The Pakistani founder who bootstrapped three global startups

A T-shirt startup, a social network, and a lesson about software margins

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as a direct response to his own recent criticism of Pakistan’s startup ecosystem. His argument: consumption-driven startups built inside a free-falling economy are the wrong bet, and founders should be looking toward exports. To make that case concrete, he brings in Adeel Raza — a founder who has done exactly that, three times over.

Adeel’s origin story is disarmingly low-tech. Growing up in Lahore, he got his first computer in 1993 at around age seven. As a self-described introvert, the machine became his primary companion. He taught himself to code through IRC bots, ASP, and PHP — not through formal education, but through forums, cracked resources, and one close friend from Beaconhouse Garden Town who shared the same obsession. “Because programming was for something fun, I got really passionate about it,” Adeel says. “I was sitting on computers eighteen, eighteen hours — I was coding, I was learning.”

By the time he graduated from the University of Management Technology in 2009 with a degree in Business and Information Technology, he had already run a T-shirt startup selling thirty units a day through Orkut. The pivot to software came from a simple margin calculation. A PHP script that introduced live chat to internet forums was generating one sale a week at $129 — more money than thirty T-shirts a day after screen printing, delivery, and logistics. “I was like, okay, this is making more money with like ninety percent less effort. I want to pursue that.”

ContactMe: the accidental acquisition that moved him to America

The product that changed Adeel’s life was ContactMe — a lightweight CRM for small businesses that added a contact button to websites and funneled leads into a simple follow-up system. He built it in roughly six months. The growth mechanism was borrowed from PayPal’s early eBay strategy: embed a “powered by ContactMe” button on as many websites as possible and let visibility do the work.

The acquisition came through an email he almost ignored. Harun, the founder of Webs.com — a DIY website builder and Vistaprint subsidiary — spotted a ContactMe button on a customer’s site, clicked it, and reached out. Adeel was on vacation. He almost dismissed the email as spam. When he finally called back, an unexpected connection formed: Harun was originally from Afghanistan, his family had passed through Pakistan during the Cold War, and the two men found an immediate rapport. “It was Harun and not Mark who wanted to acquire,” Adeel notes — a piece of luck he credits openly.

The deal was effectively an acqui-hire. Adeel and his co-founder were moved to the Washington DC area. He was rejected for a B1/B2 visa on his first attempt, only to receive a call two days later from the Islamabad embassy apologising and offering a new interview — after Webs’s lawyer had contacted a local senator about the jobs at stake. He moved to the US permanently in 2011 on an H1B, the last batch before the lottery system began.

Why he named his sixth company “Six Takes”

Before ContactMe, Adeel had tried and failed at five other startups in Pakistan. He named the legal entity for his sixth attempt “Six Takes Private Limited” — a dry acknowledgement of the streak. The failures taught him something important: he was a strong developer but had no idea how to sell. “I was a great developer but not a good person in sales, marketing, et cetera. So that wasn’t working.” Moving to the US gave him his first real exposure to how to sell a product, and that, he says, was the missing ingredient.

Muzamil presses on this point, noting that many technically capable engineers in Pakistan never make the leap to product companies precisely because they cannot bridge the gap between building and selling. Adeel agrees, and adds a sharper version of the same observation: “A lot of times what people do is they’re great at something and then they think — let’s say they’re great at an IT job — and they’re like, I have extra money and I have this itch to be an entrepreneur, let’s go open a restaurant. You have no idea how a restaurant works. Domain knowledge is something people discount. I think that’s ninety percent of everything.”

Minder, Mailmunch, and the discipline of timing

In 2015, Adeel launched two companies simultaneously: Mailmunch, an email marketing and lead generation platform, and Minder — the Muslim matchmaking app that would later become Salams. Both were bootstrapped. Both were built entirely by the founders themselves, which eliminated the largest cost in any tech startup.

The name Minder came from a lunch conversation. “Me and my co-founder, we were having lunch and we said, what should we call this? Muslim and Tinder is popular — Muslim Tinder, Minder. Let’s keep it, we’ll figure it out later.” The name went viral on Twitter almost immediately. But the real driver was timing. Nasib.com and Shaadi.com had dominated Muslim matchmaking online, but neither had moved to smartphones after the iPhone launched in 2007. “We got a window of opportunity where there was no competition,” Adeel says. Today Salams has close to five million active users and between 250,000 and 400,000 reported marriages — the range exists because some are engagements and some are tracked through different metrics.

