Why Shehzeen Siddique started freelancing at 15 in secret

A 20-year-old freelancer from Karachi, in Islamabad for the recording

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Shehzeen Siddique as a freelancer who has come to Islamabad specifically for the podcast. She is 20, studying mass communication in Malaysia with a criminology minor, and runs an online course called Learn to Earn under the handle Freelancing by Shehzeen. Muzamil makes a point of framing the conversation before it starts. He says he deliberately seeks out very young guests because the comments section often pushes back — viewers asking for more experienced voices — and he disagrees. “I’d like to explore the minds of these young people just to understand how they think and what are the thought behind the things that they’re doing,” he says.

Shehzeen tells him Islamabad feels calm after Karachi traffic, that she was here two weeks ago, and that she came back specifically because Muzamil reached out by email. The tone is set early: she is not a polished media personality. She is a working freelancer who happens to be very fluent about how she got here.

The most average student in the class

Muzamil asks straight away whether she was ever a high achiever. The answer is unequivocal. Shehzeen describes herself as the sixth in a group of six close friends at Nixor College, all of whom routinely scored A-stars. She did not. “I wasn’t, I mean A-star nahi aata tha, nahi aata tha,” she says. Maths in particular was her enemy. She would cry over it.

The decisive moment came in her O level mock exams. She failed maths. The school called her mother in and said they would put her on the private candidate list — not just for maths, but for every subject, despite the fact that her business studies, economics, accounts, and English marks were strong. She had been at the same school for thirteen years. Her mother argued. The school refused to budge. Shehzeen stopped going to school and slid into what she describes openly as severe depression.

It is worth pausing on what she names as the actual injury. It is not the failure itself. It is the framing the school imposed on it — that a single subject defined her ceiling. “A degree does not make you smart,” she says. “Every person has their own areas of expertise. You can’t judge everybody by the same set of subjects.” Muzamil agrees, and adds a frame she does not contest: that maths is treated in Pakistan as the proxy for intelligence, which leaves anyone strong in humanities or art permanently misread by the system.

What her father said about the failure

The recovery has a precise origin. Shehzeen describes coming home the day she was put on the private list and her father sitting her down. “Listen, you failed,” he told her. “It’s like a bruise. It’s not a tattoo. It’s not gonna define you.” She applied to Nixor College anyway, against her own teacher’s advice. She got in. Her O level results came back: As and Bs, including a B in maths. The school had been wrong about her.

This is the first of several moments in the conversation where the parents emerge as the quiet engine behind everything that follows. They do not feature in the marketing of her course. They are not in the Instagram bio. But every time the story bends, one of them is in the frame holding it up.

Stumbling onto freelancing through a vocabulary habit

The origin of Freelancing by Shehzeen is almost comically mundane. Her father had drilled a reading habit into her — whenever she came across a word she did not know, she was to underline it and look it up. One day, scrolling Instagram instead of reading, she came across the word “freelance.” She googled it. The word that hooked her, she admits, was “free.”

Her first reaction was disbelief. “I thought yeh toh jhooth hai,” she says, “because the entire idea of working at home and apne ghar par paise kamana — I was so dumb that I genuinely thought ke jo log office mein bahut accha kaam karte hain unko bosses bolte hain aap ghar baithe aaram se kaam kare. I thought freelancing ko aisi pagal bana rahe hain.” Within a week she had read enough to know it was real. She did not tell her parents. She did not tell anyone at school. She was 15.

She tried telling one friend. The friend told her to forget it and focus on maths. That was the last person she told for a long time.

Seven scams, including one delivered by sixteen-minute voice note

The middle of the conversation is the most useful part of it, because Shehzeen is precise about the mechanics of how a Pakistani teenager gets fleeced trying to learn an online skill. She lists seven separate scams across roughly three and a half years.

The most vivid is the Eid story. After Eid she had Rs 4,000 of Eidi. A man online offered her freelancing training for Rs 1,500. She could not go to the market alone, so she handed the money to her family’s cook and asked him to do an Easypaisa transfer quietly. The man sent her an audio message. “Sixteen minute voice note,” she says. “Now that I realise, baad mein, he was explaining to me why he should get the training fee. He said I deserve it, I’m training you, I deserve it.” Seven minutes of actual content followed. The actual content was a pyramid scheme — she was supposed to resell Netflix and Amazon accounts to people who would not believe her.

A second scammer sold her a network marketing pitch dressed up as freelancing — products she was meant to resell to her social circle, including the now-familiar overpriced creams. She abandoned that too. Muzamil sharpens her own observation back at her: “Jo agla scam kar raha hai na aapko, woh khud scam hua hai actually.” She agrees instantly. The scammers in Pakistan’s beginner-freelancing ecosystem are themselves the previous batch of victims, recycling the only playbook they know.

This is the section of the conversation that her course was eventually built to neutralise. She says explicitly that Learn to Earn was designed so that “the three and a half years of difficulty you faced, the new person who comes in doesn’t have to face.” Every scam she fell for is now a named warning inside the course.

