How Bilal Munir built VideoWaliSarkar from scratch

A Faisalabad kid who never quite fit the university mould

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Bilal Munir as someone who has been on his mind for months — a guest whose range of activity across tech media, e-commerce, and product development made him difficult to pin down in a single category. Bilal arrives with the same restless energy that, by his own account, made formal education feel like a poor fit from the start.

Bilal grew up in Faisalabad and was, by every conventional measure, a strong student — a topper in college, consistently near the top of his class. He chose computer science because the interest was genuine and the decision felt settled. What was not settled was whether university would deliver what he expected. “I thought that when I leave college and enter university, I will get out of the textbook world and get practical knowledge,” he says. What he found instead was a curriculum taught largely by professors who, in his view, had never worked in the market they were teaching about. The gap between what was being taught and what the industry actually required felt unbridgeable.

He transferred from Lahore back to Faisalabad mid-degree. The move was partly logistical — travelling back every weekend was unsustainable — and partly a recalibration. In Faisalabad, the academic environment felt less demanding, and his grades improved to a 3.67 GPA. But the improvement came at a cost: he was, as he put it, playing in a lighter weight class. Time was abundant. The question of what to do with it became urgent.

The first video and the name nobody planned

With time on his hands and a genuine interest in technology, Bilal began watching YouTube. He noticed something specific: Urdu-language tech content did not exist in any meaningful form. The channels that covered smartphones and gadgets were either in English or aimed at audiences in India. Pakistani consumers — who were buying phones, comparing specs, and making purchase decisions — had nowhere to go in their own language.

He asked a university friend for advice on what to put on a channel. The friend suggested unboxing videos. Bilal made his first unboxing video and uploaded it. The name VideoWaliSarkar came together without a grand strategy. “I just thought of it,” he says. What mattered more than the name was the gap he was filling.

The early videos were basic. Production quality was not the point. The point was that someone was finally talking about technology in Urdu, in a register that felt local and accessible. Subscribers came slowly at first, then faster. Muzamil notes that this origin story — a single unboxing video, a name chosen almost at random, a gap spotted rather than manufactured — is more common among successful creators than the polished founding myths that tend to circulate later.

Why copying MKBHD was the wrong strategy for Pakistan

One of the sharpest arguments in the conversation concerns production quality and who the actual consumer is. Bilal describes a pattern he observed in Pakistan’s early tech creator space: almost everyone was trying to deconstruct and replicate MKBHD — the American YouTuber known for cinematic, high-production-value reviews. The logic seemed sound. If the best channel in the world looks like that, aspiring creators should aim for that standard.

Bilal’s counter-argument is grounded in a simple observation about where the Pakistani consumer actually watches content. “The consumer is a guy watching a video on his mobile phone while standing in a gift shop,” he says. That consumer does not need a drone shot or a colour-graded studio setup. He needs clear information, delivered in a language he understands, at a pace that respects his time. A creator who invests everything in production quality before building an audience cannot compete on quality with established international channels, and simultaneously fails to serve the local audience who would have watched something simpler.

The more durable competitive advantage, Bilal argues, was always the language and the specificity of the market being covered. Pakistan’s smartphone market has its own dynamics — different price points, different brands dominating different segments, a replacement cycle that runs at roughly half the length of the US cycle. A creator who understands that market and speaks to it directly in Urdu has something no amount of production budget can replicate.

The technology cycle that makes Pakistan a content opportunity

Muzamil pushes Bilal on the structural features of Pakistan’s smartphone market, and the answer is detailed. The maximum user base, Bilal explains, is buying phones in the thirty to forty thousand rupee range. These are not flagship buyers. They are practical buyers who want a phone that works, covers their needs, and can be replaced when something better arrives at the same price point.

