How two sisters in Thatta built a global audience on a one-hour dial-up

The episode opens in Thatta, on a one-hour internet allowance

The episode opens with Muzamil saying he has been meaning to meet his guests “for at least seven years.” Noor Unnahar and Areeba Siddiqui are sisters, seven years younger than he is, and they finish each other’s sentences without trying. “It just happens,” one of them says. “We sometimes complete each other’s sentences.” Muzamil notes that he has watched their work from a distance for a long time, and that the story he wants to tell on this episode is not the polished one their followers see. It is the one underneath it.

That story starts in Thatta, a small city in Sindh, where the two sisters grew up with one hour of internet a day each. Not one hour between them — one hour for Areeba, one hour for Noor. The connection itself was a PTCL v-phone with a ZTE device, slow enough that Muzamil pauses the conversation to correct them when they call it dial-up. “It wasn’t dial-up,” he says. “Skype wouldn’t have worked on dial-up.” Either way, it was slow. A single megabyte took hours to move.

This is the texture of the early section of the conversation. Two sisters in eighth grade, in a town most of their later audience cannot find on a map, deciding that an hour each was enough to build something.

From Stardoll to Blogspot to a real audience

They were on Stardoll first — an online dress-up game with a sister site called Piczo, which let young girls keep an online diary. When Piczo announced it was shutting down, the sisters were genuinely upset. “We were like, where will we write our diaries now?” Noor recalls. “We literally Googled it.” Blogger.com came up first. WordPress looked too complicated. They picked Blogger because they were teenagers and wanted what was easy.

The year was 2011. Areeba was in eighth grade. The blogs were lifestyle blogs in the American sense — long-running text posts about daily life, modelled on the American lifestyle bloggers they followed obsessively on Bloglovin and Pinterest. There were almost no Pakistani lifestyle bloggers in their reading at the time. The community they joined was Western by default, and that single fact shaped almost everything that came next.

Areeba ran her blog until 2018. Seven years. By then it had served its purpose — it had taught both sisters how to draw an audience, how to think about traffic, and how to write for someone who is not in the room with you.

The $5 banner, the uncle in Saudi, and the first dollar

The most charming detour in the conversation is also the most instructive. Noor needed thirty-five dollars. She wanted a diamond membership on Stardoll so she could dress up her doll properly, and the membership was about six dollars a month, cheaper if she bought the year. No bank in Pakistan would give a teenager a card. Pakistani PayPal access was effectively non-existent.

She solved it the way the rest of the conversation says she solved everything. She downloaded a free copy of Photoshop CS2, watched tutorials, and started making banner ads for other bloggers in the American community. Her first sale was five dollars, paid by a mother in the United States, through a PayPal account verified by an uncle in Saudi Arabia. “I told them, it’s not in Pakistan,” she says, completely deadpan. “I just needed that money.”

She got the thirty-five dollars. Then she kept going. Other bloggers wanted banners. Some wanted full blog header designs, which she taught herself by reading source code on other blogs and replicating what she saw. A blog redesign paid thirty to seventy-five dollars. She gave the first one away as a giveaway to build a portfolio. By the time she was fifteen, she was running a small design service out of an hour of v-phone internet a day, mostly while her mother thought she was on Skype.

Areeba ran ad space on her blog using the same community as a market — three to four ad slots a month, three to five dollars each, sold directly to American bloggers she had befriended through commenting. The blog itself was averaging three to five thousand monthly readers.

Muzamil keeps stopping the conversation to mark how strange it sounds. “Sitting in Thatta, using a v-phone connection, talking about backlinking.” He says it twice.

Instagram was a traffic tool first, a destination second

Areeba moved to Instagram in 2013. Noor came in shortly after. Neither of them treated it as a destination. “I started Instagram so that I could send people to my blog,” Areeba says. “Link in bio, click on the link. That was the whole point.” The pictures she posted were the same ones that headlined her blog posts, taken by her, of her.

The pivot to journals — Areeba’s visual art journals and Noor’s poetry journals — was not a strategy. It was what they were already doing offline. Areeba had kept three or four diaries her whole life. Noor had become deeply introverted and was writing poetry to think. When Areeba’s spreads started doing well on Instagram, Noor noticed the traffic data, applied the same logic to her own work, and started posting poems.

Then one of Noor’s poems went viral on Pinterest, and her audience multiplied. “I had no idea poetstagram existed on Instagram,” she says. “I was just sharing poetry. It was very childish. I hadn’t learned the language of poetry yet.” Her subject matter at that point was home, identity, and point of origin — the only questions she had, because she did not yet know who she was or who she was going to become.

Areeba’s break was different and more direct. Tavi Gevinson, then the editor of Rookie Magazine — the same magazine Areeba had told her sister she would one day work for, as a joke — sent her an email asking her to make paid content for Rookie. The Instagram repost that followed brought her a thousand new followers an hour. “I kept refreshing,” she says. “A thousand followers, every refresh.”

Yesterday I Was The Moon, and how Penguin found her

Later in the discussion, the conversation moves to Noor’s first book, Yesterday I Was The Moon, published in 2017. The route to that book is one of the cleanest answers in the episode to the question of how an unknown writer breaks into traditional publishing.

