Why Pakistan's freelancers will be dead in three years if they don't transform

A school teacher’s son, a rejected army interview, and a fifteen-hundred-rupee job

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming a guest he has only recently met in person but heard about for a long time. Syed Arsalan Ali Shah is the founder of Connected Pakistan, the host of what is now the largest tech and freelancing conference in the country, and the only Pakistani featured as a success story on Payoneer. Muzamil’s framing is deliberate: this is not a hype interview, it is a conversation with someone who built something at scale and is willing to be challenged on how.

Arsalan begins with the home he grew up in. His father was a government school teacher with five sons and two daughters in the house. After school hours, his father wrote for newspapers by hand — there were no computers yet — which Arsalan now reads as the first evidence that freelancing was already in his family’s genes. When his father suffered a heart attack and left government service for a private school, the child in third grade decided that day that he would build the family a house.

The path he chose first was the army. He prepared, applied, and made it to the final interview. Twice. Both times, the letter arrived at home with no reason given. He took a job working twelve-hour days, twelve in the afternoon to twelve at midnight, for fifteen hundred rupees a month, only to fund his studies. The next day after a particular conversation with a senior, he resigned. People around him thought he had lost his mind. “People were saying, you’re crazy, it’s a job, you’re being ungrateful, you don’t have any sense — people long for a government job and you’re resigning.”

The skills he had built in parallel — computer science background, graphic design, a hunger to keep learning — landed him at an IT park company. That job is where the founding insight for Connected Pakistan arrived.

The bid in KP that pointed at a different idea

Later in the discussion, Arsalan describes the moment the idea for Connected Pakistan crystallised. His IT-park company was bidding on a government land record management system in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He went to ask around informally about competing bids and discovered the contract was being discussed in the billions of rupees. “Suddenly I felt that this money is being wasted,” he tells Muzamil. In a meeting he suggested the obvious: why not take what Punjab has already built, tested, debugged, and is already running, instead of paying to build it again?

The suggestion did not go anywhere inside that company, but the shape of the problem stayed with him. An organisation was needed that did not break Pakistan into provincial or political fragments — one that put work, freelancers, and the digital economy under a single flag. That is what Connected Pakistan was founded to do.

He started with four lakh rupees, a small rented space, and not enough money to buy stable chairs for everyone. Early on, no platform work came through. He went back over the strategy. He picked ten to fifteen UK restaurants, had his five-person team build five website designs as samples, and started cold-emailing the restaurants directly. Every single restaurant they emailed replied. That, he says, is where the actual revenue began.

A digital freelancing agency, not a software house

Muzamil presses on the business model. The classic software house, he says, has a sales-and-business-development side that owns the client relationships while the engineers work for a salary. Freelancing, on the other hand, depends entirely on individuals — if every freelancer at a shared desk keeps what they earn, the math of a company never closes. So what is Connected Pakistan?

Arsalan’s answer is to refuse the binary. “We categorise ourselves as a digital freelancing agency,” he says. The KP IT Board has named them the best digital freelancing agency in Pakistan three years running.

The internal model is built around three deliberate choices. First, hierarchy and training. Arsalan trained the early team members himself, one or two months at a time, because he wanted them to absorb the Connected Pakistan vision while they learned the craft. Second, specialised Fiverr and Upwork profiles owned at the agency level rather than the individual level — one profile for video editing, one for content creation, one for web, each backing a real department inside the company. Third, share percentage. Juniors get a rising share in the projects they deliver well. As Muzamil puts it, “They have skin in the game.” Arsalan agrees: freelancers do not have a money problem, they have a channelisation problem. They have fifteen, twenty lakh sitting on the side and no idea where to reinvest it.

The next move was to stop relying on the marketplaces. Three years before this conversation, Arsalan’s team studied where their best buyers were coming from. The UK led. So they registered a UK company, built a properly designed and SEO-optimised website to international standards, and let it rank. The result, he says, was that British agencies stopped competing with them and started white-labelling work through them instead. They are now repeating the same playbook in New Zealand — registering a .nz domain, but this time staying remote because the post-COVID market there understands remote delivery.

