Adeel Raza

Early life and background

Raza was born in Lahore. He got his first computer in 1993 and says he taught himself programming. He started programming by creating bots for MIRC. He says the self-learning he developed came from being left alone with computers and the internet. [1]

Education

Raza attended Beaconhouse Garden Town and Punjab College for school, then a university for graduation. He graduated in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in business and information technology. He does not have a computer science degree. [1]

Early ventures

Raza ran a t-shirt business that sold about 30 shirts a day. Orkut was the main sales channel for the business. He built a social network called Lounge, which reached 10,000 users within six months. He and his team also built a software startup called Jigsaw. [1]

contactme.com and the move to the United States

Raza built contactme.com, a CRM for small businesses. Webs.com, a subsidiary of Vistaprint, acquired contactme.com. He describes Haroon as a successful entrepreneur running webs.com. A partnership developed, after which webs.com decided to acquire the whole company. Raza attributes the acquisition to product-market fit. [1]

Raza and his co-founder were moved to the US and worked there until they got green cards. He moved to the United States right after graduation, when contactme.com was acquired. His first trip to the US was on a business visa, and an application was made for his H1B work visa. He moved to the US for good in 2011. [1]

Mailmunch

Raza started Mailmunch with a co-founder who was a friend from Beaconhouse Garden Town. He describes Mailmunch as an email marketing platform. He says the Mailmunch team is based in Lahore. It took almost a year from founding Mailmunch until he left his job, and he left only after one of his startups earned about what he had been making. [1]

Raza says he never wanted a job and wanted to be an entrepreneur. He is sure he would not have been hired by Google with his skill set. [1]

Approach to building companies

Raza says each of his products has a different co-founder. He and his co-founders built the first versions of Minder, Mailmunch and Unlayer themselves. Pop-ups from one of his companies reached a billion views in its first year. [1]

Raza says he was a strong developer but weak in sales and marketing before he moved to the US. He learned sales after moving to the US. He describes himself mainly as a product person. [1]

Minder and Salams

The name Minder came from Muslim Tinder. Raza says Minder went viral partly because of its name. Minder was rebranded as Salams to get rid of the Tinder connotation. [1]

Raza describes Salams, formerly Minder, as one of the largest Muslim matchmaking apps in the world. He says it has almost 5 million active users and between 250,000 and 400,000 reported marriages. He says its complete focus is marriage and that it is subscription-based, like other matchmaking apps. [1]

Raza says Muslims are very scattered, especially in the US. He says Salams is popular in Dubai but focused mostly on the Western world. He says the Salams team is based entirely in the US. [1]

Unlayer

Unlayer began in 2017. It was first built to meet Mailmunch's own need for a drag-and-drop content builder. Raza spoke with a technical friend, who had taught him coding, about building a drag-and-drop builder. The friend sent him a prototype the next day. [1]

Raza describes Unlayer as a content creation platform and as a white-label drag-and-drop builder. He says anyone can embed Unlayer's builder into their marketing automation software. He says Unlayer works in two-week sprints and updates the product in each one, and that it added AI features, such as suggestions for headings. [1]

Raza says Unlayer offers multi-year contracts to enterprises and monthly subscriptions to SMBs. He says Netflix is an Unlayer customer and that its clients include Fidelity and IBM. He says Unlayer's enterprise clients came to them inbound, and that Unlayer used the Y Combinator network to reach enterprise clients. He says enterprises could build the product in-house for about half a million dollars, or license it. [1]

Raza says all of his companies except Unlayer are bootstrapped. He says Unlayer is currently valued at $60 million and raised a seed round that it will announce in a few months. Unlayer is now on the venture capital route, with Series A and B rounds next. [1]

Views on startups and product companies

Raza says a problem solved for yourself can be solved for other people too. He says they did no customer research at the beginning. He says people underrate domain knowledge, which he thinks is 90% of what matters. He says timing is the number one reason startups fail. [1]

Raza says raising money is not always the right choice and can damage a company, and he is glad his companies did not take the funding route. He says first-time founders focus on product, and second-time founders focus on distribution. He says building a good product and putting it in the App Store can carry a company to its first million in annual recurring revenue. He says reaching a first million in revenue is not that hard, and he has done it four times on his own. He says growth hacks are not sustainable. He says Y Combinator is most useful for founders who are new to the game, and he is still very bullish on micro SaaS. [1]

Raza says a founder needs breadth across sales, marketing, customer success, product and QA. He fundamentally believes in product companies. He says services companies sell a person's hours, like any labor job. He thinks services work will diminish and product work will increase considerably. He says a developer who uses GitHub Copilot already outperforms one who does not. [1]

Views on Pakistan

Raza advises smart people in Pakistan to spend a few months in Dubai for exposure. He says letting Pakistanis go abroad could make them partners and sales agents. He says graduates with strong skills should aim for startups that bring in dollars. [1]

Raza says Pakistan's youth population only matters if the country gives it direction. He says he is optimistic about Pakistan overall. He thinks Pakistan will survive, though perhaps not thrive quickly. [1]

Mentor and plans

Haroon was Raza's mentor and had recently sold Truebill. Raza says his focus for the next few years is growing his companies into bigger ones. [1]

Personal life

Raza is married and has a daughter. His youngest child was born in 2015. He says his wife was supportive of his entrepreneurship from the start. [1]

Raza says he was completely absent from family life in the early startup years. He worked 18 to 19 hour days in the early years. He says it would be better for his family if he focused on work and his wife stayed at home. [1]

Raza has enrolled his children in a Montessori school. He says parents should give children good education and fundamentals, then let them figure things out. [1]

Timeline

2009

Graduated with a bachelor's degree in business and information technology.[1]

2011

Moved to the United States for good.[1]

2015

His youngest child was born.[1]

2017

Unlayer began.[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. The Pakistani founder who bootstrapped three global startups . Thought Behind Things , 2023-05-26.