What makes this interesting for a content creator is the replacement cycle. In the United States, the average smartphone upgrade cycle is roughly six months for the content that drives views. In Pakistan, Bilal estimates that cycle compresses to around a month and a half. New phones launch constantly. Consumers who bought a phone six months ago are already looking at what has changed. “When so many phones are launching and I am still making videos about them, someone who changes phones every month and a half cannot be covered by a creator who takes more time to produce each video,” he says. The volume of content required to serve this market is enormous, and most creators have not built the systems to produce at that pace.

The implication for VideoWaliSarkar’s growth was clear: the channel needed to cover more products, more frequently, with a team rather than as a solo operation. Building that team became the next phase of the business.

Fast fame, slow financial stability

Bilal is candid about the gap between recognition and income. Fame, he says, came early. People knew the channel. Brands were aware of it. But converting that awareness into sustainable revenue took much longer than the subscriber count suggested it should.

Part of the problem was structural. Brands in Pakistan, particularly in the technology space, were accustomed to a specific model: place a product in a news article, pay for a print mention, and consider the marketing done. The idea that a YouTube channel could reach a consumer more directly and more effectively than a newspaper placement was not yet accepted. “Brands thought that this is all they can do,” Bilal says. Changing that perception required time and repeated demonstration that the audience was real, engaged, and making purchase decisions based on what they watched.

The second problem was that early brand relationships were not structured around the creator’s platform. Bilal describes a period of building slowly toward a point where he had enough control over his own distribution to negotiate from a position of strength. That shift — from being a service provider to brands to being a platform that brands needed access to — took years.

The e-commerce experiment and what broke

The conversation moves into territory that goes well beyond content creation. Bilal describes an attempt to build a direct-to-consumer product business, selling smartphones through his own platform. The logic was straightforward: he had an audience that trusted his reviews, he understood the products, and he could theoretically cut out intermediaries and deliver better value to the consumer.

What he discovered was that the two foundational pillars of e-commerce in Pakistan — logistics and payment — were both broken, and that their failures compounded each other in ways that made customer experience consistently poor. He walks through specific incidents: parcels that were scanned as delivered but never reached the customer, a branch employee who removed a customer’s address label and replaced it with another, packages that returned to the sender without explanation, customers who had paid and were waiting and had no visibility into what had happened.

“The customer is not getting a good experience, and I have no other option,” Bilal says, describing the position of a seller caught between a customer’s legitimate frustration and a logistics system that offers no recourse. He describes absorbing losses on individual orders to protect the customer relationship, operating on margins that left almost no room for error, and eventually concluding that the business model required either a different logistics infrastructure or a different product category.

The home appliances category came up as a potential next frontier — a space where durability matters more than features, where the review format needs to change accordingly, and where almost nobody in Pakistan’s creator economy has yet built a credible presence.

What the creator ecosystem in Pakistan actually needs

Late in the discussion, Muzamil draws Bilal into a broader conversation about the health of Pakistan’s creator economy. Bilal’s view is that the space has grown but has not matured in the ways that would make it sustainable for new entrants.

The core problem, as he sees it, is that established creators treat the space as zero-sum. A new channel covering the same category is seen as a threat rather than an expansion of the overall market. Bilal pushes back on this directly. “The market is 220 million people,” he says. “You can literally have twenty or thirty channels with 1.5 million subscribers each and all of them can be successful.” The audience is large enough. What is missing is the willingness of larger creators to support smaller ones — to send products their way, to mention them, to treat the ecosystem as something worth investing in collectively.

He also raises the question of what happens when a creator becomes unavailable. If a channel is built entirely around one person and that person is sick for a week, the output stops. Building a team, building systems, building a brand that is larger than any individual — these are the things that separate a sustainable media business from a personal project that happens to have subscribers.

By the end of the conversation, Bilal’s vision has expanded well beyond tech reviews. He describes wanting to move into product development, into research and development, into manufacturing at some level — a vertically integrated operation where the channel is the distribution layer for products he has had a hand in creating. Whether that is achievable in Pakistan’s current industrial environment is a question he holds open, but the direction is clear.

Muzamil closes by noting that few guests cover as many distinct areas with as much genuine depth. The session ran long, and neither of them seemed to notice.