DotsnDashes' Erum Munir, Leaves Cush Job for Entrepreneurship

Elan's Women Social Club

As Rani Wemel once said, "Every King was once a crying baby...every great building was once a map...it's not where we are today...but where we'll reach tomorrow."

Erum Munir is the fourth young female entrepreneur from Pakistan I have interviewed in audio podcast. She is the founder of DotsnDashes. People like her not only start businesses, but they create new jobs and grow people to go out and start their own businesses, and such is the Circle of Entrepreneurial Life.

Listen to Erum Munir and me on audio podcast.

She began using the Internet in 1997 and started her first company three years later. The Internet service available to Erum, at the time of this podcast, was not powerful enough to enable her to use voice over IP, so I used an IP-PABX phone service to call her Karachi cell phone number, put it on speaker phone mode, and recorded it. This is why there the quality is different than in our other podcasts.

What made Erum excited about the Internet was the ability for anyone to create a presence via a website and be accessible to new and current friends and customers around the globe. She could not help but get started right away designing, for example, with Geocities. Soon she quit her full-time with another organization and started her own. Her clients now are from USA, UK and Pakistan.

Suzanne Bowen (the interviewer): I can remember one of the first websites I ever made. It was called "Areuthere.com." I wish I had saved it somewhere just for nostalgic moments. You remember how back in the old days of Internet over dial up, we always asked over and over via voice and chat ... "Are u there?"

Back then, I was just excited about HTML, looking at patterns that I could follow to create my own. Tell us more about the languages, PHP, java, Wordpress or whatever you like the most?

Erum Munir: I used HTML at first and Photo Shop for design. I started using something called Homepage Editor, then Macro Media.

Now, I write my code in HTML. I do the designing in Photo Shop. My main specialty is content management websites. I use WordPress. Wordpress is very flexible for blogs, projects, information. It seems that anything is possible.

Suzanne Bowen: There are other programs that people can use like Drupal or Joomla, but WordPress does seem very easy to use.

There were probably very few girls or women getting involved in the Internet in the mid 90s when you got started. Thank goodness for people like you, Sarah Dawood, Salma Navaid Jafri, and Mehwish Abdul Sattar whom I have also interviewed and will add to this podcast channel. This is message to other young ladies, "Hey, go for it."

Erum Munir: At first, we had only dialup Internet. It was very slow at Modem 2400 (V.22bis) 2.4 kbit/s. But we were too excited to care.

Other topics we discussed were ... who influenced Erum Munir to be who she is today, and what is her motivation now to do what she does in business and entrepreneurship?

Please visit her website and Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/ElanWS and and http://www.dotsndashes.com/.

Another inspiring person to learn from in a world where collaborations among the most unlikely entities result in the best stories to share. If you need a Virtual Phone Line to collaborate with current and potential friends and customers, try http://www.virtualphoneline.com, and if your telecommunications provider does not offer virtual phone numbers, ask them to join DIDXchange to make available to you phone numbers from over 55 nations!