Penetrate, don't apply: a Pakistani's path to a remote US job

A viral video and a long-pending LinkedIn message

Muzamil opens by explaining why he booked this guest at all. He saw a video go viral, looked into the man behind it, and decided the topic deserved a long-form conversation: the single thing that, in his framing, can pull Pakistanis “out of the shackles of slavery” is “independence of your professional life” — earning in dollars from inside the country.

Ghalib Hassam, for his part, had reached out on LinkedIn a year or two earlier. Nothing happened then. “Maybe I don’t have the platform yet, but one day it will happen,” he remembers thinking, “or आज इंशाला वह दिन आ गया है.” The seat across from Muzamil was something he had visualised before he had any business expecting it. Both men return to that detail later as proof of a mindset, not a coincidence.

From civil engineering family to “I want to work from home”

Ghalib is from Nowshera, KP, near Peshawar. He follows the standard Pakistani trifecta — doctor at the top, engineering next, BBA as the fallback — and lands in the middle. His brother is an architect; his late father was a civil engineer. He picks electrical engineering, graduates in 2017, spends 2018 hunting for work, and finds nothing.

The family sells their Vitz to fund a masters in Turkey. COVID hits in the middle of it. He returns to Pakistan in 2022 with a clear personal verdict: “जिस चीज़ से मैं भाग रहा था Pakistan से, job नहीं मिल रही.” He decides he wants to work from home, stay near his mother (his father passed away in 2016), and accepts that engineering is not the lane. Marketing is — because, as he tells Muzamil, “अगर आपने remote job ढूंढी तो you need to be in a field जो कि उसको allow करें.”

The lowest barrier of entry

This is the section of the conversation Muzamil keeps circling back to, because it is the load-bearing idea. Ghalib’s framing: a Pakistani with no international experience cannot demand a paid job from a foreign company. The risk-reward for the founder on the other side does not work.

“I thought what if I try to penetrate an international organization by not demanding a job or feeling entitled, but just by finding the lowest barrier of entry? For me, that was free work.”

He cold-messaged a founder in Berlin who was running a LinkedIn content agency. The pitch was honest: I will work for free, I just want to learn how your business runs. “To my surprise, उन्होंने मुझे जवाब दिया and he said, I love the attitude. Let’s jump on a call.” A month of unpaid work later, Ghalib did not wait. He pitched himself back: I understand the business now, I am an asset, let’s move to an hourly contract. The Berlin founder moved him to twenty hours a week.

He repeated the move with a UK founder. Same script: one month of experience, willing to work free again, just want to learn. It worked again.

The Sam Winsbury message

Months in, with one part-time role and two free internships running in parallel, Ghalib went after a full-time contract. The Berlin founder said he wasn’t ready. He went around him, directly messaging the CEO of Kurogo, a London agency — Sam Winsbury. “Because he’s running a startup, छोटी team, he’s accessible, he’s creating content on LinkedIn.”

A short interview, a fifteen-minute task he already knew how to do, and then the screenshot Ghalib says he still has saved: “Ghalib we would love for you to join us as a full time personal brand manager.” His description of the moment is plain — “मेरी आंखों में आंसू आए थे” — and he frames the reason the same way each time: a UK founder paying a full month’s salary to a stranger in Pakistan, when the local talent pool is large, is not normal. Free work, documented publicly, made him no longer a stranger.

Free courses, then taste

Muzamil pushes Ghalib on the education question. The Pakistani conversation about remote work has been hijacked by paid courses; he wants to know what Ghalib actually used.

“I never paid for a course.” LinkedIn Learning’s one-month free trial when you sign up. Google Digital Garage. HubSpot Academy — which Ghalib admits he tricked by typing in “info@google.com” as his company email, because he had no company. YouTube on top of that.

The advice is structural, not tool-specific: don’t commit to one specialty because you heard there’s money in it. Try SEO, then inbound, then CRO. “पैसा should never be the motivation in my opinion.” Find your taste first. Then go deep.

What’s actually missing: work ethic, not skill

Muzamil pivots the conversation to the harder thing — the gap that no course closes. He lists it directly: work ethic, discipline, time management, critical thinking, ethical fundamentals. People who book meetings and don’t show up. People who overcommit and underdeliver and then explain why. “जो real world environment है या global market है उसके अंदर people if they hate one thing it is excuses.”