The first Rs 300 — and the day the job and the savings disappeared together

Her first paying job was a thousand-word article on hotels. She was paid Rs 300. She still has it, she tells Muzamil — she never spent it. Before that, every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday she had been writing thousand-word articles by hand for practice.

By 18, she had a real job: social media manager for Café Aylanto, Café Fuji, and Hen House in Karachi, hired out of an interview pool of fifteen people, all roughly twice her age. She negotiated her hours down from six to four to two — a single weekly visit, with the rest done from home — because she was simultaneously taking university classes from Malaysia at 4 a.m. local time during COVID.

Then both pillars collapsed in a single day. A man from Sahiwal called her crying, claimed his money had landed in her Easypaisa account by mistake, and walked her through an OTP routine that emptied the account. Her entire earnings from her first teaching batch — Rs 8,000 — were gone. The same day, the restaurant group sat her down and gently told her the workload was making her job untenable; she should focus on university. “Job bhi khatam ho gayi,” she says. “Maine kaha main toh wapas se aa gayi loser. I’m a loser.” Every voice from school that had told her she could not do anything came back at once.

How Momina Mustehsan accidentally saved Learn to Earn

What broke the spiral was a single Instagram story. Shehzeen called her friend Momina Mustehsan — a classmate from Nixor — and asked her to share a post about her course. “I will always be thankful to her,” she says. The next day she had triple the money she had lost. Her second batch had thirty students, double the first. The fourth had forty-five. The ninth had more than 200 — enough to hit the WhatsApp group limit of 256 members, which is what forced her to hire a manager (one of her own students) and pull her younger brother in to help.

Muzamil pushes her on the structural choice she had made: WhatsApp as the payment portal, course delivery, and customer service stack, because she did not have money to build a website. It is a quietly important detail. The most successful Pakistani youth e-learning operations are not running on Stripe and Teachable. They are running on a WhatsApp group and an Easypaisa screenshot.

Online hate, fake cheek fillers, and an organised pile-on

A long stretch of the conversation deals with what happened when Hello Pakistan ran a feature on her after she lost the Café Aylanto job. Her follower count roughly doubled. So did the abuse. The complaints, she says, were not about her work. They were about her age — strangers insisting she could not possibly be 19. They were about her face — an Instagram argument broke out about whether she had had cheek fillers, with women messaging her asking where she had got them done. She had not. They were about the payment portal — she had left admin settings open, and overnight people flooded the group calling her a scammer, prompting other prospective students to leave.

Her mother had to wake her up in the morning to look at her phone. “Show mein bura bhi bahut lagta hai,” she says, “ke yaar itna kuch mehnat ki and then people just come in aur ek yeh baat bilkul ki yeh toh scammer hai saara pani us par pher dete hain.” The line she settled on, and still uses, is that she cannot stop anyone underestimating her. The only response is the work itself. “If you don’t believe in me,” she tells prospective students, “I can’t believe in you. Wait. Read the reviews. Come back when you’re a hundred percent satisfied.”

Why she teaches mostly women

Muzamil arrives at the question late, at the 48-minute mark, but it is the cleanest section of the conversation. Roughly half of Pakistan’s population is out of the workforce. He asks why focusing on women matters to her.

Shehzeen’s answer is not the standard one. She does not argue that women should be pushed out of the home. She argues that the home is where many of them already are, and that the relevant question is whether paid work can be brought into it. “Aap ghar baithe, in your safe spot in your room in front of your parents, and you can earn. Toh aap kyun na karo?” Some of her students have used the exposure to launch their own businesses rather than freelance. One housewife in Qatar — a mother who had been told all her life she could not write — sent Shehzeen a sample of her writing. “I cannot tell you maine usse behtar article apni zindagi mein nahi padha,” Shehzeen says. The woman is now earning. Her husband, who had initially discouraged her, is now proud of her.

Muzamil names what is happening here. The argument is not abstract feminism. It is a culturally contextual workaround: a way for women to participate economically within the constraints their families actually impose, rather than against them.

What money means now, and the advice she gives back to herself

Near the end of the conversation Muzamil asks her what money means to her now that she is earning regularly. Her answer is unambiguous. “Paise se zyada jo mujhe cheez ab matter karti hai na, it’s respect.” She says she has students in her batches who have not paid her — verified cases of unemployment caused by COVID — and she is fine with it. Some of her students, she notes with quiet satisfaction, are the same A-star classmates from school who passed maths while she failed it.

On advice to people her age and younger, she has two lines worth holding onto. The first: “If you start following the advice you give to others on your own self, that’s how you are going to get successful.” The second is a direct inversion of the Pakistani parental script. “Hamare yahan yeh hota hai ke you will be successful and you will eventually be happy when you will be successful. Main kehti hoon happiness brings you success. Do what you love and eventually you will be successful.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks what Pakistan will look like in 2050. Shehzeen answers carefully. She wants young people to be productive. She wants parents to accept whatever field their children go into — her own parents are a doctor and a chemist, and they accepted her drift into mass communication without resistance. “When you get encouraged from home, that’s how you build into your own place, make your own place in the society.” It is the same point her father made the day she failed maths. The bruise is not the tattoo. The household is what decides which one it becomes.