Softaims

Delivered solutions that integrate LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA) to create scalable systems for data-driven growth, user engagement, and predictive modeling.

AI Growth Marketer

Developed and deployed deep learning models for tasks including image recognition, NLP, and predictive analytics across various industries.

Worked with frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Hugging Face.

AI Engineer

Flower Bouquet

A one-stop portal for all things floral and festive.

Founder

ApplyAce

ApplyAce is a one-stop Pakistan's admission platform for Pakistani students seeking admission to their dream university.

Upwork

Software Engineer

Growth Marketer @ Softaims | Help Founders Validate Ideas & Build MVPs in 4 weeks | Acquire first 350 Users within 2 Months | Scale to Enterprise Level | Click Follow For Tips on Startup Growth.

👉🏼 In the past year, I’ve helped Softaims (a SaaS-based solution) generate over $193k in revenue 

Here's my story in a nutshell ✌🏼

In November 2022, I launched my first startup, Applyace. It was incubated by PITB in 2023, which gave me the opportunity to learn about multichannel marketing and launch my first marketing campaigns.

My entrepreneurial venture didn’t pan out as planned, but I found myself enthralled by the research, the agile process, and got a strong grip on marketing.

It's been more than 2 years, I have been working as a AI engineer at Softaims. After my first venture, I decided to make a swift transition to marketing because it kept grabbing my attention. 

While utilizing my software background, I gained in-depth knowledge of multichannel marketing, marketing automation, and personal branding and earned several certifications along the way.

I began implementing these strategies at Softaims where my efforts contributed to generating 2x more revenue last year.

In April 2024, I launched my new venture, Flower Bouquet, in Pakistan. It's currently generating $12k per month.

 📈 We're now ranking in the top four spots for almost 170 keywords.


What you'll get by following me:

 🎯 Quick tips to grow a profitable SaaS business
🔥 No fluff only valuable tips about building MVP
🤝 Best advice about Personal Branding

P.S. Softiams can help your startup in 3 ways  ✌🏼 

- Build your SaaS MVP in 30 days.📈
- Outreach 100K prospects monthly.
- Automate LinkedIn-Twitter outreach 20K monthly

Ready to build the SaaS of your dreams?

So hit that “Follow” button! - I’ll be posting tips and tricks for business growth.

P.P.S.: The startup we built in Softaims has a combined value of $138 million 💸.

Email: badar@softaims.co.uk

Before Zuck, Friendster had 30 million users. 

Over $50 million in VC funding - today it's dead.

Friendster was one of the first major social networking sites.
 
Launched in 2002 by Jonathan Abrams.

It allowed users to:
- Create profiles and connect with friends
- Share photos, updates, and interests
- Browse friends of friends (early social graph concept)

What happened:
- Servers crashed under load
- Features broke constantly
- Millions of users left while the team chased growth
- Code could not scale fast enough
- Tech debt was ignored

Meanwhile, the winners:
- Facebook launched in 2004 with scalable architecture
- MySpace iterated on user experience and servers
- New startups avoided Friendster’s mistakes and grew

The developer lesson: 
 → Slow code caused user churn
 → Poor architecture blocked growth
 → Adding features without fixing foundations accelerates failure

The founder's lesson:
- Tech debt compounds faster than hype
- Funding cannot fix broken foundations
- Build for scale from day one

One line of bad code today can erase millions tomorrow

Friendster was not killed by competitors. 

It was killed by its own code.

P.S: We specialize in delivering what you NEED, ensuring removal of tech-debt.

Badar Munir

AI Growth Marketer | I partner with founders to turn ideas into AI products and scale with virality | Follow for Practical AI Growth Tips

"100 VCs laughed me out of the room. 

Now my company is worth $40 billion."

Melanie Perkins was rejected 100+ times by investors while sleeping on her brother's floor in San Francisco.

Today, she runs Canva - a design empire used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

Her secret? A strategy almost no founder uses anymore:

- Start small with a "stepping stone" business
- Melanie didn't launch Canva first. She built Fusion Books (a yearbook design tool) from her mother's living room to PROVE her concept worked.
- Solve a problem you've personally experienced

As a university design teacher, she watched students struggle for entire semesters just learning where buttons were in Photoshop. 

