EXCLUSIVE: How does this Pakistani entrepreneur power 25m+ websites via remote software business?

Pakistani tech entrepreneur Syed Balkhi powers over 25 million websites through his remote software company, Awesome Motive.

Awesome Motive, a company Balkhi started back in 2009, builds software for WordPress, a content management system that powers 43% of the websites on the internet in 2023. These tools allow website owners to add a huge array of functionalities - an opportunity that Pakistani entrepreneur Balkhi realized early on.

Here’s his story.

Balkhi was born in Karachi and showed his entrepreneurial spirit early on. “I started my first business when I was seven years old, selling holiday greeting cards for Eid and Pakistan’s Independence Day celebration. Later, I started a small snack shop for my neighborhood. Both ventures were extremely profitable,” Balkhi told Daily Pakistan in an exclusive conversation.

When he was 12, his family moved to the US - and soon faced financial hardship. To help out, Balkhi started taking online jobs managing forums and building websites. This helped him discover WordPress, then a fledgling software.

Balkhi, though, instantly recognized its potential. He told, “I came across WordPress and saw that it was open source. That was a magic word for me. I had money to buy licenses at this point, but I was very frugal, and I believed in the huge democratizing potential of open-source software.”

As a result, Balkhi soon became a WordPress expert, and started sharing his knowledge on his blog, WPBeginner.

The sentiment paid off. WPBeginner soon gathered a massive audience - who let Balkhi know exactly what they wanted in terms of WordPress functionalities.

It is this user feedback that helped Balkhi turn Awesome Motive into a massive success.

“I remember, I wanted to grow my email list for WPBeginner, but there was no plugin on the market that scaled to my needs, so I coded a solution for my own website,” Balkhi recalls. “Then I started getting emails from users asking me - ‘What is this - can I get this exact thing that you are using?’”

Scenting an opportunity, Balkhi got together with co-founder Thomas Griffin, a seasoned coder he’d met at a WordPress community event. Together, they turned Balkhi’s home-made fixer-upper code into a sleek, publicly available pop-up plugin, OptinMonster.

“We launched it to the WPBeginner audience in September 2013, and it was an instant success

Furthermore, Balkhi bought several existing plugins and extended them based on the feedback he got from his audience. He acquired MonsterInsights, a Google Analytics plugin, as well as All in One SEO, a plugin that helps users optimize their content for search engines.

 “We were fortunate to be a fully distributed team from day one, so when everything changed, for our team, at least this aspect of their lives stayed the same,” Balkhi explains.

“We were also fortunate to be in the tech sector, which saw a massive tailwind. Many of our software tools enabled our small business customers to not only survive, but thrive during the pandemic, and this was rewarding both spiritually and financially that we were able to make a difference in the lives of our customers, their families, and their community.

In addition, building a remote team also let him source amazing new team members without geographical restrictions: “I always say that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. By building a distributed team, we get to hire not just experts in their field, but people who are autonomous, motivated, and self-driven.”

Looking into the future, Balkhi counts on sticking to the same principles to keep growing his business. “We just do the simple things really well,” he says. “And we keep doing them over a long time. You keep doing something for twelve, sixteen years - then all of a sudden it looks like an overnight success.”