Why Jaffer Haider never took the VC money for PosterMyWall

A product company built out of Lahore

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as a rarity. In 385 prior episodes of Thought Behind Things, this is one of the first proper product conversations he has hosted — and the reason is sitting across the table from him. Jaffer Haider runs PosterMyWall, an online design and marketing tool used by around 20 million people every month, with roughly three to four million of them active in any given month. The company has 42 employees, all based in Pakistan, and serves customers almost entirely outside it.

Muzamil is direct about why this matters to him. He has been, in his own words, “a long critic of doing more and more consumption business in Pakistan” because the rupee revenues do not move the country forward. What he wants from Jaffer is the opposite story: a product built in Lahore, sold globally, generating dollars, employing Pakistanis. PosterMyWall fits that brief almost exactly, and the rest of the conversation is an extended attempt to understand how Jaffer got there — and why almost nobody else has.

A VTech laptop and the early grammar of programming

Jaffer’s path to software starts earlier than most people’s. He was born and raised in Lahore, went through Beaconhouse end to end, sat all eight of his A-level subjects in one round in 2002, and got into computing not through school but through a toy. An uncle of his father’s brought back a VTech educational laptop from Dubai when Jaffer was around ten or eleven. The toy ran a stripped-down version of the BASIC programming language, with a printed booklet explaining the syntax. He built a text-based cricket game on it and made his mother play along.

He returns to this anecdote when Muzamil asks whether he has pushed his own children toward coding. The older two, he says, are doing block-based programming and Scratch courses run by a LUMS spin-off. The point he wants to make is not that every child should grow up to be a software engineer. It is that programming, at that age, teaches two things that are useful regardless of what the child ends up doing. “The ability to break down a complex problem into smaller chunks and really understand the basics,” he says, “and logical thinking. There is no magic. You have to build everything by yourself. Every step is discrete and you have to understand.”

Muzamil agrees with the framing. He says it explicitly: “This is not computer science, it’s fundamental of problem solving.” Both of them treat this as the under-appreciated case for putting kids in front of code — not vocational training, but a discipline of thought.

LUMS, Technologix, and the choice between services and product

Jaffer applied to LUMS, GIK and FAST for university. LUMS was a walking distance from his home in Lahore, which he names as a real factor in the decision. He enrolled in computer engineering — the new, telecom-boom-flavoured degree of the moment — but by the end of his first year he had decided the hardware and signals-and-systems courses were not for him. He moved to computer science and graduated in 2006 with a 3.5 GPA.

The interesting part of his early career is the deliberateness with which he rejected the obvious paths. Google, Amazon and Microsoft were on the radar but took only one or two LUMS students a year. The big local players were Systems, NetSol and Technologix. He picked Technologix, and he is unusually clear about why. “Technologix had a very engineering focused culture compared to NetSol or Systems,” he tells Muzamil. The other two were, in his reading, more focused on customising existing products and reselling them. He was after the craft itself.

This is the first appearance of a distinction that returns repeatedly through the conversation: the difference between people who optimise for the engineering work and people who optimise for the contract. He stayed at Technologix for about eighteen months, doing outsourcing work for an American startup that was digitising school yearbooks — building software to lay out photos and animate photo books. It was, by his own description, the kind of work that taught him what corporate engineering felt like and what he did not want to do for the next forty years.

Fulbright, Carnegie Mellon, and the addendum that sent him home

Jaffer applied for the Fulbright twice. The first time was, in his telling, peer-pressure: a wave of LUMS classmates were applying and he joined in despite having no real idea what to write in his statement of purpose. The second time, a year later, he had actually worked in industry and could write the essay honestly. He got it.

His top choice was Carnegie Mellon, which he describes — accurately — as “the birthplace of software engineering as a discipline.” He is interested in the lineage. CMU’s software engineering institute was originally funded by the US Department of Defense, which was, at the time, the world’s largest buyer of software. The processes for building software at scale, with hundreds of engineers in coordination, were largely worked out there. Jaffer wanted to build things real people used, not write papers, and CMU’s industry orientation fit. He also liked that the university sat at the intersection of art and engineering — they did collaborative work with Disney through their drama and arts schools.