That frustration became her billion-dollar insight.

Do whatever it takes to get in the door

When investor Bill Tai invited her to a kitesurfing conference, she said "I love kitesurfing!" (she'd never tried it). 

Then LEARNED the sport just to pitch VCs.

Rejection = Refinement

Each "no" became a chance to improve her pitch. 

The most fascinating part? 

She built a $40 billion design empire despite having no technical background herself.

Instead, she became obsessed with a problem, started small, proved demand, and refused to quit.

Persistence beats talent. 

Validation beats speculation. 

Solving real problems beats chasing trends.

76% of tech leaders think in-person boosts engagement.

The data says they're WRONG.

I looked at 50+ tech companies. 

Return-to-office (RTO) rules with results.

What I found will shock you.

THE RTO REALITY:
- Google, Amazon, Meta: 3+ days in office required
- Amazon went to full 5-day office work in 2024
- Top talent quit Apple, Microsoft, SpaceX after office mandates

Only 1 in 4 work days happen at home now

THE REMOTE WINNERS:
- GitLab: 1,300+ people in 65+ countries. Zero office costs.
- GitLab saw 35% higher productivity by focusing on results, not hours.
- Shopify: 5,000 employees work from home forever. Cut office space by 80%.
- Coinbase: Zero mandatory office days.

HERE'S THE TWIST:

While Google, Amazon, and Meta force 3+ office days, remote companies are winning.

For Developers: 
→ Remote teams: 35% faster at shipping code 
→ Office teams: 40% more time in meetings
→ Remote code: 23% fewer bugs

For Hiring: 
→ Remote companies hire from anywhere 
→ 33% of companies went more remote in 2024 
→ Office mandates = 25% more senior people quit

The real shocker?
71% of leaders say offices build BETTER culture.
63% think offices boost productivity.

But remote companies are:

Growing 40% faster

Keeping talent longer

Shipping products 2x faster

Saving $11,000 per person each year

The hard truth:

Return-to-office isn't about getting more done.

It's about control.

Big tech forces people back to expensive offices.

Remote companies quietly win with global talent working around the clock.

The question isn't if remote work works.

It's whether your company can afford to ignore it.

STOP hiring MBAs for your startup.

They're CANCER to early-stage companies, and I'll prove it.

The brain experiment that exposes MBA programming:

Tell people: "Find everything BLUE. I'll quiz you."

30 seconds later: "Eyes closed. Name ONE red thing."

Complete silence.

Room PACKED with red objects. But they're programmed to be blind.

This is what $200K MBA degrees do to your startup.

They create expensive individuals who can't see opportunity.

The $1.5B story that'll trigger every MBA:

Elon Musk's X .com had the "perfect" strategy. Internet banking. 

MBA wet dream.

PayPal was dismissed as a "toy." Not serious enough for Harvard grads.

Plot twist: eBay sellers begged for PayPal logos on their listings.

MBA response: "That's beneath our vision." 

Non-MBA response: "Holy sh*t, follow the money."

Result: 

Elon's MBA vision: DEAD 

"Toy" PayPal: $1.5B exit

Here's what MBAs actually do:

- Ignore your paying customers for "strategic alignment" 
- Kill profitable opportunities because they're "off-brand"
- Spend months on analysis while competitors ship 
- Create PowerPoints instead of revenue

The brutal truth:

Every MBA is trained to see BLUE and miss RED opportunities.

While they're perfecting strategy decks, scrappy founders are building what customers actually want.

Your biggest competitors aren't other startups.

They're the MBA consultants convincing you to ignore reality.

Stop calling it "pivoting." Start calling it WINNING.

Companies crushing it right now?

Zero MBAs on founding teams. 

Wide attention, not narrow "focus." 

Customer obsession, not strategy obsession.

Your MBA hire will say, "That's not our target market," which means, "I'm too educated to make money."

Fire your MBA. Hire your customers.

They'll tell you exactly what to build.

100 VC rejections should have KILLED Canva.

Instead, they built a $40 billion empire.

While your startup is busy chasing the perfect pitch deck...