Ghalib agrees and then goes one level deeper. He blames freelancing platforms for the positioning problem: “freelancing ने especially Pakistan में हमें as a commodity position कर दिया है.” Hours marked, deliverables shipped, no real conversation with the client. “Ten साल तक freelancing कर लो, पैसे भी बहुत कमा लोगे लेकिन उसके बाद आप क्या करोगे?” He cites a post he saw two days earlier — a freelancer with one to two crore in savings whose pipeline collapsed in six months once the market shifted.

AI is dangerous if you’re a pair of hands

When Muzamil asks about AI replacement, Ghalib’s answer is unsentimental. The danger is real, and it is specific: anyone whose value was executional. Data entry, basic copywriting, simple graphic design. He quotes a stat he had read — early ChatGPT and Claude displaced roughly 5% of the global freelance workforce on execution work almost immediately, and the number has gone up since.

His company’s internal thesis is what they call the “full stack marketer” — one strategic mind upstairs running tools that previously required ten to fifteen people. The line he attributes to a former client is the one he wants people to remember: “you have to be a client’s expansion of their brain instead of an expansion of their hands. उनके हाथ ना बनो, उनका दिमाग बनो.”

Go to Claude, not ChatGPT

Asked which tool to bet on, Ghalib is direct. “If I were you, मैं ChatGPT को हाथ भी नहीं लगाऊंगा. I would directly go to Claude.” His reasoning is operational, not brand-loyal: Claude lets you create projects with persistent context, build dashboards, and chain tools together in a way ChatGPT does not. He describes a concrete use case — replacing a small business’s manual Excel bookkeeping with a Claude-built dashboard, without knowing how to code.

The point is not which model is smarter on a benchmark. It is which one lets a Pakistani breaking into remote work ship a deliverable that looks like a senior person built it. For Ghalib, that is Claude.

Outcome selling vs technique selling

Muzamil makes the case that the pitch most Pakistanis use is too technical. “Sir, I can build dashboards” is a weak hook. “Sir, your bookkeeping is leaking 30% of your margin and I can fix it for $500 with a $4,000 upside” is a strong one. Outcome over technique.

Ghalib agrees, with a sharp split. If you are landing clients, yes — audit them first, find the gap, send a Loom video showing what they’re missing before asking for anything. He used to do exactly that. But if you are going for a remote job inside an organisation, the buyers are scanning for two different things: expertise as a baseline, and culture fit as the deciding factor.

His definition of culture fit is the most useful thing in the episode for someone preparing for an interview. It is not how well you do the work. The work is table stakes — “काम तो मैं भी कर लूंगा, मुज़मील भाई भी कर लेंगे, बाकी सब लोग कर लेंगे.” It is whether you can be put in front of a client. Whether you turn your camera on. Whether you can talk about your goals beyond money. Whether your stated reason for working remotely — Ghalib’s was wanting to stay near his mother — resonates with a founder somewhere who started their own company for a similar reason. Culture fit is what gets you referred.

The mindset shift at 27

Muzamil closes the working portion of the conversation with the question he says actually matters: where does the belief come from? Ghalib had every excuse available. Engineering degree, no job, sold the family car, came back from Turkey into a worse economy.

His answer is specific to a date. “मेरा यह mindset change हुआ था तो, when I was 27.” Finishing his masters, responsibility arriving whether he wanted it or not. The line he wants to leave with the audience is blunt: “अपने हालात तब तक नहीं बदलेंगे जब तक आप ख़ुद नहीं बदलोगे.” Your circumstances don’t change until you do.

Why he stays in Pakistan

Muzamil’s last question is the personal one. Ghalib earns in dollars now. Portugal, Dubai, Malaysia — the digital nomad route is open. Why stay?

Two reasons. The first is the same one that started the journey: home, the lawn in the morning, tea with his wife and mother. “मेरे लिए इस दुनिया में घर से बेहतर चीज़ कोई भी नहीं है.” The second is harder. He describes a working guilt — sitting in comfort while millions of young Pakistanis do not know that a remote job from inside the country is even possible. That guilt is what produces the LinkedIn content, the Instagram explainers, the YouTube channel, the workshops. The moral framing he lands on is the one Muzamil seems to have been waiting for: “मेरी responsibility है morally कि मैं लोगों को सिखाऊं.”

Muzamil’s closing line is that the audience doesn’t need to support Ghalib, or any particular creator — they need to support the practice of teaching the next person what worked. The episode ends there, with the camera off and the playbook intact.