Why freelancers will be dead in three years if they don’t transform

The hardest claim in the episode is one Arsalan has made on a stage before. “Freelancers will be dead after three years.” When he said it the first time, the room was shocked. He explains it the same way to Muzamil. “Ten years ago I used to charge a thousand dollars for an HTML website. Today the same website is built for twenty dollars.” The price collapse is the warning. Adaptation toward newer technology is not optional; predicting where the economy is going is the job.

Muzamil sharpens the point by naming the two categories of freelancer most exposed: content writers and graphic designers. AI will eat the lower end of both, and Fiverr’s incentive — like Uber’s incentive to move to self-driving cars — is to automate every low-value task it can. “This is not an attack on freelancing,” he says. “This is the question of how, inside the framework of freelancing, do you upskill yourself.”

Arsalan accepts the framing and adds his own data point: at the Connected Pakistan conference, he handed awards to two hundred and fifty of Pakistan’s top-rated sellers — the deepest experience, the strongest portfolios. The path forward for that cohort, he argues, is not more Fiverr gigs. It is drop shipping. It is e-commerce stores. It is the kind of revenue diversification he has personally done across the UK company, an e-commerce store, drop shipping, and now New Zealand. “I have moved out of the reliance model.”

The frustration he keeps returning to is policy-shaped. “Across the whole of Pakistan there is no freelancer accelerator boot camp. Startups are the ones who need funding. Freelancers are the ones who have funding sitting around.” Pakistan, he says, runs accelerator after accelerator for founders who need capital, while ignoring the people who already have capital and just need direction.

Communication, ethics, and the email a freelancer can’t write

Muzamil narrows in on what he calls the real bottleneck: not skill, but communication and work ethics. “Skill is easy to find.” Arsalan agrees completely and gives an example that lands sharply.

“I am telling you honestly, on record, kids cannot write an email,” he says. Tell a top-rated seller to draft an invitation and they cannot. Ask them to write their own bio and ninety-nine percent of the time someone else wrote it for them. Their soft skills never developed, because the freelancing journey skipped the organisational exposure where those skills are usually built.

He contrasts this with how he handles a client himself. Fifteen freelancers will all reply to the same lead with “Hello, how are you doing? How many pages do you need? Do you have a logo, content?” He will write to the same person and say something like, “I can truly understand how hard it is to survive as a single mom.” From there, he says, the client is yours for life. “I can show you my conversations with clients where they are discussing their daughters’ problems with me.” That is the difference between a transactional relationship and a relational one. Muzamil pulls the lesson out: “When you are building a relationship, sales multiply.”

The agency’s competitive edge, Arsalan adds, is not its delivery speed or its prices. It is its customer service after delivery. The mental model most Pakistani freelancers have — that handover means the project is over — is exactly the model that keeps them stuck on single sales instead of compounding referrals.

The startup-freelancer divide that nobody wants to close

Later in the discussion, the two of them work through the divide between Pakistan’s startup ecosystem and its freelancer ecosystem. Muzamil’s diagnosis is that freelancers know the technical work but not how to run a business, and startups have a business model but no native technical depth. The collaboration that would solve both problems is not happening.

Arsalan agrees and points at culture as much as economics. “At big conferences, our participation didn’t used to happen. Even now, show me a freelancer at Zero to One.” Freelancers are not invited, and even when they are, the cultures do not mix. A startup founder is a fancier identity; a freelancer is not. The language is different, the conferences are different, the trust is not there.

Muzamil is candid about what is missing on both sides. The startup has to be willing to give up some title and bring a top-rated freelancer in as a real CTO, not a contractor. The freelancer has to want their name on something that lasts, not just a backdoor invoice. “We do not, as a society, as a community, trust each other enough.”

The window matters. Muzamil mentions that on this podcast alone in the last year he has brought on at least ten companies that raised funding — Bookme, Dastagyr, Finja among them. 2020 was a good year for funding, 2021 was remarkable, and he expects 2022 to be better. The capital exists. The collaboration does not.