Melanie Perkins was sleeping on her brother's apartment floor in San Francisco after being rejected by EVERY investor she met.

The brutal truth about Canva's "overnight success":
→ 100+ VC rejections over 3 years
→ CEO couldn't get a single meeting
→ Adobe "owned" the market already
→ Zero tech background
→ No Silicon Valley connections

Yet today they're worth $40 BILLION.

How?

They did the OPPOSITE of what startup gurus tell you:

GURU ADVICE: "Swing for the fences immediately."
CANVA REALITY: Started tiny with yearbook design (Fusion Books) to prove demand.

GURU ADVICE: "Raise big, scale fast."
CANVA REALITY: Bootstrapped for YEARS before raising money.

GURU ADVICE: "Focus on enterprise customers."
CANVA REALITY: Built for regular people who couldn't use Photoshop.

GURU ADVICE: "Charge premium from day one."
CANVA REALITY: Free forever tier with optional premium features.

The most valuable insight that 99% of founders miss:
- Melanie wasn't selling design software.
- She was selling CONFIDENCE to non-designers.
- While Adobe was building MORE features for professionals, Canva removed features regular people would never use.

The numbers don't lie:
- Adobe: 30M users after 30+ YEARS
- Canva: 90M users after 10 YEARS
- Adobe: $95/month minimum
- Canva: $0 forever (free tier)

Typical tech founder would have:
→ Added more complex features
→ Targeted professional designers
→ Built for desktop first
→ Optimized for technical ability

Canva did the exact opposite:
→ Removed complexity
→ Targeted everyone BUT designers
→ Built for web first
→ Optimized for confidence

This is why most startups fail:
- They're built by engineers who LOVE complexity.
- Used by customers who HATE complexity.
- Canva's $40B insight:
- The world doesn't need more features.
- It needs fewer barriers.

Your startup won't die from lack of features.

It will die from lack of customers.

The Canva blueprint for outlasting rejection:
- Start small (yearbook design)
- Validate with real revenue (not pitch decks)
- Build what users want (not what investors want)
- Focus on non-consumption (people who couldn't use design tools)
- Never give up (100+ rejections)

The tech elite laughed at Canva.

"Adobe already owns this market."

"Two designers with no tech background?"

Now they're worth more than Adobe's 1982 market cap, adjusted for inflation.

Your startup isn't struggling because of bad luck.

It's struggling because you're building what YOU think is impressive.

Not what your CUSTOMERS think is useful.

Stop adding features.

Start removing barriers.

Because the next $40 billion company won't be built with more complexity.

It will be built with less.

Uber broke EVERY rule and built a $120B company.

Meanwhile, your CTO is obsessed with "perfect architecture" for an app with 0 users.

THE $800 CAB RIDE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING:

- Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn't find a taxi in Paris, 2008.
- Spent $800 on a private driver.
- Got pissed enough to build a solution.
- That's it. That's the entire origin story.

No MBA strategy sessions.

No market sizing analysis.

No regulatory compliance plan.

Just solving a problem that pissed them off.

THE ANTI-STARTUP PLAYBOOK:
• Ignored regulations completely
• Launched with 3 cars (not scalable!)
• Charged 1.5x taxi rates (premium pricing!)
• Hired a nuclear physicist for arrival time predictions

While your engineers debate GraphQL vs REST for the 5th week...

Uber followed ONE rule: SHIP FIRST, FIX LATER.

WHAT REALLY MADE UBER UNSTOPPABLE:

OBVIOUS PROBLEM: Everyone hated taxis

REGULATORY DEFIANCE: "Better to ask forgiveness than permission"

CITY DOMINATION STRATEGY: Own San Francisco before expanding

HEAT MAPS: Showed app opens even before service was available

The greatest insight?

Uber built user demand so strong that regulators COULDN'T shut them down.

THE BILLION-DOLLAR MOVE:

When competitors tried copying Uber, it was already too late.

Travis didn't optimize for:
- Perfect code
- Regulatory approval
- Sustainable growth
- Driver happiness
- Industry relationships

He optimized for SPEED and DOMINANCE.

