that’s a lot of money but I hate it? Has that ever happened?

[00:31:56] Zain Mustafa: In business terms, it always most likely be money since we are in services industry. Of course, budget matters a lot, but I have seen a lot of projects—I’ve personally gone through experiences where we didn’t like the client or maybe the idea on the project. So most of our clients who reach out to us, if the idea is something that will not work for them, period, we’ll let them know. It’s not something that you build MVP on; you’ll just be spending your money on it. Yeah, they understood this and they never came back—not a problem—but we wanted to make sure if we’re working on something, it actually made sense. So we let them know what will actually work in the market. Of course, we have been for the past seven to eight years have worked on more than a hundred mobile applications, maybe 200 web applications. So we do know which one worked for which industry. So with our experience, we try to make sure we deliver as much information in the ideating process as we can.

[00:33:14] Arsalan Ahmed: So I’m getting the impression that you’re primarily working with startup companies, maybe some established companies as well, but starting companies. I know a lot of service providers, small service providers, in the Midwest where I’m at, they do that too. So is that your focus these days?

[00:33:33] Zain Mustafa: We do work with the companies who are directly serving Fortune 500. They’re like a hundred-people company in the U.S. We are working with them, and the software that is generated by them is being directly used by a lot of Fortune 500 companies. So we are working with large-scale enterprise clients and also a lot of our client base—it’s actually true that we work with early-stage startups, helping them make their MVPs and doing the validation on their product ideas.

[00:34:10] Arsalan Ahmed: And you’re working on, I’m assuming, JavaScript-based technology stacks, something like Node, React, Next, Vue—that’s pretty much where we’re at.

[00:34:22] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, actually. So I started as an Angular MEAN stack developer back in 2015. So it was actually something very inspiring that was happening back in 2012. So a teacher who came from the States came back to Pakistan and started teaching the students of Pakistan the latest trends and technologies in the U.S. So back in 2012, Angular came into the market, I think in 2009, something like that. And at that time, everything was around PHP or .NET, and every institute was teaching that. I was fortunate enough to get introduced into the JavaScript world, actually Angular, and at that time we used to have Ionic to build mobile applications.

One technology—Angular—can work on mobile and web, both the platforms. So it was quite new at the time. And when we started actually doing the development, there was a lot of work available because a lot of the people who started in 2005 or till 2010, they were working on PHP or .NET. So a lot less competition was there at that time.

Speaking of 2024, it’s—the market again, the situation is PHP, WordPress, .NET of that time. So we now have our focus on LLMs. We have, I think, more than 10 projects that we did only last year on AI. So AI, of course, is the market shift that has happened.

[00:36:08] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah.

[00:36:10] Zain Mustafa: And we are really trying to tap into that market as well.

[00:36:15] Arsalan Ahmed: No, I think that’s the right approach because it’s still not prevalent. So there’s a first-mover advantage. You go in there, and if you have two years of AI experience, you’re one of—anybody, any company who has two years of solid AI experience, it’s very hard to top that. So starting early means you always have advantage. But the word AI is also—

[00:36:42] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:36:49] Arsalan Ahmed: Just by typing a prompt in ChatGPT, you can get really good at doing prompt engineering. So interesting.

So I was actually doing some research to see, okay, what are the types of things that companies are working on. I’m not plugged into the companies for the last year or so. I’ve been traveling. I went to six or seven different countries last year, or a year ago, and was building my education platform, and I was exploring multiple countries. I had a good time; my kids had a great time. But when I came back, everything had changed. Because when I left, I had never heard of ChatGPT. ChatGPT blew up while I was away. So when I came back, I was like, what’s going on? So I had to really catch up. And then, of course, I learned about the generative AI, LLMs, and so many other companies are in the mix. So I have been keeping up now. I got the ChatGPT subscription recently. I use Claude, I use—Perspective, is it Perspective? Ah, forgetting. But I never use it. So I use ChatGPT, the 4.0 model; I use that. Now I’m learning about, okay, do you make your own models, all that stuff. But it’s a lot.

[00:38:10] Zain Mustafa: Yeah.

[00:38:10] Arsalan Ahmed: But when I do a search on the job boards that I see in the U.S. to see, okay, who’s hiring for this, who’s hiring for that, I almost see nothing. So at least established old companies, I haven’t heard a lot of work, but I know there is work that’s being done. So maybe it’s more constrained in companies, or maybe they’re startup companies. So if you worked at 10 AI—that’s a lot of projects, almost one every month. What is the type of work that you’re seeing that’s coming down?

[00:38:41] Zain Mustafa: So almost every industry would want to know how AI can help them out. So that’s—we normally start off with a lot of companies. So companies in health tech have reached us out, companies in e-commerce space wanting to know how AI can help them out. So almost every industry, they literally want to know how AI can help them out.