Where the government can help and where it cannot

The two of them then turn to government. Arsalan has been arguing for an accelerator boot camp for freelancers. Muzamil’s pushback is sharp and worth quoting at length. “How will the government provide funding? A PPRA rule will kick in, a tender will go out, bids will come in, and a bureaucrat will sit and decide whose idea is good. Inefficiency arrives the moment you snap your fingers.” He uses Akhuwat as the counter-example: a private-sector micro-lending program that has done at scale what no government department could have.

But Muzamil also refuses the easy anti-government reflex. “Ten things the government gets wrong, eight things the government also gets right. This blind rhetoric of being against everything is not useful — and that is not just about the current government.”

Arsalan’s reply is to point at infrastructure as the one thing only the government can do. “I or you cannot stand up and fix the bandwidth of the internet or its connectivity.” Pakistan’s freelancing community, he says, has drafted a policy paper for the government. Visas and interest-free loans are second priority. The first priority is one tool: a working internet. Without it, no amount of laptop subsidy, training, or accelerator helps.

He widens the lens to something most Pakistani tech conversations avoid. “Pakistan is probably the only country of its size where Microsoft has no official office. Google has no official office. Amazon has no presence. You cannot order anything from Amazon to Pakistan.” India, by contrast, just hosted Amazon’s largest setup in the region and added twenty-two lakh jobs. That gap, he argues, is not a market failure. It is a policy-making and invitation failure.

Muzamil adds the local-versus-global nuance. India’s Supreme Court fined Amazon ten million dollars for practices that hurt local sellers, and the government backed the ruling. “Every foreign company is input also.” Welcoming the giants is necessary, but on terms the host country defines.

Kamyab Jawan, branding, and the Digiskills point

The most pointed policy critique in the conversation is Arsalan’s read on Kamyab Jawan. “An official inside the program told me almost a hundred crore rupees was spent on marketing alone.” Islamabad was covered in their branding. Pindi was covered. Every pedestrian bridge. “Tell me what the benefit of that branding was the very next day.” His answer: none. He would rather see that money go into micro-industries spread across cities — self-sustainable, product-oriented, generating real downstream employment for drivers, gardeners, and the rest of the layered ecosystem any real industry needs.

He points at Digiskills as the model that actually moved numbers — for Saylani, for the freelancers it trained, for the program itself. The president’s AI initiative filled a stadium, he notes. The follow-up question — where are those kids now, what are they doing — is the one he keeps asking.

Special Technology Zones and the close

Toward the end of the conversation, Muzamil offers a forward referral. The Special Technology Zones Authority team has been on the podcast. He thinks Arsalan should meet them, particularly if they extend the model to Peshawar. The pitch he relays is grounded: STZA gives small companies access to a two-by-two cube if that is all they need, not a full office. The world is moving toward virtual workspaces but not entirely; a percentage of work will always require physical co-location, and the zones are designed for that percentage.

Arsalan agrees and adds the political reality that good initiatives in Pakistan keep getting politicised the moment they touch anything visible. He has been studying the technology-zone model since its Guangzhou origins. The right thing to do, he says, is for established companies and startups to actually move into the zones and back the policy with their participation, so the data exists when government makes its next call.

By the end of the conversation, the two of them are aligned on the close. Pakistan now ranks fourth in the world for freelancing. The State Bank has, for the first time, recognised it as an industry. Freelancer accounts can now be opened. Success stories exist and need to be visible so they can inspire and ignite the next layer. But none of that is the destination.

“My talk wherever I go is the same,” Arsalan says. “Freelancing leading to entrepreneurship. Start the journey from freelancing, but you ultimately have to become an entrepreneur. Not even a startup. Why? Because freelancing has given you revenue. Now find a problem real masses are facing, solve it, and become an entrepreneur.” The product or the solution shape does not matter. The mindset shift does. Muzamil agrees. The transformation is the point.

The episode closes with Muzamil thanking Arsalan for being willing to be disagreed with, which, he notes, is rarer in Pakistani public conversation than it should be — and is the only way the right policy framework ever gets built.