Malik Amin

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

95% of companies that invested in AI got no measurable return (MIT, via Bloomberg Businessweek, Jun 2026).

The other 5% didn't buy a smarter tool. They rebuilt one workflow around it.

A chatbot on a broken process is just a faster broken process.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

A petrol pump runs blind until month end. Meter vs tank dip vs cash drawer, nobody knows which is right.

We built a POS for fuel: live variance, shift cash locked, credit register, QuickBooks sync, owner gets the day's number on WhatsApp.

2.5 min: https://t.co/yuVDRX5qA7

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

47 prints of the same master plan in one quarter. We counted.

That is one real estate launch in Pakistan today.

Vector replaces the loop. Map digitally. Paint by investor, buyer, status, anything. Proposal PDFs in one click.

https://t.co/JfM0xA24jz

[Pierre-Eliott Lallemant @pierreeliottlal]

We went from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year by following @ycombinator's 15 rules:

1/ Do things that don't scale. Get your first 10 customers by hand.

2/ Launch now, not when it's "ready". A mediocre product in front of real users teaches you more in a week than 6 months of polishing in the dark.

3/ Charge from day one. If nobody will pay, you don't have a startup, you have a hobby.

4/ Talk to users every single day. The roadmap you need is sitting in your customers' heads, and they'll hand it to you for free

5/ Always hunt the 90/10 solution. For almost any feature there's a way to capture 90% of the value with 10% of the effort.

6/ There are only two real jobs: write code and talk to users. Everything else (conferences, press, VC coffees, corp dev calls) is fake work.

7/ You pick your customers as much as they pick you. 10 users who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you.

8/ Growth is an output, not a strategy. Grow before product market fit and all you're buying is churn.

9/ Do less, really well. Pick one or two metrics and judge every task against them.

10/ Know if you're default alive. Paul Graham's question: on current growth and current burn, do you reach profitability before the money runs out?

11/ Don't hire until it hurts. Headcount is not progress, it's burn. Every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long.

12/ Momentum is the only real moat in year one. Ship something every week, even something tiny.

13/ Every great startup is badly broken at some point. The game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out. Again. And again

14/ Ignore your competitors. Startups die of suicide, not murder. In year one, the only company that can kill yours is your own

15/ Startups rarely die from running out of money. They die because the founders fall out. Brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy

Good luck !

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Google Ads says it was the click.

Meta says it was the impression.

LinkedIn says it was the meeting.

Your CRM says it was an organic web form.

Nobody is lying. Everybody is half-right.

Attribution is theatre.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Reddit r/CRM today, sales rep:

"if I log activities so my manager can see what I'm doing, how does that help ME sell more?"

CRMs built as surveillance get treated as surveillance. Adoption dies.

Build for the rep. The dashboards take care of themselves.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Reddit r/CRM today:

"You don't have 50 engineering teams doing deployments every day where anyone can break something."

Your SaaS vendor's 99.9% uptime hides their incidents. Single-tenant has zero of that blast radius.

Cheap to host in 2026. Worth the math.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Your CRM is a spreadsheet called Leads_FINAL_v3.xlsx.

Be honest.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Reddit r/CRM today:

AI-native custom CRM builds now ship for less than a year of 100 Salesforce seats.

For SMEs in the 20-200 seat range, that's accurate. 6-12 weeks. One-time. Owned not rented.

The assumption that "custom = expensive" is 10 years out of date.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Reddit r/CRM today, sales operator:

Zendesk. Freshdesk. Intercom. Salesforce Service Cloud "a complete disaster."

The premium brand doesn't fix workflow mismatch. Just makes it more expensive.

The rep who built his own because nothing fit? Solving an actual problem.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Reddit r/CRM today, owner doing the math:

$200 to $2,400 extra a month on the wrong CRM. $12K to $140K over 5 years.

Monthly forever vs one-time and owned. Math crosses inside 24 to 36 months for most SMEs.

The owner who runs it gets to keep the money.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

11 tabs to answer one customer.

5 more to attribute the sale.

The cost of running on CRMs built for someone else's workflow.

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

I'm testing a concept and would appreciate honest feedback from people who sell online.
A live shopping feed that runs on your own FB/IG/Tiktok all day - built from creative assets u already have.

Worth exploring?

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

The 50-Spreadsheet Problem https://t.co/LSGZ5FK0oW

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Custom CRM vs Salesforce: The Build-or-Buy Framework https://t.co/WuKEb1c9Rq

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

11 Tabs to Answer One Customer: Why Your CRM Should Own Every Channel You Sell On https://t.co/uZSRcvDffv

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

https://t.co/3Te2CtHlMD

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Vector: A Real Estate Map Tool Built After We Counted 47 Prints of One Plan https://t.co/ygtdtRXVMk

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Built for Chaos: What Custom Software Has to Get Right https://t.co/HYHCR8HeVJ

[Malik Amin @malikamiin]

Without analytical pipelines, no CFO can see the system clearly enough to fix it.

Send Sitara a CSV. In 48 hours we ship a working dashboard built on your data. Power BI, Fabric, or Python + web. Your stack.

Yours to keep. UAE/PK CFOs only.