It’s exactly the situation how it used to be with blockchain back in 2017, 2018. Everyone wanted to know how blockchain can help them grow, help them make more money out of it. Mainly, we did SaaS products out of those more or less 10 products that we did last year. They were mainly SaaS—software as service—products. In terms of industries, one of the interesting things that is going to happen is in education, educational sector.

So a cool project that we did was actually in the education space. So if you are someone who has two or three years of experience, or even if you’re in your university, you can upload your resume and the skills that you know at this moment. So the AI program will let you know how you can improve on the international scores where you are at. Zain Mustafa wants to upload his resume into that application. So that application will let me know where do I stand out of maybe out of five. And if I get a score of 3.5 or 4, how can I improve on this? So it will recommend me courses online according to the background, the skill set that I already have, and how I can improve on this.

I think we got more than a hundred thousand users on this platform. It goes by the name skillscore.com. And in Pakistan, we have a lot of youth that is in university, and they really want to figure out which career they would want to choose. With the inception of AI, LLM is available for everyone. Blockchain was not exposed to the common man.

[00:41:03] Arsalan Ahmed: Right.

[00:41:04] Zain Mustafa: Through ChatGPT and LLMs, AI is in the hands of everyone. So that is the difference it has made. Coming from—we have been talking about AI since decades.

[00:41:18] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah.

[00:41:18] Zain Mustafa: But this is the first time AI was so easy to use. For other technologies, they need to follow the same path to be able to reach that big numbers. So I think almost every sector will be impacted by AI. So every business—we’ll have three to four or maybe five meetings with some of our inbound queries or some of our existing clients. We’ll help them out, identify the options that they have in solving new and new problems.

[00:41:57] Arsalan Ahmed: Okay, so imagine yourself a new developer. You’re somebody, maybe a 20-year-old, a 22-year-old person. Maybe you went to computer science university. Maybe you’re still at school, or maybe you’re just interested and you’re like, I want to do this AI thing, but I don’t know what it is because there’s so many things. As I’m getting into it, it’s down the rabbit hole. I’m discovering, oh my God, I need to spend several weeks, months actually learning because there’s so many things about, okay, you are going to write prompts. Yes, this is how you can actually get the information, but maybe the information is not in the right format. You have to do some fine-tuning, or maybe you have to do some custom model generation.

The biggest thing that I hear is, hey, I want my data. I’m a professor, or I’m just—I generate all this data. It’s my proprietary information. I don’t want anybody to see it. I don’t want this to go into training ChatGPT. I don’t want this to be public. I would like to now infer some information out of that or do some data mining using some chatbots.

So where do I start? I am somebody, I have two months to learn. I’m a new person or young person, and I want to learn something. So give them some cool advice. What can they learn in two months?

[00:43:21] Zain Mustafa: So I think throughout my early career, I’ve had like, you know, maybe hundreds of MOOCs courses that were left in between. Like when you start doing one course, YouTube—if you’re on YouTube—it will recommend you another cool, like a clickbait.

[00:43:42] Arsalan Ahmed: Something else. Thumbnail. Yeah.

[00:43:43] Zain Mustafa: Let’s go on this tangent. And you’ll be figuring out, like, oh my God, I need to get this done as well. So you’ll go there, and YouTube does not stop. It’ll get you places where you didn’t even think about going there in the first place.

So first recommendation from my side would be to pick a course on a dedicated online course website. Not only it’ll help you keep your focus on that, but also it is something that is only developed for students, for people who want to learn. So there are a lot of complementing things that’ll be there. So let’s say if you pick a course on Udemy, you’ll have relevant tests available after each video or each chapter that you do. So that’s something I figured along the lines when a few of the MOOCs courses, just to convince that I completed, they were on those websites. They were not on YouTube.

So you’ll see a series of videos of nine—maybe nine-video playlists. The first video will have 10 million; the second will have five, and it drops down to maybe 50,000 for the last one. So yeah, that’s the issue. That’s the thing that you can see. So don’t consider yourself different from others. So you will get caught up—you will get caught up by the thumbnails, by the clickbait on YouTube. So figure out a platform that is available and pick just one thing. And try to make sure that you also talk to the community. So a lot of—on these websites, you will find forums, you will find community. So start talking to people who are new. So that’ll also help you get along, get moving every day.

So in my early times when I was learning how to program the fourth time, I was about to quit. So a friend of mine was like, “If we’re coming here, if we’re coming to this place, at least we’re spending in a good environment. What else could we do? Instead of spending two hours here at the institute, we can spend this time maybe playing cricket or watching a movie back home. So why not just be here, even if we are not understanding a bit of what the teacher is teaching?” I just somehow managed to get convinced by that idea. So after two, three months, I really got serious about it because some of the topics really clicked. And that is how my journey began.

So my suggestion, of course, will be to pick a platform independent of YouTube, spend some money—not a lot—a lot of cool options and cheap options available, and also try to talk to people, talk to community, be that the forums, be that groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, or maybe Discord channel.

