No Holds Barred, Mehwish Sattar's Entrepreneurial Spirit

Mehwish Abdul Sattar has a story to tell and thank goodness, she tells it all, the story of a young female in the business world of Pakistan. Her name is pronounced "Suttarr" not "Saddur" like I enunciated it in the beginning.

(Listen to our podcast interview in audio which is available on DIDX and iTunes.)

Interesting fact is that her masters is in Genetics, and look at where she is now ... like Erum Munir and Salma Navaid Jafri, she not only started her own company, but her company helps other people start their own companies.

A friend suggested that she switch to the IT industry. Her first job was an as SEO intern. Then she became a product manager in the same company.

Later she partnered with Pure BPO, a big company in Pakistan, and enjoyed her time. She shares the good and bad which is refreshing. She later told me that the other partners were really smart, and she will always appreciate them and respect them.

she started 3wOgle.com, 3w as in www- world wide web and "Ogle" is a german word means "Creative Vision" so she have a "creative vision on world wide", she has created jobs and employed ten people in her headquarters in Karachi, four more in Lahore, two in Islamabad, one in Georgia and have virtual representatives and employees in different part of the world and her baby 3wOgle is now 3wOgle Group of Companies. She is affiliated with 4 local and 7 international companies.

She thinks back to her own life when her father passed away when she was eight years old and her mother had to work even more to take care of the family. Mehwish started to help her mom in several ways and started teaching after completing her matriculation, so she can help her mom and can bear her education cost too. Now, as Mehwish is rewarded for all hard times she faced and due to her mom's and God's blessings, she is spending a great life.  She knows that there are others in Pakistan in the same boat. Mehwish wants to help the talented people who are having those problems to start their own business.

She started a program called SEO Media to help others do a great job assisting businesses get recognized for their great products and solutions and even ... work from home while doing this.

We discussed failure and how we dealt with failure in this podcast. Secondly we talked about another controversial subject ... starting a business, doing well, and then ... well, listen to find out.

Mehwish mentions my business partner and the other co-founder Rehan Allahwala's One Million Businesses program and the fact that she participates in all those events.

She realizes that even if her "graduates" outdo her in the industry, she knows she knows that her reputation just gets better for helping others to start businesses.

Next topic is how to help smart, honest people in developing areas to establish quickly a local presence in other areas of the world via virtual phone numbers.

I like the name of her website 3wogle ... http://www.3wogle.com.

We discuss Linkedin and its value. Connect with Mehwish and me on Linkedin, but I do recommend that if you use Linkedin, make sure you include a profile picture, use your real first name and last name at least, and when people write recommendations for you ... write one for them. :-D


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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!

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Paytoo has millions of end user clients taking advantage of their mobile wallet in several dozen countries around the world already. Read on Techistan. ... Connect with me on Linkedin,Facebook, Youtube, TMC, iTunes channel or Twitter, or at global events face to face to develop business and innovation.

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