THE ACTUAL UBER LAUNCH STRATEGY:
- Find universal pain point
- Build 10x better solution
- Expand faster than regulators can respond
- Create winner-take-all market dynamics

Your $180K engineers are building architecture diagrams for your "disruptive" app.

Meanwhile, you have 0 customers who care.

The uncomfortable truth:
- In winner-take-all markets, speed and aggression matter more than perfect code or playing by the rules.
- Not saying it's ethical.
- Not saying it's sustainable.
- Just saying it worked.

From $800 cab ride to $120B company.

Sometimes the best strategy is to move fast, break things, and apologize later—but only if you're solving a problem millions experience every day.

The UBER formula: Solve obvious problem + Superior tech + Aggressive expansion + Fight regulations = Global disruption

P.S: Our devs help build WITH startup knowledge. 

P.P.S: We help SHIP code, not sit idly as customers walk past.

DM me to learn more.

110+ apps built. We found out who survives.

I'm about to TRIGGER VCs with this.

Most startup advice is WRONG.

Everyone tells you to "pivot fast," "add features," "expand your market."

But after delivering 50+ SaaS projects and 60+ web apps...

We've seen a pattern that Silicon Valley gurus won't tell you:

The survivors obsess over ONE thing.

Their core product.

Look at Vercel's $9 BILLION valuation story:

❌ What Vercel DIDN'T do:
- Build their own AWS competitor
- Add database hosting
- Create a full backend suite
- Chase every enterprise feature request

✅ What Vercel DID do:
- Made git push → live website PERFECT
- Obsessed over deployment speed
- Became the undisputed king of frontend deployment

Result: $100M+ revenue. $9B valuation. 

Powers Apple, Nike, Netflix, TikTok.

The counterintuitive lesson:

Your startup's biggest risk isn't doing too little.

It's doing too much.

While your competitors are building "platforms" and chasing every feature request...

You should be asking:
"What's the ONE thing we can do better than anyone else on the planet?"

Then do ONLY that.
Until you own that space completely.

Please. For your own sake: 

Niche DOWN. Conquer. THEN move.

And if you're ready to build with a team that recognizes this...

Let me know. We build what you NEED.

Notion fired their ENTIRE TEAM in 2015.

They moved to Japan and started over.

Today they're worth $10 billion.

The Crisis (2015):
- Product kept crashing due to wrong tech stack
- Running out of money with no viable product
- Made the brutal decision to fire everyone and start fresh

The Rebuild (2015-2016):
- Ivan Zhao and Simon Last moved to Kyoto, Japan
- Lived cheaply while coding 18 hours/day for 18 months
- Completely rebuilt the product from scratch

The Breakthrough (2018):

Wall Street Journal called it "The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity"

Hired their biggest fan (Ben Lang) from the community as Head of Community

This single hire changed everything

The Anti-Marketing Strategy:
- Spent only 0.5% of revenue on marketing (vs 10-20% industry standard)
- Built a 4-person sales team while generating $400M+ revenue
- Achieved 95% organic traffic through community-led growth

The Community Flywheel:
- Users discover through templates shared by other users
- Templates showcase features better than any demo
- Passionate users became unpaid ambassadors in 50+ countries
- Regional Facebook groups exploded (Notion Vietnam: 238K members)

Key Milestones:
2016: 1K users after Product Hunt launch
2018: 100K users after WSJ article
2019: 1M users, community explosion
2021: 20M users, $10B valuation
2024: 100M+ users

The Real Lessons for Founders:
- Kill your darlings ruthlessly - Notion spent 2 years on the wrong tech stack before admitting failure

- Optimize for focus over comfort - Moving to Japan wasn't glamorous, but it gave them 18 uninterrupted months to build

- Hire your biggest fans - Ben Lang was already promoting Notion for free before they hired him

- Templates beat tutorials - Every shared template was a demo, tutorial, and viral loop combined

- Community scales better than ads - 65+ meetups in 40 countries, all organized by passionate users

- Small teams can handle massive scale - 4 salespeople managed $400M+ in revenue because community pre-sold

- Personal founder engagement matters - Ivan personally replied to every early user tweet and email

Product Hunt isn't just a launch... 

