I took the
long way round.

I was fifteen or sixteen, studying pre-medical because that is what you do, and spending every spare hour on a laptop instead. I taught myself WordPress and started approaching local businesses — building their websites, setting up their online stores, getting them selling.

Those were small jobs. What mattered was the realisation behind them: I could learn something on the internet, use it to solve a real problem for a real business, and get paid for it. That lesson has not changed since. Only the price has.

I finished pre-medical. Then I went and did a Bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design. I completed it properly — and I have never worked a day in either field.

I am not going to dress that up as some grand strategy. I simply could not make myself care about either path the way I cared about building things on a computer. So while I was studying, I kept working, kept taking clients, kept learning whatever the next job required. The degree is on paper. The skill is what pays.

If you are reading this from an unconventional background, thinking it is too late or you studied the wrong thing — I am fairly good evidence that it does not matter nearly as much as people tell you.

I founded Xclator as a software house. We built ERP systems and custom business software, and we sold them locally, inside Pakistan. It was real work for real companies, and it taught me something no course could have: how businesses actually operate, and exactly where they lose hours and money.

Building an ERP means sitting with a business and mapping every process it has. Do that enough times and you stop seeing software. You start seeing waste — the same manual work, repeated, in company after company.

For roughly the last eighteen months my focus has been the US market, and in that time Xclator stopped being a software house and became an AI product house. The shift was not a rebrand. It was what clients were asking for. They did not want another custom system to maintain; they wanted the work itself to stop being manual.

That change also moved the numbers. The same problem that was worth a modest fee locally was worth many times more to a US business, because the hours I was removing cost them far more to begin with. The work was not harder. The market was different.

This year I registered the business formally as Xclator AI LLC in Wyoming, USA, so international clients could contract with a proper legal entity and pay into a company account rather than a personal one. That one step changed which clients would take a meeting.

To date I have earned more than $165,000 from US and international clients. The largest single piece of that was a $65,000 deal with a US real estate business.

Their team was drowning in manual lead handling — calls, emails, follow-ups, spreadsheets. I did not pitch them a price. I showed them their own process and where it was leaking money, then built them 15 connected automations: lead capture, AI qualification, automated follow-up, appointment booking, CRM sync and reporting. Their team got back more than 20 hours a week.

All of it run from Pakistan, on a laptop, by someone with a fashion design degree.