The eBay trainer building Pakistan's e-commerce future from Multan

From Multan, with a stammer and a book

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Qasim Sana Ramay as the founder and CEO of Empowerers — described as Pakistan’s largest and probably only eBay-centric training organisation. Before the conversation reaches business models or sales figures, it goes somewhere more personal: childhood in Multan, a banker father whose transfers shaped an early life split between Multan and old Lahore, and a boy who was consistently first in class but deeply introverted.

Around the age of nine or ten, Qasim developed a stammer. He cannot identify a single cause for it, and says so plainly. What he does identify is what was missing: any structured work on social skills or personal development. “Aapko express karna hi nahi aata. Aapse stage par aakar present karni nahi aati” — you didn’t know how to express yourself, you couldn’t present on stage. He connects this not to a failure of intelligence but to a systemic gap. In the late eighties and early nineties, there was no internet, no YouTube, no infrastructure for building confidence. Wednesday afternoons brought fifteen minutes of Captain Planet on PTV, and even that was sometimes replaced without warning by Open University course broadcasts.

His parents, he says, were consistently encouraging and never blocked what he wanted to do. That support, he believes, was the single most important variable in his early life.

The engineering detour that wasn’t really a detour

After skipping sixth and seventh grade entirely — jumping from fifth class directly to ninth — Qasim ended up at the College of Signals, NUST’s campus, studying software engineering. He heard about NUST almost by accident, sitting in a coaching centre when a physics teacher mentioned it alongside GIK as alternatives to UET Lahore. He cleared both entry tests and chose NUST.

The campus ran like a school — morning assembly, recitation, structured routines — but it gave him exposure and confidence he hadn’t had before. He graduated in four years, in good standing. When the army offer came, as it typically does for College of Signals graduates, most of his cohort declined. The reason was simple: 2006 was the peak of Pakistan’s telecom boom. Private sector salaries were starting at 45,000 to 80,000 rupees, with rapid progression. Everyone went into telecom.

Qasim did not take a job at all.

Thoughts become things — and a network marketing detour

The intellectual anchor Qasim returns to repeatedly is a short book by James Allen called As a Man Thinketh. He read it during his university years and one sentence lodged itself permanently: “Thoughts become things.” He describes it not as motivational rhetoric but as a working principle — the thought is the starting point, but you have to pay the price in effort, in difficult days, in ruthless minutes and hours.

During his university years he had already been working with a network marketing company — legal in the UK and US, operating in a grey area in Pakistan — and had reached an income of 14,000 rupees per week, enough to cover his first two or three semesters of fees. More importantly, that organisation gave him something the education system had not: structured social skills training. It was there, he says, that people pushed him to speak until the stammer began to loosen. “It can be a physical issue but mainly it’s a psychological issue.”

New Horizons, an ERP company, and the lesson about grass-roots entrepreneurship

After university, Qasim and a friend — Dr Nadeem Aabadi, a medical doctor with similar entrepreneurial instincts — started an institute called New Horizons Institute of Success. The premise was treating success as a subject. They divided life into twelve areas, ran monthly training cycles with four sessions each, and operated for about three years.

Then Qasim wanted to go further. He wanted to test entrepreneurship at grass-roots level, not just teach it. He started an ERP software company, bringing in a chartered accountant partner and a development partner. They were selling implementations — not just software — for fifteen lakh rupees at a time, in a market where companies resisted spending five lakh. The real value, he explains, was never the code on a CD. It was the implementation, the business process redesign, the humans behind the system.

After two years he handed the company to his functional partner and moved on. His reasoning was direct: he wanted to be on a simpler, more financially productive path. He also started an IT hardware business alongside, because hardware was one area where Pakistani customers would actually pay promptly.

He is candid about one thing he considers a small mistake from that period: he wanted to stay in Multan, to generate employment there, to serve his own people. That commitment, while genuine, may have limited his early scale. “It’s my responsibility to serve my people in Multan, in Punjab, in Pakistan.”

How eBay became the centre of everything

The path to international e-commerce was gradual. Qasim built a local e-commerce operation, sold IT equipment on Daraz, and encountered the familiar Pakistani retail frustrations — buyers swapping cheap items into expensive packaging and returning them, platforms that offered little recourse. By 2018 he moved to international platforms, starting with Amazon private label: sourcing from China, shipping to Amazon fulfilment centres in the US.

Then eBay happened, almost by accident. “eBay par to bas Allah taala aise achanak le aaye” — God just brought me to eBay suddenly — and the success there was significant enough that paid courses followed naturally. The market rate for eBay education internationally was around $1,800. Empowerers charges $297 to $797. The gap is deliberate.

Muzamil asks him to explain the different models available on eBay. Qasim walks through online arbitrage (sourcing from one online retailer and shipping directly to the customer in that retailer’s packaging), dropshipping (listing someone else’s inventory under an agreement, with the supplier shipping directly), wholesale, private label, and stock-based selling. His position on all of them is consistent: customer service is not optional if you intend to build something long-term. “Agar aapki niyyat yeh hai na ke isko maine long term lekar chalna hai” — if your intention is to run this for the long term — then you have to serve the customer.

