I’m Tariq, a founder and hands-on builder with eighteen years of experience across private aviation, services, e-commerce and software.
I’m interested in how things work, why people make the decisions they do, and what happens when you build something that makes their lives a little easier.
That curiosity has taken me into some fairly different businesses.
A little background
This is the part where I’m supposed to talk about what I’ve accomplished. It always feels like giving a speech at my own birthday party, but here goes.
I’ve founded five companies and advised many others on marketing, go-to-market strategy and conversion.
I’ve built to six and seven figure annual revenue.
I’ve structured aircraft sales worth tens of millions and a $3 million charter operation moving COVID test kits between labs during the pandemic.
I also built a solo e-commerce business to mid-six figures within eighteen months, without spending a penny on advertising.
That said, my introduction to marketing was considerably less impressive.
I’d started an aircraft detailing company in 2011 and was driving around airports, knocking on doors and asking people whether their jets needed cleaning. After being told off by an airport manager, I began to suspect there might be a better way.
So I taught myself online marketing through the businesses I was running. Somewhere between building websites, trying campaigns and figuring out why people bought, I found the work I kept wanting to get back to and fell in love with it.
How I approach the work
I’ve a shit ton of mistakes, some were expensive, some very painful, and a a few were entirely avoidable, which is particularly annoying, but that’s growth right.
Eighteen years of experience has made me more willing to question my first answer.
I research, form a hypothesis, build something and see what happens. When the evidence points somewhere else, I change what I’m doing.
I enjoy being close enough to the work to make those changes myself: understanding the customer, building the system and figuring out what the results actually mean.
Today, I run a small bootstrapped SaaS business on Replit called EmptyLegFinder.aero and I'm looking to continue building a portfolio or small digital products.
What has my attention
I’ve always been a geek. PCs, hardware and building on the web have kept me happily occupied for years.
Generative AI now gets a fairly unreasonable amount of my attention.
I build with it, deploy agents and use it throughout my work. I also make things simply because I can see someone would find them useful.
Somewhere along the way, I became a certified Level 4 builder and a top 1% user on Replit. An achievement I’m proud of, although I suspect it also means I’ve spent far too much on inference tokens.
Recently, that meant building Granddad Lifts, an app for my family to organise lifts for my grandfather’s cancer treatment appointments.
Everyone could choose the journeys they could cover and change them when plans moved around.
My grandmother got her own section, with big, readable text and a way to print everything out.
That last bit mattered a lot because seeing how happy it made my grandparents was the best part by far.
That’s what I find so exciting about these tools: more people can now build something useful, creative or meaningful to them.
I’d love to show how I build these things and help a few more people have a go. What a time to be alive.
Why this site exists
For years, I wrote in the voice of whichever business I was running, this is somewhere to write as myself.
I’ll share what I’m building, what I’m learning and what changes my mind. There’ll be plenty of AI, marketing and business, alongside whatever else catches my attention.
I also love computers, music, books and making things so I’m giving myself some room here to follow that curiosity, and see where the writing goes.
Thanks for stopping by.
Tariq