He spent sixteen months at CMU. He got married before leaving and his wife went with him. He describes it as “an extended honeymoon” — no settled job, no green card pressure, and family in the US to visit on weekends. The catch was an addendum to his Fulbright cohort’s agreement that did not exist for the previous batches: master’s students were required to return to Pakistan for two years before they could re-enter the US. He returned. He never went back.

PosterMyWall, June 2010, and the first sale a few weeks later

Before he graduated from CMU, a contact he had met on the client side at Technologix reached out with an idea. That idea became PosterMyWall. Jaffer flew back to Lahore in January 2010, set up a home office, and spent six months building the first version — the proprietary tech for high-resolution output, the website, the editor. They launched in June 2010 and waited. The first sale came within a few weeks.

The product addressed a specific gap. In 2010, if you wanted to make a poster or any marketing imagery, Photoshop or other desktop applications were essentially your only choice. PosterMyWall offered a browser-based editor that a layperson could use, with a free download option that watermarked the output with a large “postermywall.com” stamp — which Jaffer credits as one of the early growth loops that brought direct word-of-mouth traffic back to the site.

For the first four years, the team was effectively two people: Jaffer writing code, and his wife — who taught herself web design and Photoshop after looking over his shoulder at the launched product — handling the artwork and the early templates. “She was like, you know, this is never going to work. Users cannot see their designs or templates,” he recalls, before she went and rebuilt the website. The first full-time engineering hire did not come until 2014.

Muzamil asks the obvious question. Four years, no employees, the steady drumbeat of friends and family asking when he is going to get a real job. Did he ever second-guess himself? Jaffer is honest. “Yes, of course, there were dark moments and there was a lot of uncertainty at the start. We even stopped working on the product for a few months and started picking up services projects for some sort of revenue stream.” What carried him through, he says, was the discipline his wife enforced — a clean separation between work hours and life — and the simple fact that the numbers, while never spectacular, were always pointing the right way.

The conscious decision to stay bootstrapped

By far the sharpest answer Jaffer gives in the interview is to Muzamil’s question about venture capital. The years from roughly 2014 onward were the years when everyone in the founder ecosystem was salivating over term sheets. Why did PosterMyWall never take the money?

“It was a conscious decision,” Jaffer says. “It was about controlling the product and controlling our lifestyle and where we wanted to take the team.” Offers did come later, after the user base grew large enough to attract them. They turned the offers down. “We were happy with the profitability, happy with the growth, and we had a clear vision for where to take the product, and we didn’t need them frankly.”

He makes a related point about how the company grew. Because the money was theirs and the revenue was real, every marketing decision had to be defensible on its own terms. “Whereas these days it’s typical to pump in a few hundred thousand dollars into paid ads, we never did that. We always focused on getting users in ways that were sustainable and didn’t require a lot of funding.” The biggest inflection point in growth, he says, was when they opened up the template marketplace — letting designers from Malaysia, Argentina and Europe upload templates and earn royalties. Suddenly there were templates for hyper-local holidays and regional events the Lahore team had never heard of, and the SEO surface area exploded.

The scale numbers Jaffer eventually shares are not small. 20 million users overall. Three to four million active users a month. Over 130 million designs created on the platform. Eighteen million emails sent through PosterMyWall’s marketing tools. Half a million social media posts published. Over two million templates contributed by the community. The competitor list is what you would expect: Canva in design, Buffer and Hootsuite and Sprout Social in social media, Constant Contact and Mailchimp in email. All of them are VC-funded. PosterMyWall is not. Jaffer is unbothered by the asymmetry. He says he tells new hires the same thing on day one: bring your A game, because look at the landscape you are competing in.

On AI, on Google, and on the platforms you cannot escape

Muzamil presses on two anxieties. The first is AI. Designers and freelancers are worried that generative tools will eat their work. Jaffer’s answer is shaped by PosterMyWall’s own history. When online design tools first appeared, the equivalent fear was that they would democratise design and put professional designers out of work. The opposite happened. The platform’s most active users include small shops that use PosterMyWall to push designs out to clients quickly — work that, by Jaffer’s reckoning, would not have gone to a Photoshop expert anyway. He expects something similar with AI. The team is training its own model on the millions of designs in their system. He is, in his phrasing, “very excited” about the space, while acknowledging that the actual set of genuinely useful AI products today is much smaller than the hype suggests.

