Freelancing is a business, not a passive income

Five Fs, a coma year, and the move to Islamabad

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Qasim Umer — a 28-year-old freelancer recently recognised by the Pakistan Software Export Board at a national conference in Bhurban — and asking him to start at the beginning. The beginning is not flattering. Qasim was born and raised in Quetta, did his schooling at Helper Public School, and entered FG College for ICS because he disliked chemistry. He failed five of seven subjects in first year.

“I understood like this is not the phase for me,” he says. He repeated the year, cleared first and second together, and shifted to Islamabad in 2012 to follow an older sister who had a Fulbright scholarship at FAST. He enrolled at Islamic University. The first semester produced two Ds and an F. The second semester produced two Fs. He moved back to Quetta.

The Quetta years were not idle. Qasim and two friends imported security cameras from Karachi and ran installations on tenders for plazas and banks — including, he notes in passing, every National Bank branch in the city. The three of them split roughly fifteen to twenty-five thousand rupees a month between them. When the family home needed rebuilding, the whole family eventually consolidated in Islamabad, and Qasim followed.

The intern who slept four hours and got two raises

A referral landed Qasim a three-month data internship at a small Islamabad software house — ten to seven, searching contact information for real estate brokers, filling forms for the sales team. He stayed past office hours not because the work demanded it but because the office had table tennis, foosball and an Xbox, and he had no friends in the city to go home to. “Where would I go home? Just to sleep.”

The CEO noticed. A marketing manager named Tabu Ali pulled him onto an email marketing project for a real estate SaaS. The CEO then handed him a plane ticket and an ActOn email marketing certification with one condition: come back certified. Qasim spent three days enjoying the trip, ignored the course, then completed it overnight after landing back in Islamabad. Salary went from fourteen thousand to twenty-five. A Salesforce certification followed in three days. Salary went to thirty-five.

“My mom was like, beta, what is this company that’s giving you two raises in a month?” he says. His mother thought it might not be a real job.

By the time he was promoted to manage the eight-person sales team — replacing two managers the CEO wanted to fire — Qasim was making eighty thousand rupees a month. The agency was doing US and Canadian projects under a different brand. His older brother joined as project manager. His younger brother joined later on content.

The first freelance project and the COVID exit

Muzamil pushes Qasim on the moment things shifted. The trigger was a wedding. In late 2018, with eighty thousand rupees of monthly salary and a marriage to fund, Qasim started picking up evening work on LinkedIn, Upwork and Fiverr. His first project was a Shopify store setup and email marketing engagement for twelve hundred dollars — roughly 150,000 rupees at the time.

“That was a month’s salary for thirty days of work,” he says. “And here was a week of weekends. The bell went off in my head — something is going on here. Why is someone paying me this much?”

He did a few more projects, paid for his wedding, and shipped twenty-eight colleagues from his Islamabad office to Quetta in a chartered coach to attend — including the CEO’s Canadian nephew, who spoke no Urdu and was driven across the country in a coach that, Qasim admits, “anything could have happened on.”

By late 2019 he and both brothers were matching their full office salaries in six days of evening freelancing. They sat at three small desks in one room at home, working from after office until midnight. When COVID hit in March 2020 and the agency began laying off employees as investors held back capital, all three brothers walked out the same day. The relationship with the CEO, Qasim notes, is still good.

Why the brothers became a full-funnel team, not three gig workers

Muzamil presses Qasim on what makes his setup different from the typical freelancer story. The answer is structural. Qasim is the media buyer — Facebook, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat. His older brother handles conversion rate optimisation, which Qasim explains in plain terms: if a hundred people land on a store and five buy, the CRO’s job is to figure out why ninety-five bounced and to make the journey effortless. His younger brother creates the content that feeds the paid media. The three of them are a full e-commerce funnel.

Muzamil names what he sees: most freelancers in Pakistan sell a single, narrow, easily-commoditised skill — content writing, logo design, one tool. Qasim has gone top-down. He sold the customer journey first and made the specific technical skills underneath swappable. “If photo content goes out and video content comes in, the end technical skill is irrelevant. We pick up whatever is required at the time.”

Qasim adds the line that frames the rest of the conversation: “Freelancing is actually a business. You are basically a hunter. You wake up every morning, you hunt, you catch the client, you eat at night, and you keep that flow regular.”

The upsell is where the money is

The cleanest tactical idea in the conversation is Qasim’s argument that the headline service is not the product — the upsell is. When a client comes to him for Facebook ads, he agrees to run them but lists ten things that must first be true on the store. Those ten items are his upsells, and they are where the bulk of the revenue lives.

“My service is one service. If I just pitch that and deliver it, the conversation is over. But these ten things I keep ready — that’s the place I make the most revenue.”

He extends the argument out beyond his own work. Every shopkeeper in Pakistan, in his framing, is already a freelancer — they are offering something to someone and getting paid. The only thing that distinguishes online freelancers is that they never meet the buyer face to face. The skill is the same: see what else the customer needs, and sell it.