She did not. Not at first. She self-published on Amazon, through their print-on-demand service. She skipped Kindle on purpose, because she wanted readers to have a physical object. The cost per copy was a little high, but the manuscript was hers, the ISBN was real, and Amazon’s store was the distribution.

The book broke into Amazon’s top three best-sellers for new poetry releases. Offers from traditional publishers followed. The one she took was from Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Muzamil interrupts himself to say it out loud. “Penguin published you?” Yes. The book was later translated into Dutch and Chinese, picked up by Urban Outfitters in an exclusive pink-cover edition with bonus content, and stocked across Target in the original blue-cover edition.

Noor still has not been to the United States to see her book on a shelf. She was supposed to go in 2020. COVID happened. The trip is now scheduled for the end of 2022. She is calm about it — she is not surprised the book is there, because she was the one who put it there. “I was more excited to see it in Liberty Books here,” she says, “because I knew I didn’t have a huge audience here.”

Her second collection comes out in October, with a different publisher this time — one she chose because they are a poetry-first house rather than an illustration-first house. The themes are similar to the first book, but the language is different. “I was a teenager trying my luck with poetry,” she says. “Now I’ve studied extensively the kind of language I want to use.”

Why they did not become fashion influencers

One of the more interesting moments in the conversation is the one where Muzamil asks the question their audience size makes obvious. Why did they not become fashion influencers? An Eid photograph almost always outperforms a poem on Instagram. The platform rewards faces. The easier path was right there. Why did they not take it?

Areeba’s answer is precise. “I do not want to put myself out there as Areeba,” she says. “I want to put myself out there as the artist who is Areeba.” She has started incorporating her own outfits into her animations, but the rule is that her face never appears without her art. The commercial and the creative are fused. Anyone who wants Areeba the person has to take Areeba the artist with her, on her terms.

Noor’s version of the answer runs deeper into identity. By the time their Instagram audience had grown, both sisters had already had the conversation about whether to dilute their Pakistani identity for the Western audience that had carried them from the blogging days. They decided against it, deliberately. Areeba chose to wear the hijab on the account, knowing it would cost her followers. Noor’s poetry shifted from generic teenage themes to South Asian identity and origin. “I think Areeba and I made a collective decision,” Noor says. “We were going to question our own content. Is this authentic to us, or are we doing it because the blogosphere is doing it?”

The conversation makes one detail explicit that is easy to miss. Areeba’s audience today is roughly seventy to eighty percent Pakistani, then UK, then Indonesia — driven by the hijabi community — then the United States. Noor’s is still US first, then India, then Canada, then Pakistan. They did not converge. Their work pulled different audiences, and they let the audiences settle.

The financial argument for a woman’s own money

The most direct passage in the conversation comes near the end, when Muzamil asks about the implications of being independent women in Pakistan with global careers. Noor does not wait for a softer question. “I think it is very important, and I really want to talk about it,” she says. “A girl, a woman, needs her own money to keep herself safe. Not just any money. Her own money.”

She makes the argument structural, not emotional. If something goes wrong, the probability of safety rises with the ability to act. Getting on a bus from Karachi to Islamabad is not the same as booking a flight that lands in two hours. The flight is not a luxury in that frame. It is an instrument of physical safety. Without her own money, a woman cannot use that instrument when she needs to.

Muzamil extends the point to the macroeconomic one — a country writing off fifty percent of its productive population. Noor pulls it back to the personal. She and Areeba spent eighteen years doing exactly what they were asked. They did not date, did not push back, did not fight their parents on anything. That eighteen-year deposit, she says, is what gave them the standing to make their own decisions now — including the standing to say they would leave the country if their work required it, and have their parents trust them to handle it. “Parents understand when their kids grow up,” she says. “But they also need to see the eighteen years of trust you built before they let go.”

Pakistani clients, foreign clients, and where the appreciation actually is

By the end of the conversation, Areeba and Noor are talking about their professional plans after graduation. Areeba is clear, and not apologetic. She prefers foreign clients. The reason is not glamour. It is that Pakistani creative clients do not pay, and often do not appreciate the work either. “Pakistan mein, as a creative, working only with Pakistani companies is very hard,” she says. “They don’t want to pay you.” Foreign clients pay properly, and in her experience, they value the work. Given a choice between the two, she says, why would you not pick the second?

Noor’s framing is slightly different. She is happy in isolation. Whether the conversation about her work is happening in Karachi or in New York does not change her practice. Her ambition for the next decade is to run her own studio, with an all-women team — animators, illustrators, writers, all in one room.

Muzamil closes the conversation at the one-hour, thirty-something-minute mark. The point he keeps returning to in the last stretch is the one the episode is built on. None of this had to happen the way it happened. Two sisters in Thatta, one hour of internet, no Pakistani role models in the space they were entering, no PayPal access, no industry contacts — they built a career by reading other people’s blogs, Googling the parts they did not understand, and refusing to drop their identity for an easier audience. The lesson, as Muzamil puts it near the end, is not that the playbook is repeatable. It is that the playbook never existed. They wrote it as they went.