Pakistan's freelancers built this industry themselves

From Gujranwala to ODesk at 1.5 dollars an hour

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing the core problem: Pakistan has had plenty of conversation about local fintech — EasyPaisa, JazzCash — but cross-border payments, the ability to receive money from clients abroad or pay contractors overseas, remain a persistent and under-discussed pain point. To address it, he brings in Mohsin Muzaffar, Senior Director and Country Head at Payoneer.

Mohsin grew up in Gujranwala, a city he describes in one word: “pure.” It was, he says, a place you could cross end to end in ten minutes — small, honest, uncluttered. His family had originally been from Lahore, shifted to Gujranwala two generations back, and he eventually returned to Lahore for university. He studied computer science at Punjab University, which had just launched its BSc Honours programme — the pioneer year, as he puts it — and graduated in 2005.

He was not a top student. He was not the worst. And he was, by his own account, the last person in his batch to find a job. He traces that partly to how he approached interviews: “I was taking the interview as an interview. Down the line I learned that an interview is basically a contract — you have to sell and buy.” The anxiety of treating the interviewer as a superior rather than a counterpart cost him early.

After a stint at Mobilink and a brief period in the UAE, Mohsin returned to Pakistan in 2009 — a particularly difficult moment, with load shedding crippling IT businesses and the war on terror dampening foreign interest in the country. Five months of job applications, Sunday newspaper classifieds, and failed references later, he had dinner with a university acquaintance who mentioned ODesk.

That night, at one or two in the morning, Mohsin turned on his tower desktop, created a profile, and applied for projects. By the next afternoon, he had been hired — no back-and-forth, no interview — for a web research role at a dollar fifty an hour. The client was Australian. The work was finding suppliers on Alibaba and negotiating on his behalf.

The self-taught upskilling loop

What followed was a three-year compounding of skills, each one learned from YouTube on an internet connection that cut out every hour alongside the load shedding. When the Australian client asked for a WordPress website, Mohsin had never heard of WordPress. He watched videos, figured it out, and charged six or seven dollars for a job the client expected to pay eleven. From WordPress he moved to PHP development, then to Facebook application development.

Muzamil presses him on whether the computer science background was essential. Mohsin is honest: he thinks he would have found a way regardless. But the more important point, he argues, is the method — identifying where market demand was highest and investing time accordingly. “If I spent ten to twenty hours on this and the return is far higher than if I invest three months somewhere else, that’s the calculation.” He was, in effect, doing the same web research for himself that he was doing for his client: finding where the jobs were, then acquiring the skill to fill them.

He is direct about what this means for today’s freelancers: “If you are not upskilling, you will fall very far behind very quickly. Every passing week, every new month, a better version of you should appear.” The skills that were premium three years ago are already low-value. WordPress is the example he returns to repeatedly — once a meaningful differentiator, now a commodity.

Training the ecosystem, and who actually built it

After three years of freelancing, ODesk’s management found a bilingual video Mohsin had made explaining how to set up a profile and find work. They approached him to scale it. What followed was a programme that embedded freelancing training into the final semesters of major universities in Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi — replacing what he calls “useless kinds of projects” with real ODesk contracts, actual earnings, and credit hours tied to outcomes. ODesk’s US team simultaneously pitched these university-trained freelancers to American clients as vetted, communication-ready talent.

But Mohsin is pointed about what this training actually contributed versus what freelancers built themselves. “Freelancers struggled on their own to get to where they got. And when everyone saw that a billion dollars started coming in, they said: we did this, we ran this training, we did that.” He is careful to add that he means no offence to any institution, but he holds the position with, as he puts it, “absolute clarity” and has had heated arguments defending it.

The implication matters for policy: if the growth came from individual hustle rather than institutional support, then the next phase of growth cannot be unlocked simply by running more of the same training programmes.

The hyper-growth ceiling and what comes next

Muzamil asks Mohsin to characterise the growth Pakistan’s freelancing industry has seen over the past four to six years. Mohsin’s answer is that the industry has roughly doubled year on year — one hundred percent annual growth — since around 2016. But he is clear that this rate will taper, and that the tapering is already beginning.

He identifies four metrics that matter: how many people are entering the field, how many of those actually start earning, how many sustain it beyond six to nine months, and what dollar volume they bring in. The conversion rate from registered account to active earner has historically been around three percent. The other ninety-seven percent are dead accounts.

The risk, he argues, is that Pakistan is approaching the kind of inflection point that every hyper-growth industry hits — and that inflection can go two ways. If experienced, knowledgeable people step forward and build real structures around the industry, the curve bends upward into maturity. If the industry is left to free-fall, the initial enthusiasm flips into despondency, and the entire category gets written off the way stock market investing was written off by a generation of Pakistani middle-class families after early losses. “Your father told you: don’t put money in the stock market. And the stock market is the engine of a modern capitalist economy.”

He is also blunt about the marketplace model itself: “Freelancing on platforms — Fiverr, Upwork — will become irrelevant within one to one and a half years.” The agency model is already replacing it. Freelancers are moving to direct client relationships faster than before — the average time to go direct has dropped from eighteen months to four or five months. The platform is increasingly just the introduction.