Mailmunch followed the same logic. Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp existed, but none integrated directly with websites to generate leads through pop-ups. In the first year, Mailmunch’s pop-ups reached a billion unique views. The “powered by Mailmunch” label on each one created a viral loop that drove sign-ups without any performance marketing. “All you really need to do is get the first five customers and then the rest will happen,” Adeel says. “Salams — until now there has been no performance marketing. It’s all viral, word of mouth.”

Unlayer, the third company, was started in 2017 when Mailmunch needed a drag-and-drop content builder and could not find one that met its standards. Adeel called a technical co-founder, described the problem, and received a prototype the next morning. “I was like, this looks great — this has the whole germ of the idea we are looking for.” The pattern across all three companies is identical: solve a problem you personally have, then ask whether others have it too.

Distribution is king — and the mall analogy

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the question of a hypothetical Pakistani engineer — technically strong, internationally exposed, interested in micro-SaaS, but paralysed by the question of where to start. Adeel’s answer is direct and draws on a framework he says he gives to entrepreneurs regularly.

“There is a famous startup quotation: first-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution. Distribution is king.” His practical advice: instead of building a standalone product and hoping people find it, go where the foot traffic already exists. “Instead of building a shop on some random road, go to a mall where foot traffic is already coming. You don’t need to figure out distribution. Just build a good product, put it in the app store — Shopify app store, WordPress plugin directory, Wix’s app store — and that will take you to your first million ARR. I have done it four times alone.”

He is equally direct about the AI moment. Jasper, the AI content creation tool, started as a Shopify urgency widget called Useproof. When OpenAI released its APIs, one co-founder messaged the other with an idea, they built a front end for those APIs, and raised $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation. “Micro-SaaS opportunities are coming and going. With AI, the game has completely changed — the opportunity that existed in the early two-thousands has been renewed.”

Y Combinator: useful, but not for everyone

Unlayer went through Y Combinator in 2022, accepted into a batch that Adeel says had an acceptance rate of around two percent from over twenty thousand applications. The batch deal at the time was $500,000 plus $125,000 for seven percent of the company. YC had rejected Unlayer in 2018; by 2022, the company had the revenue and product-market fit to clear the higher bar.

Adeel is measured about the value. For Unlayer, the network was the point — enterprise clients and deals that would have taken years to reach otherwise. “But for a company that doesn’t need any of those things, the lectures are available on YouTube. Content is no longer a problem.” He is also candid about the downside of venture funding more broadly. A mentor, Harun, had sold his fintech Truebill for over a billion dollars and had seen both the funded and bootstrapped paths up close. “Raising money — it’s not always the right choice. It can also kill companies if you do it the wrong way. In hindsight, I think we are better off than our competitors who have raised money and have investor pressure to grow at a certain rate which I don’t think they can at this point.”

How Netflix ended up on Unlayer — and why it was inbound

Muzamil asks how a company that started in Pakistan ends up with Netflix, Fidelity, and IBM as clients. Adeel’s answer is counterintuitive: they never pitched any of them. “All enterprises we got — they were all inbound. They came to us. We didn’t go to them.” The reason is that Unlayer solves a genuinely hard problem: building a white-label drag-and-drop content editor with SDKs that large marketing automation platforms can embed. The alternative for an enterprise is spending half a million dollars building the same thing in-house over six to twelve months. “Build versus buy — and it costs them less than half. So it’s a no-brainer.” Unlayer is now valued at $60 million and is preparing to announce a seed round.

Pakistan in 2050, and what the youth dividend actually requires

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Adeel how he sees Pakistan twenty-seven years from now. Adeel is careful not to overclaim. “I am overall still optimistic about Pakistan. I think Pakistan, in the end, will maybe not thrive as quickly as we would like, but it will survive. Every time we hit a rock bottom we bounce back, and then hit another rock bottom, and then bounce back. We will survive.”

On the question of opportunity within Pakistan, he resists a single answer. “Pakistan is so diverse in terms of economic classes and education. Every segment has a different answer.” For those with strong English, a good education, and the technical skills to build world-class products, the path is clear: aim for startups that bring in dollars. For a developer without those advantages, under family pressure to earn quickly, the calculus is different. “He doesn’t get the room to take the risk like I did. His best route is different.” The broader point, which Muzamil has been building toward throughout the episode, is that the youth population is only an asset if it is given direction — and that direction has to be segmented, not uniform.