[00:46:41] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. So that’s good advice. We have to wrap up very, very soon. We’re a little bit over. The conversation is going really well. We may have to have you back for going a little bit deeper into some of the topics because I personally am very interested. I want to learn. We’ll just learn from each other, but I think there’s more to talk from the AI point of view because we need to get into what specific thing they can learn, what is the thing that they focus on. But again, this is maybe a topic for another time.

But before we close, I just have one last thing. I’ll let you talk about how do people get in touch with you, and if they want to work with you, maybe they want to give you some business, or, “Hey, these are some cool people who’ll give you some good projects, and let’s work together.” We will go into that.

But before that, this is something that I really wanted to know: If you could implant one mindset or habit into every developer’s brain—okay, let me just, I can just turn a switch on, and now they have this thing—what would it be? Because there’s some things that you wish developers had so you could hire more of them and they fit right into your team and they’re successful. They’re successful, and that means you’re successful. What is that one mindset or habit?

[00:48:06] Zain Mustafa: So I have seen—I confess I was not really that good of a developer, but the good developers that I’ve seen or the good work—some of the good work that I did was only done through being curious. Like, what if I do it the other way? What if I search it online and see if there is any other approach available? What if I implement a different algorithm? Let’s just try it out. So being curious is the most common habit that I’ve seen in developers or the work that I did that I’m proud of where I was being able to produce that work only by being curious. So that’s something I’ve seen a lot of people doing that. And the people who do open source—that’s also out of their curiosity, like let’s just try to work on this idea, let’s see if I have some other people around the community who think likewise. In the conferences that I’ve attended worldwide, they’ll just discuss ideas in the technology space. Like, that’s how Angular came out. That’s how React.js was built by Facebook, and even they had React and Angular. That’s how the developers came up with the idea for Vue.js—I think the second most popular framework at this moment. So curiosity is a common thing that is a common trait that I’ve seen in good developers.

[00:49:42] Arsalan Ahmed: Excellent. Yeah, always be curious, but don’t be so curious that you go and click on every link on YouTube. So don’t be so curious. Control your curiosity a little bit. Okay.

All right, Zain. So it was excellent meeting you. And I think the audience would have greatly benefited from you, and maybe they can benefit more by working with you on—if they have any projects, especially in AI these days. Or you have a team, you have a team of a hundred-plus people or roughly a hundred people that are ready to work, and they’re working in all time zones, right? Two shifts means that if I’m in the U.S. and it’s nighttime for you, somebody could be there live working for you.

[00:50:26] Zain Mustafa: Someone available to talk, someone available to work.

[00:50:30] Arsalan Ahmed: That’s excellent. And it’s not just the workers but also people who are managing it. So you have people who can actually be the liaison, talk—you know, so you have people who have good English skills, they have good technical skills, and then it’s possible that if you want something quickly, someone could be working at night, then somebody else could pick up that work tomorrow.

Because one thing that I was curious about—we have to wrap up—but the one thing that I was curious about is, are people getting—are you getting projects and just assigning it to people as you have them available? Or is it that you have somebody who’s maybe augmenting someone’s staff, staff-aug type thing that you could get—you have, “I have two developers here and one designer here for you.”

[00:51:17] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So it’s a combination. A lot of times we get requests for proposals to get a hint of the timeline, how the product will look like, and what the costs and estimations look like. So we do that. And what we prefer personally is to staff augment, or not individuals but a whole team that includes software architects, designers, developers, testers, and project managers. So the whole team is working on one idea. So that’s what we prefer, but a lot of time we do get some inputs or incoming queries for estimations.

[00:52:02] Arsalan Ahmed: All right. You heard it here, folks. If you guys want to get in touch with Zain, how do they get in touch with you?

[00:52:10] Zain Mustafa: So they can reach me at zain@geeksofkolachi.com or happy@geeksofkolachi.com. They can find us everywhere. We are on LinkedIn. We are on www.geeksofkolachi.com, Facebook, Instagram, like literally everywhere. You search the name, Geeks of K—that’s why it was picked. It’s so SEO-friendly.

[00:52:34] Arsalan Ahmed: Nobody else has thought about that. Yeah. It’s so unique. No, you nailed that. You nailed that right on the head. It’s perfect. Yeah. One of the problems that I have with some of the projects that I work on is they’re so common. Like my podcast is Mentoring Developers.

[00:52:55] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, I can imagine.

[00:52:57] Arsalan Ahmed: There are so many of them. There are so many people that are doing something to do with mentoring and developers, and also developers could mean real estate developers. So it’s—

[00:53:08] Zain Mustafa: Oh yes.

[00:53:09] Arsalan Ahmed: That’s a problem with not having a unique name, but you know, I started many years ago and that’s what it is.

Right, everybody, thank you very much, Zain. Stay on the call. We’ll keep talking. We’ll end the show here.

To everybody who is watching, go to https://mentoringdevelopers.com/episode97 for show notes and bios and links and all that good stuff. All right, bye everybody!

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