Software Finder made money before its website existed

A product company, not another services shop

Muzamil frames the episode, part of the Endeavor Pakistan series, around a distinction he keeps pressing on: services exports are fine, but high-value work means products that serve the global market from Pakistan. Software Finder is exactly that, and he admits he only discovered it recently. The company is a marketplace connecting B2B software buyers and sellers: a company Googling “top HR software” lands on the platform, compares options and reviews, and narrows a thousand choices to five. Vendors, in turn, buy what every software company wants most: prospective buyers. “We are a bridge between software buyers and software sellers,” Adnan explains. The scale is startling for a company few Pakistanis know: 350-plus employees in four countries, about 90 percent of them in Pakistan, offices in Dubai, the US, and Canada, and a customer base that is essentially 100 percent American. Headcount grew from roughly 200 to 350 in a single year.

The CureMD common room

The founding story runs through CureMD, the health-tech company every Pakistani computer science graduate knows. Adnan, a Karachi-born computer scientist who majored in AI in 2005 when, as he puts it, the hardware to run a query barely existed, spent nearly a decade there while it grew from about 70 employees to over 800. Around 2010 he started building its digital marketing function, and hired two people who would change his life: Mariam, the department’s first hire and now Software Finder’s third co-founder, and Shan, a LUMS finance graduate fresh out of petrochemical corporate sales who answered a job ad without knowing what digital marketing was. Working leads for enterprise software in the early 2010s exposed the gap: buyers of B2B software are mostly non-technical, an HR manager or an accountant, and evaluating hundreds of tools can eat months with no guarantee you chose well. “The idea started to come in 2014 and 2015,” Adnan says. Then life scattered them: Adnan to Australia, where he led a software implementation across one of Melbourne’s biggest hospital networks, Shan to five years of investment strategy at a Karachi conglomerate. In 2018, a phone call between Australia and Karachi revived the idea.

Bootstrapping as a discipline, not a constraint

What follows is the part Muzamil wants viewers to study. No funding was raised, then or ever. “It’s all bootstrapped. We haven’t raised a single dime. The company is debt-free. We don’t even have a credit line,” Shan says. Knowing the money was finite shaped every decision: all three founders kept their demanding day jobs for the first six months to a year, working what Shan calls 18-to-20-hour shifts. Adnan describes waking at 5 a.m. in Australia to run Software Finder before work, then returning to it from 7 to 11 at night to match US hours, on four to five hours of sleep. Mariam quit first, at a salary cut; Adnan followed; Shan was last, moving to Canada in February 2020 just before COVID closed the country. Crucially, they made revenue before they had a product. “Even when there was no website, we were making money,” Shan says: they generated leads and sold them through a third party while the site took three months to build. He contrasts it with close friends who raised capital, polished the technology to perfection, never focused on the business, and closed shop when the money dried up. The founders took 50 to 60 percent pay cuts, in tranches, as a token salary they describe as psychological fuel.

Married co-founders and the real cost

Muzamil steers into territory podcasts usually skip: Shan and Mariam are husband and wife, working from a one-bedroom Vancouver apartment through COVID with a small child, no family, no social circle, and no outlet. “I don’t want to sugarcoat it, it is such a big sacrifice,” Shan says, describing years where the couple missed weddings and funerals in Pakistan and watched peers surf and travel on Instagram. His conclusion is not romantic but operational: prescribed gender roles do not survive a startup, so the split of household and company work has to be renegotiated constantly, sometimes 80-20, sometimes 30-70, and the communication to do that without fighting is itself a founder skill. Adnan is blunt about why he insisted on partners at all: “In the initial days, when you’re down, there will be another person who will pick you up.” His own wife, Sarish, later joined and now heads learning and development.

The engine: distribution at American scale, from Lahore

Asked how the machine actually works, the founders describe what may be Pakistan’s largest digital marketing operation: around 220 to 240 of the 350 employees, including roughly 120 people in SEO and 60 to 70 content marketers producing on the order of a million ranking-grade words. But Muzamil’s assumption that this is an SEO business gets corrected: 60 to 70 percent of business comes from other channels, industrial-scale email marketing built on properly acquired databases, SMS marketing under US anti-spam law, webinars, and white papers. The site draws about 250,000 targeted monthly visitors across 850 subcategories and tens of thousands of listed vendors. The moment that made the model, though, is the guarantee. “Whenever Software Finder sends a lead to the vendor, that lead will be looking for your software. If they are not, you don’t pay anything,” Adnan says. The math they share: 100 leads yield 30 to 40 real opportunities and 6 to 8 paying customers, on month-to-month contracts a vendor can exit with 30 days’ notice, which keeps the quality pressure permanent. In medical software, their first category, they now supply leads to 80 percent of US vendors.

The AI question, answered from both sides

Muzamil pushes on the existential risk: if LLMs replace search, an SEO-era marketplace loses its front door, and when he asked a chatbot for software recommendations, Software Finder did not appear alongside Gartner and G2. The founders concede the gap, note those rivals have 15 to 20 years and billions behind them, and describe a new LLM-optimization team spinning up. But their deeper argument is that AI expands their market: cheap AI development means an explosion of new software vendors who all need differentiation and leads, and Shan expects margins on phone-qualified leads to widen as the noise grows. Internally, the plan for 2026 is agentic AI across prospecting, enrichment of a multi-million-contact database, and even AI callers, so that 50 or 60 of the next 200 hires are, in effect, machines. Adnan holds one line firmly: complex B2B purchases like an ERP that touches accounting, HR, and inventory keep a human element for at least five years.

Street-smart talent, polished

The closing 2050 question gets an operator’s answer. Adnan, who moved back to Pakistan in 2005 out of patriotism and built his career there, argues the country’s edge is talent trained by adversity: “You learn street smartness in Pakistan.” What was missing was exposure, and he believes companies like his, teaching Lahore graduates to run US-scale campaigns and effectively operating as a digital marketing institute, are closing that gap faster than universities are. Both founders push schools to teach digital marketing in depth rather than as two elective courses. Muzamil ends where he began: watching for the day a Pakistani digital-first company crosses the thresholds everyone assumes require Silicon Valley, and noting that this one got to 350 people without asking anyone’s permission, or capital.