They won #1 Product of the Month twice by building relationships first

Regional expansion through users - Let passionate locals build communities instead of hiring country managers

Stay lean on marketing forever - Even at $10B valuation, they keep marketing spend under 1%.

The counterintuitive truth: The less you spend on marketing, the more authentic your growth becomes.

Their real genius wasn't the product - it was creating a system where users did the marketing because they genuinely loved it.

P.S: I built a detailed, interactive document on the matter.

P.P.S: We help founders get developers who THINK like them. They code what's needed. 

P.P.P.S: You can find it in the comments.

Stripe's first "customer" was FAKE.

Now they process $1 TRILLION annually.

Here's the insane story behind the $95B lie:

2010: Patrick Collison had zero payment software.

Zero servers. Zero code. Zero infrastructure.

But he had something else...
A friend who could manually set up merchant accounts.

So when Stripe's "first customer" signed up, Patrick didn't run code.

He picked up his phone.

"Hey buddy, need another account setup."

Every. Single. Customer. For months.

While Silicon Valley thought they were seeing revolutionary API technology...

It was just two Irish college dropouts playing middleman.

The "Wizard of Oz" MVP in action.

But here's where it gets crazy:

- They didn't rush to build real software.
- They used those manual setups to LEARN.

What did customers actually need? 
What frustrated developers most? 
Where did integrations break?

Each phone call was customer research.

Each manual setup taught them something new.

By the time they built real infrastructure, they'd solved problems their competitors didn't even know existed.

That "fake" beginning became their unfair advantage.

Today, Stripe processes payments for: 
→ Amazon 
→ Google
→ Shopify 
4 million other businesses

The lesson isn't "fake it till you make it."

The lesson is: Manual first, automate second.

Before you build the product, BE the product.

Your "embarrassing" manual process might be your biggest competitive advantage.

P.S: We created a full analysis of Stripe below:

https://lnkd.in/ecifaqhD

Before building Linear, Karri was using Jira at Airbnb. 

50 dropdown menus. 10-second page loads. 

Endless clicking to do simple tasks.

So he built a Google Chrome extension that completely transformed Jira's interface.

The extension did what Jira couldn't:
- Stripped away 90% of the UI clutter
- Made pages load instantly
- Turned complex workflows into simple clicks
- Removed the pain from issue tracking

What happened at Airbnb:
- 100+ employees installed his Chrome extension
- Product teams stopped complaining about Jira
- Productivity shot up across engineering
- Internal Slack channels praised the "Jira fix"

The Google extension proved something massive: 
→ Jira's problem wasn't features 
→ It was the terrible user experience 
→ A simple UI wrapper could fix everything 
→ Developers would do anything to avoid Jira's interface

Meanwhile, Atlassian ignored the real problem:
- Kept adding more features to Jira
- Made the interface even more complex
- Focused on enterprise sales, not user experience
- Never fixed the core speed and usability issues

Karri's realization: 
"If a Chrome extension can make Jira usable, why are we still using Jira at all?"

The pivot moment:
- March 2019: Quit Airbnb to build the native solution
- Partnered with engineers from Uber and Coinbase
- Turned the Chrome extension concept into Linear
- Built what Jira should have been from day one

Their mistakes along the way:
- Initially tried to match Jira's feature complexity
- Almost fell into the same bloat trap
- Thought they needed every enterprise checkbox
- Nearly burned out building too fast

The breakthrough:
- Focused on speed as the primary feature
- Kept the interface brutally simple
- Made every action happen instantly
- Built for users, not procurement teams

The results: 
→ Linear: $1.25B valuation in 6 years 
→ 66% of Forbes top 50 AI companies ditched Jira for Linear 
→ OpenAI, Scale AI, Cash App all switched 
→ Built with just $35K in marketing spend

The founder's lesson:
- Chrome extensions reveal billion-dollar opportunities
- Sometimes the wrapper is more valuable than the product
- Fix your own daily pain first
- UI/UX can be your entire moat

The developer's lesson:
- If you're building browser extensions to fix tools, there's a market
- Speed beats features every single time
- Simple solutions win over complex ones
- Users pay premium to avoid frustration
- One Google Chrome extension exposed a $60 billion company's weakness.

Jira wasn't killed by better features.
 
It was killed by better design.

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