A colorful poster featuring a basket full of fresh apples with motivational quotes might look fancy. But the real thrill is experiencing the pleasure of those sayings. I have always loved Chris Grosser’s famous quote, “Opportunities don’t happen. You create them,” because my story is a living example of it.
Today I am the CEO and Founder of Wordsense – a group of great people who bring to the table win-win survival strategies to ensure proactive domination.
But founding a successful company from scratch, or rather from the ashes of a resource-scarce villager, is not what I would like to call success.
The 10 years that I spent struggling, losing, grappling, and finally winning it in the year 2013 are what define me as the Founder I am today.
I started from scratch, literally.
Think of computer scraps and bits of the internet. It was the early 2000’s and computers and software were the hot new assets of that time. They were booming at a fast pace, evidently, and I could see them going only upwards and beyond.
Lucky for me, I managed to get a personal computer of my own – a PC, considering I was very young at that time in a family that couldn’t afford most luxuries (or necessities).
That was perhaps the best decision of my uncomplicated life at that moment. I could envision those computers – could be programmed to carry out sequences – would make it big in the coming decades. And they could be my lever to do things that I hadn’t known myself.
Thereafter, I started working on that computer gig of mine. Driven to try and learn new stuff, usually without any external help, I got the hang of hardware and software.
You must be wondering what’s so big about that, but more than two decades ago, having learned computers was a tremendous achievement in my village.
I was the kid they would call to fix their computers and remove viruses from software. That gig got me going at an early age and I stuck with it for a long while, being renowned as a young computer genius.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), things don’t always go as planned or as we think for ourselves.
Skipped high school & still found success – Not recommended for everyone, but anyway…
I had a rough patch for about 5 years when I went for higher schooling. It turned out that the school system and curriculum weren’t working for me – perhaps because I had gained technical insight earlier than most.
Always aiming for independence and self-sufficiency, I was the kid who always strived to make money through hard work — and that’s precisely what I did during that patch.
From doing plenty of part-time jobs to running my computer gig, I was witnessing an unprecedented growth of the internet in my country. Fueling my fire for diving deeper into this niche, I decided to not put all my eggs in one basket and delved into other side hustles.
One of the side businesses I took part in was buying and selling cell phones, and that too before the smartphone era.
It allowed me to learn about how to do business, add value, and engage potential clients – ultimately learning to build value-adding and mutually-beneficial relationships.
In the meantime, things were speeding up in the virtual world.
It was the right time for me to get a grip on everything coming my way. So, I began working on different things that belonged to the communications network. Google, Facebook, and AdSense to name a few.
Like I said before, from struggling, learning, succeeding to failing, re-learning, and re-aligning; I learned the technical art of earning through Google which would later pave way for my company, Wordsense.
Wearing multiple hats and juggling different balls, I kept my side hustles going and they helped me immensely during the rough time of my career. Using multiple streams of income to build my company, it was in 2013 that Wordsense finally materialized before my eyes.
At this point, there’s one thing I’d want to emphasize; although I worked day and night for where I am right now – the real opportunities came from being at the right place at the right time with the right people.
Self-accountability & no-victim mindset
No matter what anyone else would say, you are always responsible for the choices you make. For every error, every obstacle, and every failure that comes your way, it is ultimately you who is responsible for them.
We are fully responsible for the choices we make; we cannot blame anyone for what happens. Launching a company wasn’t easy – and brought with it many complications, but I still kept going.
Besides developing self-accountability, it is important to nurture a no-victim mindset for a businessman to thrive in any marketplace.
Given my background with no conventional education, I could have been easily defeated. But I was already a businessman in my mind from the very beginning — and I was grateful for the opportunity that I had created.
Amidst an unsupportive society with conventional authority figures forcing me to take the conventional route, nobody took me seriously enough but I rebelled.
I left education to add real value and make real money — and ended up succeeding in both. People around me bashed me for doing what I did – especially some traditional-mindset teachers – but the same people revered me for my achievements only a couple of years later.
In 2014, I joined a company where I dealt with MS Office and Google while still managing my business in its baby stages.
The next year, I gained greater insights into software-based companies. It was revealed that they are more profitable than any other business model, especially for someone with no proper educational qualifications and college degree(s).
And like that, with every passing year, I grew my knowledge base gradually. I started building a team that would really co-create a brighter future. With every year that went by, we grew together.
In 2016, the team was finally ready and we kickstarted our first project for a client company. It really got going.
In 2017, we were in full flow and everything was going smoothly and we generated a good net revenue for our company. It only got better the next year and the year after that as well.
My team and I were doing awesome in our businesses until March 2020 – then came the COVID-19 and everything got dismantled into small pieces.
The re-birth of Wordsense
The pandemic affected my business to such an extent that I was forced to shut down my business with my own hands. However, there’s always a silver lining at the end of the tunnel.
Although I was forced to terminate something I had built with such great struggle, the incident laid the foundation for the business I currently own – and fortunately, I have no regrets.
Being with the right people at the right time helped me build what I have today and it is not an overnight fortune that I have. It is the hard work of 20 years or so that has made me what I am today. As a genius once said, Overnight successes aren’t actually that overnight. They have a couple years or even decades behind them.
As you see, I worked for different things over the years including working in different call centers. Not sticking to one niche and gaining experience from multiple backgrounds proved extremely helpful. It really helped me think and work for the idea of my own software-based company.
Wordsense was a dream that I turned into reality. It is not just another traditional company; it is a place where your dreams come true. Today, we as a company have multiple enterprises that work underneath the Parent Company itself.
- Infinity By Wordsense Pvt Ltd
- Xify By Wordsense Pvt Ltd
- US Freights By Wordsense Pvt Ltd
- Haans Constructions By Wordsense Pvt Ltd
- Amectix By Wordsense Pvt Ltd
Besides hundreds of other things, the one big lesson that I have learned is that people are going to criticize no matter how good you do. So, instead of focusing on the buzz around you, focus on your growth and treat yourself good before anybody else.
Since my beginning, I really don’t care what some people think I am, but I know what I have come through and how I reached the place where I am today.
Some final words
So, this is me, Faiz-ul-Hassan – the CEO and Founder of Wordsense. A company that has generated employment opportunities for Pakistani youth and made millions of dollars in revenue to date. I am grateful to have found the right people at the right time, who helped each other grow together through thick and thin.
I haven’t stopped and I shall not stop working hard – my motto is onwards and upwards, with the sky being the limit!
