From copy-pasted Kindle books to a $16.5M Amazon exit

A one-room house and an early instinct for money

The story Muzamil opens with is the headline: a fellow podcaster who, by selling just a few stores, has made well over thirty million dollars — all of it starting from Pakistan, from a very humble background. But Naeem Sikandar’s account doubles back, the way most of these do, to a childhood that explains the hustle before any of the money arrives.

Naeem grew up in Peshawar. He describes himself as a deeply mischievous kid — a fighter, shifted from the girls’ section to the boys’ section because he was too much trouble, the boy who’d unchain a friend his parents had tied up to keep him from running off. School was incidental until he watched older cousins drift after FSc and decided, on his own, that he needed good marks for a good government college with a high merit cutoff. He topped, took distinctions, won a gold medal in FSc, and landed a scholarship to Islamia College.

The defining fact arrives quietly. His father — a government employee — died when Naeem was in eighth grade. An eighth-grader then spent a year navigating AG offices, Bait-ul-Maal, and NADRA to transfer his father’s pension into his mother’s name, learning bureaucracy and budgeting by force. “Time is the best healer,” he says, but the experience left a residue: a need to arrange money, to save, to never be caught short. Muzamil reads it back to him plainly — when the strong male figure is gone, a sense of weakness and a sharpened relationship with money both arrive at once.

Three scholarships and a confession

At UET Peshawar, Naeem became, by his own telling, “the only student who took three scholarships at one single time.” University department, Punjab Education Endowment Fund, Bait-ul-Maal — he worked the offices himself, in his school bag, walking Mall Road to plead his case. Part of it went into saving; some of it funded parties and trips with friends.

Muzamil doesn’t let it pass. He plays devil’s advocate hard: the second and third scholarships were cash in hand, money that could have educated another orphan instead of funding road trips. Naeem doesn’t dodge it. He even volunteers an earlier confession — that as a kid he fudged the fees his aunt gave him, inflating 2,500 rupees to 3,000, pocketing the difference. “I don’t know where this was coming from,” he says, “maybe a love of arranging money since childhood.” Asked whether he’d change any of it, his answer is consistent: no. The experiences shaped what he could later pull off. “Someone getting one scholarship is a big deal. You’re getting three. So you say, why not?”

It is an uncomfortable through-line, and Muzamil flags it for the record. The same instinct that worked the scholarship system would, a few years later, decide to download cracked courses and rewrite other people’s recipes — and only much later decide that value is worth paying for.

Teaching himself to make money online

Naeem’s path into commerce wasn’t a job. It was a flat refusal of one. Watching seniors graduate into 20,000-rupee internships, he climbed to his roof one afternoon and asked the only question that interested him: how do you make money before you’ve even graduated?

He spent roughly a year just reading. Cracked courses from black-hat sites — affiliate marketing, email marketing, SEO, product launches — downloaded for free because “paying for things was a low habit.” Nothing stuck. Domains bought, WordPress sites built, no dollars in the account. Then one Eid morning, sulking after a family fight, he opened his inbox to a webinar called Kindle Cash Cow. He published a $9.99 book that night. The next morning there was a sale. The morning after, four.

The mechanics were crude and he’s honest about it. He scraped ten articles on a topic, pasted them into a book, published daily — until day thirty-one, when Amazon suspended him for copyrighted material. He spoofed his MAC address, made new accounts, got banned again. The workaround that finally held was cookbooks: ingredients can’t be copyrighted, and he rewrote recipe directions line by line, flipping active to passive, swapping “skillet” for “frying pan.” He published roughly 4,400 books this way — Top 30 Scandinavian Appetizer Recipes and every variant you can name — then added ghostwritten non-fiction and fiction. At the peak, around $30,000 a month, before he’d finished his degree.

The pivot from doing to teaching

Having made the money, Naeem found a second, larger business: teaching the method. He picked an audience deliberately — Westerners, not Pakistanis, partly because Pakistan’s industry barely existed yet. He found a marketing partner on WarriorForum, split the work (Naeem built the courses, the partner ran sales), and learned to speak English by talking to a mirror every day so he could record course videos and, eventually, close deals himself.

The funnel was a $17 front-end course laddering up to a $2,000 backend coaching program. In one year he launched five courses, reached roughly 10,000 students across the US, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Australia, took on 100 to 200 coaching clients, and the partnership cleared about a million dollars — split fifty-fifty.

This is the part Naeem defends most fiercely later. His coaching clients made money, he insists, because coaching meant hand-holding: any student could book time on his calendar, and he wouldn’t let go until they were earning. “Why wouldn’t they make money,” he asks, “when they have me, who has done it, who has been through all these phases?” It’s the distinction he will use as the blade against Pakistan’s trainers — the difference between a group chat and a mentor who has actually bled.