The Google question is more delicate, because PosterMyWall depends heavily on organic search. Muzamil asks whether it bothers him to sit at the whim of one platform. Jaffer is direct that it has been a top-of-mind concern from the beginning, and that there were marketing goals at PosterMyWall explicitly framed as reducing reliance on Google. But, he says, “you can never be independent of Google.” His operating answer is that as long as the product is genuinely providing value to users searching for what it offers, Google is, in his words, “pretty fair.” The thirteen years of algorithm changes have not killed them.

He treats the rise of ChatGPT as the same kind of opportunity. PosterMyWall could plug into ChatGPT as a first-class option and use that as a funnel. The landscape is moving, and the answer is to stay on top of it rather than try to hedge it away.

iOS, the long-overdue app, and the cost of a small team

One of the more candid moments in the conversation comes when Muzamil asks why PosterMyWall, after thirteen years, still does not have an iOS app. The Android app exists. The mobile web works. But there is nothing in the App Store, and Muzamil — a Canva user himself — admits that the absence of an iOS app subtly trains him to think a product is less serious.

Jaffer does not defend the gap. “iOS is long overdue,” he says plainly. “We’ll be getting to that.” His explanation is the one a bootstrapped founder gives: a small team has to pick its battles, the mobile web carried the product for a decade, and Apple’s historical strictness about its design language made a clean port expensive. The composition of the user base also matters. In PosterMyWall’s top-paying markets — the developed economies — most paying users are still on laptops. The Southeast Asian markets that have overtaken those countries in traffic are mobile-first, but conversion rates there are lower because the users are not used to paying. The investment case for an iOS app was not as obvious as it looks from the outside.

Atoms versus electrons — and the wedge for Pakistan

The most ideological stretch of the conversation comes when Muzamil widens the lens to Pakistan’s broader startup ecosystem. He has a running critique that he repeats here. The last few years of Pakistani startup growth have been overwhelmingly focused on consumption businesses built for the Pakistani market, propped up by Careem-style valuation games that he believes do not move the country forward. The dollars are not real. The margins are not there. The country, in his framing, is being asked to imitate the wrong template.

Jaffer agrees, and he frames the wedge in a phrase he picked up from TechCrunch in his student years. “Atoms are physical products that you can sell. Electrons are digital services that you can sell.” For an economy with Pakistan’s constraints — capital-poor, infrastructure-poor, exposed to currency shocks — selling electrons is the only thing that adds up. “Given Pakistan, if it’s on the cloud, it just makes sense. You don’t need raw material. All you need is a laptop, internet and people.”

The missing ingredient, he says, is product thinking. He has been hiring in Lahore for over a decade. For most of that time, the concept of a product designer — let alone a product manager — did not exist locally. He hired fresh graduates because retraining services engineers was harder than starting from scratch. The services style, in his characterisation, is to find a quick solution on Google, paste it in, ship the project, and move on. Product work is the opposite: autonomous problem-solving, long time horizons, strong craft. He sees the local design and product manager pool finally starting to fill out. It is small but vibrant. He compares it to India, which is, for now, still known for services rather than product innovation. He believes Pakistan is on the same arc, ten or fifteen years behind.

The men in suits, and the missing operators

The deepest disagreement in the conversation is also the one Muzamil seems most interested in surfacing. He puts a critique on the table. The generation of Pakistani founders who came up between 2002 and 2010 are, in some readings, complacent. They built nice service businesses, capped at maybe two hundred employees, and settled into a comfortable life — a good house in DHA, a German car, a farmhouse if the interest is there. They had a difficult hand to play and they played it competently. But the sharper, more aggressive mode of growth that some newer players are now showing was never their style. Was the absence of that hunger a mistake, given that the economics — particularly the dollar peg breaking in 2018 and the export-friendly direction of policy since — now actually favour aggression?

Jaffer’s answer is not defensive. He locates the problem in two structural absences. The first is cultural and goes back to a much older socialist baggage in Pakistan, where the state demonised wealth creation and where, as Muzamil puts it, business has a “dirty feeling” attached to it. People still hesitate to acknowledge that companies are how countries pull people out of poverty.