He is equally clear about what Empowerers does not teach: short-term account exploitation. The Facebook group, empowers.co/group, does not circulate ideas about running an account into the ground and closing it. That is simply not the model.

The financial ladder: job, self-employment, business, investor

Later in the discussion, Qasim lays out what he calls a financial ladder — a framework he teaches inside Empowerers. It has four steps.

Step one is a job. He is firm that people should not romanticise leaving employment. “Unse poocho jinke paas job bhi nahi hai” — ask those who don’t even have a job. Gratitude first.

Step two is self-employment: a freelancing skill, a service, an extra income stream that begins to give you options. He includes in this category doctors, lawyers, and freelancers earning a million rupees a month. The income may be high, but if your presence is required for every rupee, you are still on step two. “Aapke paas time leverage nahi hai.”

Step three is business — defined specifically as something that runs without your presence, or with very little of it. A kiryana store where you sit all day is self-employment. The same store running without you is a business.

Step four is investor: deploying capital into people and ventures, earning while you sleep. He is careful here. “You do not invest on the startups or the ideas. You basically invest on people.” The person carrying the idea, their passion, their character — that is what you are actually backing.

He estimates the journey from step one to step four can take three years or fifteen, depending on resources, capacity, and luck. And, he adds with a smile, how happy your mother is with you, how many prayers she is sending your way.

Pakistan’s gemstone sellers and the billion-rupee blind spot

One of the sharpest moments in the conversation comes when Qasim describes a segment of the Pakistani economy that is almost entirely invisible in official statistics. Roughly two thousand Pakistanis are currently selling raw gemstones on eBay, generating an estimated twenty-four to thirty-six million dollars in annual revenue. None of it appears in Pakistan’s e-commerce calculations because there is no policy framework around it. Some sellers are shipping through Pakistan Post, some through DHL. He mentions sellers whose DHL bill alone runs six to seven lakh rupees a month.

“Agar chhe se saat lakh rupaye agar DHL ka unka bill hai to unki matlab sales jo hai wahan par — sales unki kitni hogi?” If their courier bill is that high, what must their sales be?

Thirty-plus manufacturers have already connected with Empowerers and begun selling Pakistani products internationally. The gemstone market alone, he argues, represents a potential of billions of dollars if it is simply IT-enabled and brought onto e-commerce platforms with proper brand building.

The competitors Qasim calls contributors

Muzamil raises the broader ecosystem — Sunny Ali on Amazon, Saqib Azhar, others building e-commerce education in Pakistan. Qasim names them without hesitation and without defensiveness. “Hum in sab ko samajhte hain ke they are our contributors.” The goal, as he frames it, is an empowered Pakistan. Everyone moving in that direction is contributing to the same outcome.

In 2021 alone, Empowerers students and group members generated over one billion seven crore rupees in sales — roughly one billion rupees — through the platforms and methods the organisation teaches. Qasim presents this not as a revenue figure for Empowerers but as evidence of what is possible when people are shown a path and given a hand on the shoulder.

Thirty years of optimism, and a seat at the table

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks the question he puts to most guests: how do you see Pakistan thirty years from now? Qasim is 39 at the time of recording. He acknowledges he should be realistic but admits he is constitutionally optimistic — and that optimism, he says, has served him well.

His view: Pakistan will be a world power by 2030, not a superpower in the conventional sense, but a country whose position is heard and whose decisions carry weight. “You can at least have a seat at the table.” He points to Pakistan’s geographic relationship with China, to recent shifts in foreign policy posture, and to six months of policy work — from September 2021 onward — involving the Ministry of IT, PSEB, SECP, FBR, banks, payment processors, and the freelancer community, which he describes as the most concentrated policy-making effort in Pakistan’s digital history.

He references a target of $50 billion in digital exports by 2030, and a government commitment to $9.8 billion by 2023 or 2025, and says both are achievable if conditions remain stable.

Muzamil closes by noting something he has observed across two hundred episodes: the first hundred had a largely cynical view of Pakistan’s future, the second hundred split roughly half and half, and the current season has been overwhelmingly positive. “Hope is a very powerful motivator. You can be in the worst of places with the worst of variables and if you have hope, you can sustain.”

Qasim’s response brings the conversation full circle: “Thought become things — aur jab aap kisi cheez ko itni shiddat se chaho to kaaynaat aapke liye enable karti hai.” When you want something with enough intensity, the universe enables it.

The last thing Muzamil notes before signing off is the thing he finds most striking about the entire conversation: Qasim built all of this not from Karachi, not from Lahore, not from Islamabad — but from Multan. South Punjab, he says, is somewhere he is very bullish on. The stories are coming.