To Blog or Not To Blog

This news has been in the pipeline for quite some time. We wanted to break this news earlier, but there was a lot of work to be done. Now that most (if not all) of the work is complete, I can proudly announce,

SeenReport has secured Samaa tv as its first client. SeenReport will provide its live reporting platform and social media suite to Samaa tv to build its Citizen News platform, iSamaa.

The site, iSamaa.tv is already live. Getting a client within one year of its launch (10 Jun 08), is indeed a great achievement for which the whole team is to be congratulated.

When we (Me, Sharjeel and Yaser) left our jobs and started working together, we didnt know how to make money, do marketing, make sales or run a business. However, we strongly believed that,

1. Every huge business starts with a small scale
2. We can use technology to create things. If we create something that solves a problem and creates value, the money will follow.
3. We make a great team, together we can do great things. And if we do great things, we will achieve great results

Our initiative was met with critique, particularly from many ‘Experts’ on ‘Business’. These experts graciously took time out from their jobs/studies and gave us hours long lectures and highlighted how we were destined to doom. The free advice would be,

“You guys are just techies, you don’t know how to run a business”, “You wont make money…Period!”, “You’ll be on the streets on 6 months”, “Who cares about the value creation, its about the money”, “This is not Silicon Valley dear, you guys are wasting yourselves”, “Create value then money? Yeah maybe in books, but not in real life”, ”You should work for 6-8 years, then do an MBA before you even start thinking about working for yourself”

Each negative comment left us with stronger dedication. After all, why should we take advices about running business from people who have never run any business themselves. Ironically, such remarks never came from any of the founders and CEOs (both successful and failed). In fact, all the founders we met had a high degree of maturity and encouraged us to go ahead with our venture.

In the past one year, SeenReport has come a long way. From a single page web site to a full blown citizen news platform that offers live mobile reporting, online news community portals and news publishing mechanism. During this journey we created something valuable, helped common people get noticed, met great people like Mr. Shahid Malik, Rabia Garib, Jawad Farid, Jehan Ara, Dr. Umar Saif, Amir Jahangir, helped activists like Dr. Awab manage and organize information in a better way, played our part in covering the long march 08, 09 and had lots of fun while working together on something that we all loved.

But it wasn’t a walk in the park; far from it. During the past year, we’ve had 72 hours long work days, at times spent weeks in the office, slept under our desks, worked without pay for months, lived off the occasional consultancy and nearly sold our PS2 . But even in the extremely desperate times, we never lost faith in the team. If one faltered, another would present its shoulder and bear the weight. I can only thank Allah who blessed me with such a great team.

I would like to thank,

• Baoo jee (aka Belal Muhammad Hashmi) whose smoke filled late night sittings showed us way when it was pitch dark
• Hashim Ali (CEO Mantaq Systems Pvt. Ltd.) whose selfless guidance and encouragement gave me confidence to achieve anything
• Mr. Shafiq-ur-Rehman, whose energy filled discussions kept us motivated
• Mr. Shahid Malik and Rabia Garib, whose sincere advice helped us set our direction
• My family, for understanding and never putting any pressure on me
• My friends, who never lost faith in me
• My ex-colleagues who always encouraged me to aim higher
• My not so friends, whose constant critique and harsh remarks kept us going even when we wanted to give up

But above all, it is the grace of Allah Almighty that helped us at each step. Without His help, we wouldn’t have achieved anything. And of course, the team that made this possible.

It is fitting that the SeenReport’s first deal is with Samaa tv that has already established itself as the leader in innovative journalism and represented Pakistan in Stanford Innovation Journalism conference 09. We believe that Samaa’s initiative to empower common people to make their voices heard, is aligned with SeenReport’s vision of ‘Make news, Be heard, Bring change’. Powered by SeenReport’s state of the art platform, Samaa’s citizen news portal now has a perfect blend of mobile reporting, rich content publishing, community driven content, live news publishing, localized news and user engagement in news.

I would like to congratulate and thank the SeenReport team (Yaser Awan, Sharjeel Ahmed and Umar Saif), a team of highly capable friends and immensely talented guys whose hard work, faith and constant struggle made this dream a reality.

I am sure this is just the first good news from the series of good news to follow

Edit: Here is Yaser’s view on the same news 

Related posts:

1. SeenReport closes first round of funding