The second is more specific. At Carnegie Mellon, he saw Google and other large companies set up offices on campus, working alongside the business schools, not just the engineering schools. In Silicon Valley, he says, there is a term for what happens next: adult supervision. “When technical founders build something, they bring in a foreign CEO, a businessman in a suit. Eric Schmidt was that for Google.” Pakistan, he argues, does not yet have its men in suits with tech experience. The business operators who could scale what the engineers have built do not exist in sufficient numbers, and the engineers themselves are not built to play that role. The early signs of change are the large local groups — he names Fatima Group — starting to invest in tech, which will produce the next generation of operators, mentors and VCs.

Muzamil pushes him on whether he would ever step back from PosterMyWall and let a hired CEO scale it. Jaffer is open to it in principle — if the vision aligns, if it is good for the product, good for the country’s economy, good for the jobs. He is also honest about the trade-off. Real scaling almost always requires decisions a founder close to the user would not make: alienating segments of the user base, taking shortcuts on craft, optimising for a different metric. He is not pretending the choice would be costless.

Brain drain, remote work, and the talent that never leaves but is still gone

Muzamil’s next question is about the talent market and what the post-2018 devaluation has done to it. Jaffer’s answer reframes the standard brain-drain narrative. Three or four years ago, his company was competing with Pakistani master’s applicants who would graduate and never come back. The newer pattern is different. People do not need to leave physically anymore. European and American companies hire directly into Lahore, paying salaries that Pakistani product companies cannot match and services companies cannot survive against.

The shift, he says, was accelerated by COVID. Before the pandemic he was personally against remote work; even applicants from Islamabad were expected to relocate. Now PosterMyWall runs a hybrid model with three days in the office, and Jaffer is more open to hiring on talent rather than geography. The flexibility helps small companies hire. It also makes retention harder, hurts productivity in some cases, and lets foreign companies “swoop in with a better package and take away top talent without ever bringing them across a border.”

The picture he paints is precise. The brain drain is now both physical and digital. Pakistani engineers are competing in a global salary market while sitting at desks in Lahore. He treats this as both a sign of how good the local talent has become and a structural problem for any Pakistani company trying to grow.

The community that does not exist yet

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil is trying to surface something more concrete. He has spent the hour listening to the founder of one of the few global product companies in the country, and the founder has just said that he too is looking for a community of people doing what he is doing — and cannot find one. Muzamil tells the story of a Lahore-based gaming company he visited recently, a building near M.M. Alam Road, eight or nine hundred people, that nobody he knew had ever heard of. He asked the founder there the same question. The answer was the same: “We are just doing our own work.”

Jaffer agrees the gap is real and that the absence is costing the industry. He has been discussing brand Pakistan with friends at PASHA. Externally, the work is starting — he mentions a strong Pakistani presence at TechCrunch Disrupt this year, and the vacuum left in services as Indian companies move up-market to enterprise work. Internally, the picture is thinner. He says he has personally looked for a community of Pakistani founders building for global markets and has not found one — not even a WhatsApp group. He suggests two paths forward. PASHA or the government could hold more local events oriented inward rather than always toward foreign clients. And influencers like Muzamil, he says, have a role to play in bringing people from different parts of the industry into the same room.

Pakistan 2050, cautiously

Muzamil closes with the question he asks most of his guests. Knowing everything Jaffer knows — having seen Pakistan from the inside since 2010, having watched the IT industry go from completely unregulated to State Bank-supervised, having raised three kids in the same schools he himself attended — how does he see Pakistan in 2050?

Jaffer is careful. He answers in data points. The IT industry is in a different place than it was in 2006. There is a startup ecosystem now where there was none. The State Bank knows what freelance income is, where in 2010 they had no category for it. Private education has improved noticeably; he sees families moving back from the US and putting their children into the same Lahore schools he went through. The passport is still the same passport. The human development metrics are still where they were. “If in a few words, I would be cautiously optimistic about 2050. Some things are on the rise, but the great multiplier in all of this is geopolitics and leadership. That is the multiplier where the graph can go up, it can go flat, or it can go down.”

Muzamil closes the conversation at the one hour twenty minute mark by thanking Jaffer and noting, for the audience, that this was one of the very few product conversations in the show’s 385-episode run — and a rare look at what it takes to build a global product company while staying in Lahore.