About

Hey, I'm Tariq 👋

Founder, dad, generalist. I build products with AI, market them myself and share what I learn. No guru shit.

I've been the geek my whole life. Business took the front seat for a while, and AI brought me back.

The long version

My uncle got me started. I played International Karate on his Atari, then he bought me a Sega Master System. Always a Sega guy. Then came the PC: Prince of Persia on the big floppy disks, and plenty of Minesweeper and Solitaire. By the mid-90s my PC gaming had properly taken off: Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal Tournament, then Counter-Strike. I played rugby and basketball too, but lunchtimes were Pokémon and weekends were StarCraft and Command & Conquer at LAN parties.

In 2004 I turned up at Bournemouth University with a custom-built, water-cooled gaming PC. Everyone asked what the fuck it was. I studied Business Information Technology, which was mostly networking, SQL, HTML and Java, and still found time to get banned from Steam twice. My buddy Steve and I even built our own World of Warcraft client and spawned Ragnaros in Ironforge.

Then I kind of fell out of love with code and qualified as a bricklayer instead. The financial crisis killed that plan, so in 2008 I co-founded Jet Connections with my dad. He had the aviation experience; I had the IT.

For the next nine years I ran service businesses, and I was bloody good at it. I still built the websites and ran the servers, but my head was in growth: leads, conversion, sales.

In 2017 I started an e-commerce business selling dry herb vaporisers. I loved it, right up until import and export, stock, cash flow, GDPR and Brexit burnt me out. So in 2020 I went back to Jet Connections, built out the charter department and landed a deal worth around $3m moving COVID test kits.

In 2022 I joined ACOM Aviation, my first SaaS company, and started creeping back towards the code. Then in January 2023 I jumped on generative AI and was hooked. LLMs opened a new world to me. Suddenly one generalist with a bit of high agency could build, market and sell on their own.

That's what I do now. I'm the founder and CEO of Empty Leg Finder, and I build my own products and tools.

Eighteen years and six companies in, the biggest lesson is to get rid of anything that drains you. A client, a customer, a gig. If it's taking too much from you, forget about it.

Receipts

• Co-founded Jet Connections, which does $2–3m a year with a team of three.
• Structured aircraft sales worth millions.
• Ran detailing contracts for the US Air Force, the Ministry of Defence and Universal Flight Support.
• Built an e-commerce store to six figures in 18 months, solo, with zero ad spend.
• Led go-to-market at ACOM Aviation, onboarding 400 charter brokers and 200 operators across Europe in eight months.

Plenty of fuck-ups too. I own those as well.

If you're a builder, a founder or just someone with a passion, come say hi or find me on X.