The Amazon machine: build, rank, flip

In 2013 the Amazing Selling Machine course pointed him at physical products, and Naeem followed it by the book — pausing, characteristically, on whether to pay the $2,997 price before relenting. His first product, plastic meat claws, broke even. Weight-lifting gloves turned a profit. An infuser water bottle briefly did $50,000 a month at 5,000 units before competitors and price wars hollowed it out. He learned the pattern early: reinvest each product’s profit into the next, expand the line, prune what doesn’t sell.

The exits became the business. He sold a ten-product brand for $1.2 million in 2017, started another and sold it for $2.5 million a year later, then built Truvio — a single-product posture-corrector brand. COVID was, in his blunt phrase, “a blessing for our business.” Everyone went home to a screen and slouched. He crossed $2.5 million in a single month on that one product, with over a million in pure profit, and the negotiation became a game of patience: each time the Nasdaq-listed buyer asked for more time to confirm the spike wasn’t a fluke, Naeem demanded a fresh deposit and a higher valuation. It walked from $6 million pre-COVID to a close at $16.5 million, the bulk wired to him in two days.

The discipline underneath the luck was specific. Naeem put 20% of profit into marketing to stay the best-seller, ranked for around 10,000 keywords, accumulated tens of thousands of reviews, and as the leader could hold a premium price while competitors fought on cuts. He later flipped another brand for $8 million. He’s the e-commerce kid, he says — “the maulvi’s race ends at the mosque” — so he stayed in e-commerce, then diversified the cash into real estate and other ventures, and almost accidentally started a podcast, which is how a story he’d kept undercover for years went public.

The trainers, and the morality switch

The second half is where Muzamil stops being a host and starts being a sparring partner. He has heard Naeem be critical of Pakistan’s Amazon-course establishment — Sunny Ali, Saqib’s Enablers, Extreme Commerce — and he pushes on the consistency of that critique.

Naeem’s objection is precise. The trainers taught private-label FBA having mostly done arbitrage, wholesale, or dropshipping — selling Nike and Adidas where the brand is already built, which is nothing like launching “Muzamil Glass” against ten identical sellers. They were, in his words, not accomplished sellers themselves; the actual teaching was outsourced to trainers running through the same courses, then relaying fundamentals anyone could find on YouTube. He knows the model from the inside: he sponsored two students through a boot camp at $1,200 each and found WhatsApp groups for product hunting and logistics, but no mentor you could actually call.

Muzamil presses the contradiction. Naeem himself built a fortune reselling other people’s work — cracked courses, rewritten recipes, repackaged fundamentals — and only later decided value was worth paying for. So why is it legitimate when he does it and a scam when Sunny Ali does it? And there’s the deeper tell he names directly: in Pakistan, “suddenly morality goes out the window” when the money is in dollars, and gets plugged back in the moment it’s a local rupee transaction. Naeem concedes the early Kindle work was unethical, and pins it on the same gap he keeps circling — nobody ever taught the fundamentals of ethics, so they didn’t exist to break.

What the backlash actually broke

Muzamil’s real argument isn’t about any one trainer. It’s about the national discourse they left behind. First came the belief that Amazon was Pakistan’s salvation. Then the backlash — manjan sellers, the idea that teaching and charging for it is the most dishonest thing in the world. And that second story, he argues, did real damage: because quacks sold quackery, the country now treats all paid teaching as a con. The label sticks to legitimate skills too, so the quality people stop participating. “Everything is on YouTube” becomes a reason not to value anything — in a country, he notes, where in Dubai they charge you for the air you breathe.

Naeem’s defence of the trainers is grudging but real: they created awareness where there was none, and out of a million people in those groups, a handful of genuine sellers emerged who eventually found him for the advanced questions the courses couldn’t answer. But he agrees on the flaw — you can’t tell a million people an industry will make them rich while staffing it with teachers who never made it themselves.

Muzamil closes on the harder problem. Naeem is a problem-solver who left for Dubai because his own growth had capped, and people still tell him he abandoned the country. So how do you actually move the number when the base is this weak — when a thousand kids responding to an online shout include seven hundred who can’t do basic math? Naeem’s answer is the most useful thing he offers all episode, and it isn’t a course. If he were Sunny Ali, he’d write give-back into the contract: every funded brand owner takes on his students as interns — graphic design, PPC, account management, logistics — and converts the ones who qualify into jobs. Most people can’t run a business. But the students an institution produces shouldn’t be left as failed sellers when they could be employable operators. The incubators that exist don’t do this, he notes, because the people who succeed hide their secret sauce — so incubators fill with newbies, and no real player is ever in the room.