Fatima Rizwan

خودی کو کر بلند اتنا کہ ہر تقدير سے پہلے
خدا بندے سے خود پوچھے ، بتا تيری رضا کيا ہے
— علامہ اقبال

I grew up in Lahore. That's where I first fell for computers as a teenager, and that obsession led me to pick software engineering in high school. Along the way in uni, I started a small community for students, and it kept growing until it had 100,000 of them across Pakistan.

Right after uni, it was clear as day that I'd like to start a product company. This was 2014, and entrepreneurship wasn't really a thing in Pakistan yet. I had an idea I believed in and applied to a new startup incubator in Lahore. They rejected me. Twice. I was young. I was furious. I knew I could do it, I just couldn't get anyone in tech to see it.

So I took all that frustration and built a media platform instead, stories about entrepreneurship, startups and technology. I called it TechJuice, bootstrapped it, and scaled it to 12 million monthly users. This was my first stint at real entrepreneurship and building this company was pure grind. I learned so much about distribution, marketing, organic, socials. TechJuice became the biggest startup and tech publication in Pakistan.

As a fresh grad, my wildest dream had been reaching a million people online. TechJuice blew past that, and I realized I'd been thinking too small.

TechJuice got acquired, and I moved to Singapore.

Singapore was another planet. I didn't know a single person, but I'd somehow convinced my parents to give me three months to register a company and figure out what was next. My ambitions had grown up. I wanted a problem big enough to matter to a billion people, and Pakistan suddenly felt too small for that. Singapore felt like the right launchpad to access multiple markets.

In 2022, I started Metaschool, a place where developers could learn web3 by actually building and shipping dApps. Sequoia, GlobalVC, and others backed it. The gap was wild: ~100 million developers in the world, and only ~18,000 active in web3 in any given month. Metaschool clicked. We grew to 150,000+ developers and became a default place to learn web3, working with 25+ blockchains and enterprises.

Then AI happened. Slowly at first, then all at once. Developers stopped going to project-based learning platforms and started vibe-coding with AI, asking models, learning from them, shipping with them. Web3 education for developers, the way we'd built it, stopped making sense.

So I made the hard call: step back, and figure out what I actually wanted to work on next.

Update: After going through pivot hell and many sleepless months, I have figured out what is my next. Okara - the AI CMO that helps small teams crack growth and distribution without spending thousands of dollars on agencies and multiple subscriptions.