The Philippines model versus the India model

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the question of which development path Pakistan should follow. Mohsin frames it as a choice between two explicit models.

The Philippines model is high-volume, service-based human capital export — English-language training, housekeeping, hospitality, call centres, care workers placed across the Gulf and beyond. It absorbs large numbers of people quickly, including those without advanced education, and generates consistent remittance flows.

The India model is product and high-value IT. India’s IT exports are, in Mohsin’s telling, $150 billion — more than Saudi Arabia’s oil exports. A single Indian city’s IT export exceeds Pakistan’s total IT export. India started with BPO, upgraded continuously, and now has globally used digital products. When Payoneer needed a vendor to run a digital immersive event during COVID, more than half the shortlisted companies were Indian — “they had already built it, brother, as soon as COVID came.”

Mohsin’s position is that Pakistan does not have to choose one or the other — it has to run both simultaneously, targeted at different population segments. The university-educated cohort should be pushed toward product development and high-value skills. The much larger cohort of school dropouts and those without formal qualifications needs a different track entirely. “One size will not fit everyone.” He uses the analogy of three children in a family: you identify what each one is good at and invest accordingly, rather than forcing all three down the same path.

He also raises a category that Muzamil finds compelling: assistant and personal shopper roles — people hired via WhatsApp to order groceries, curate weekend watch lists, clean social media feeds. “People want that human interaction.” These roles require basic English, a phone, and internet — and they pay in dollars. They are accessible to people in Muzaffargarh or Layyah, not just Lahore. “No business is a small business,” Mohsin says, quoting a line he attributes to a film.

Decision paralysis as a structural problem

One of the sharper arguments in the conversation is Mohsin’s diagnosis of why Pakistan missed the COVID window. When India and other major outsourcing destinations went into complete lockdown, Pakistan did not. Global clients were actively looking for open markets. “We did something, we exploited it, we didn’t exploit it, we kept thinking.” Enterprise-level clients, he notes, do not switch vendors every three to six months — if Pakistan had captured that business then, it would have stayed.

His explanation is cultural and systemic: “From a small child, when they say something, parents say: why are you thinking? We told you. Why are you bringing an independent thought?” The result is a population that has not been trained to make decisions, take risks, or fail fast. “He is very scared that if I make a decision and it goes wrong, they won’t let me live.” This pattern, he argues, runs from individual households all the way up to policy-making bodies.

The fix, in his view, is not complicated to describe but difficult to execute: “Make a decision. What’s the worst that can happen? You fail. Fail fast, try again.”

What Payoneer actually does, and where it fits

Muzamil asks Mohsin to explain Payoneer’s offering clearly, particularly in the context of the perennial PayPal conversation. Mohsin identifies four core use cases that digital earners in Pakistan face: receiving payments from service marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork; billing direct clients outside a marketplace; receiving payouts as a seller on Amazon, eBay, or similar platforms; and accepting credit card payments on a personal website. “Payoneer fulfils these four use cases. No other company fulfils all four.”

On the PayPal question, Mohsin is measured. PayPal’s presence or absence is not the real issue. The real issue is whether the underlying problem — getting paid from abroad — can be solved. He points out that Amazon seller payouts come through Payoneer, and eBay payouts come through Payoneer. “There is no other option available on Amazon and eBay.” The conversation about PayPal, he implies, is often a proxy for a problem that is already solved.

He walks through the billing service in detail: a freelancer sends an invoice link to a client, the client pays by credit card, debit card, eCheck, or bank transfer, and the freelancer receives a local bank account number in the US, UK, EU, Canada, or Australia — whichever currency is relevant. “For the client it’s a local transfer. The Swift code drama, the IBAN drama — all of that ends.”

On Wise, which Muzamil raises as a growing competitor, Mohsin is respectful but clear about the distinction: Payoneer’s ambition is to be a platform, not a product. “A platform covers every use case.” Wise, in his framing, is a strong product for specific use cases, particularly peer-to-peer and remittance. Payoneer is not currently in the personal remittance space — “if my relative in Dubai wants to send me money, that is not our play” — though he does not rule out future expansion.

Pakistan in 2050: correction or collapse

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Mohsin the question he puts to all guests: how do you see Pakistan in 2050? The answer is the most direct moment in the episode.

“I’ll be bluntly honest. If we continue the way we have continued, we may not see the country even more. But if we correct our course, it may be one of the biggest forces in the world.”

He does not dress it up. Survival, he says, is not guaranteed on the current trajectory. The correction requires direction from the top — on inclusivity, on education, on the willingness to make decisions. He borrows a framework he uses with his own team: maintain both a tunnel vision for immediate execution and a big-picture vision for where you are going in five years. “When you master running both simultaneously, you become a very successful person.” The same applies to a country.

Muzamil wraps the conversation noting that what began as a fintech discussion turned into something more fundamental. The freelancing and IT export question, he says, is the number one problem in Pakistan right now — and solving it unlocks everything else, including the fintech infrastructure built to serve it.