Hire broke, hungry, and eighteen

Qasim describes an experiment he ran on hiring. He brought in experienced, well-qualified people on high salaries. They did not perform. “They didn’t have drive. Their only thought was — complete the thirty days, get paid, start the next cycle.”

He switched. He started hiring eighteen and nineteen-year-olds, people from broken financial situations, kids carrying weight at home. Within two months, those hires were independently closing their own projects on the side. He now runs the team on a model he is explicit about: a small fixed salary, capped at twenty-five thousand rupees a month so the employee never gets stuck in the salary loop, plus five to seven thousand rupees per project completed. Ten projects in a month means an extra fifty to seventy thousand on top.

The point, he says, is that he refuses to make any employee a burden bound only to his work. “Watch how I’m communicating, how I’m selling. Learn it and go implement it for yourself.” Most of his long-term employees are now independent freelancers who also work with him on his projects.

The story he keeps coming back to is the office boy from his agency days — a chai-maker from Chakri who Qasim sat down at a computer, taught Shopify data entry to, and who is now, by Qasim’s account, billing twelve hundred dollars a month on Fiverr, has moved from Chakri to Pindi, has his own place, and has brought two cousins from Chakri to work under him. “He was an office boy,” Qasim says. “It comes back to drive.”

Free value as the highest-leverage marketing

Muzamil asks Qasim about platforms. Fiverr and Upwork were the start. Now LinkedIn is his main income source, and Twitter, which he started in August 2021, generated seven thousand dollars in its first three months. None of it came from cold pitching.

His method on Twitter was to offer free audits of ad accounts in the run-up to Black Friday and Christmas — the high season for e-commerce — and to put 150 dollars of paid promotion behind that single tweet. The free audits surfaced specific problems in the prospect’s account, which became the basis for the paid pitch. The same logic runs on his Twitter content: he picked five accounts in his niche, hired someone to read them and draft content in that voice, scheduled the output through Buffer, and stopped touching it manually.

Muzamil makes the necessary qualification. Free value works only if you actually know what you are doing. Seventy percent of people who try it, he says, are looking for the hack rather than the substance — and a client engagement that opens with a fake audit closes after one project.

The exit strategy: build a product, not a longer week

The deepest section of the conversation comes near the end, when Muzamil asks Qasim what he is doing with the money and where this all goes. Qasim is unusually direct. He drives a 1993 Mitsubishi Pajero he rebuilt from the engine up. He does not play the stock market. He does not buy mutual funds. He invests in occasional property, but mostly he spends — on his employees, on travel, on his shop.

“Earning money is not the art,” he says. “Spending money is the art. If you know how to spend it, you are not going to be broke.”

The strategic answer is different. Qasim’s plan is to use the capital from freelancing to hire developers and build the automation he currently does manually into a SaaS tool — a subscription product that reads ad accounts, runs the optimisations he runs, and makes the decisions he makes. He frames this as the only viable exit from freelancing itself.

“You cannot do freelancing for forty years. You will burn out. You cannot work eight to ten hours every day forever. The exit is to take the work you are doing, automate it, and turn it into a subscription. If you set it up well, the user becomes addicted to the tool — they cannot exit you because their Instagram and Twitter are now being managed by you.”

He cites a freelancer he has watched do exactly this with Instagram content — built a hashtag-driven content generator on a thirty-to-forty dollar monthly subscription and now serves a thousand clients through the tool that one freelancer used to serve one at a time.

Muzamil names the pattern: either you build the tool that disrupts your own work, or someone else’s tool disrupts it for you.

What Pakistan still owes its freelancers

Muzamil zooms out to numbers. A parliamentary committee has projected that the IT and freelancing industry could bring 57 billion dollars into Pakistan by 2025. Even on the more conservative ten-billion-dollar figure, the question is what happens to that money once it lands.

Qasim’s answer is honest. He does not currently bring most of his income into Pakistan. He keeps it abroad and rotates it there because the domestic investment opportunities are thin. He is interested in Gwadar — he has visited several times and likes the place — and would consider a vacation-resort investment there if the structure were right. He notes that the recognition the government finally extended to freelancers in 2021, including the ability to open proper accounts, is the first step toward serious domestic investment channels for this money.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Qasim his closing question: it is 2050, Pakistan is past its centenary, what does he see? Qasim is cautious but positive. The direction is right. The risk is the same risk Pakistan has always carried — failing to invest in the education of a population that is overwhelmingly young.

His prescription has two parts, and they sit closer to a personal ethic than a policy. First, share your skill. Pulling someone else up does not take anything away from you; it returns more knowledge than it costs. Second, spend money. The fruit-seller at the corner is not made richer by a hundred-rupee haggle. The economy is not made richer by hoarding. “Money does not decrease by spending it. Money decreases by not earning it.”

Muzamil closes at the fifty-six minute mark.