I started an app that streams Pakistani music, and my last vacation was 5 years ago

Express Tribune

Publishing partner

Patari was never supposed to happen. We had planned to create a variation of Hulu — a streaming service offering TV shows, clips, movies, and other media — for Pakistan. For two years, we tried to make this happen in vain as most TV channels refused to cooperate with us. In this time, we met with a senior media executive who urged us to focus on music instead. However, we were so consumed by our original plan that we refused to give up on it.

As the grind started getting tougher to bear and there seemed to be no end in sight to the wrangling with TV executives, I secretly started thinking about a music platform. I had grown up in an environment where music was always very important. One of my first memories is of my mother doing her chores to the lilt of ghazals playing on full volume. Growing up, the music scene in Karachi was extremely vibrant and I formed an inextricable bond with Pakistani music. Over the years, that bond had faded, but the more I thought about it, I realized that a music-sharing platform could bring back the music I had grown up with.

After one particularly frustrating phone call with a TV channel executive who was insisting on absurd price tags, I slammed down the phone and decided I’d had enough: the TV plan was dead. I called up my co-founders, who were as frustrated as I was. We applied to Plan9, Pakistan’s largest technology incubator, and after being accepted, our Patari journey started in earnest.

Patari is a dedicated online medium that showcases old favorites and new discoveries from Pakistan’s vibrant music scene. This music, to date, has not been offered in one place — much of it is missing or is of bad quality. Patari enables users to search through an extensive library — our state-of-the-art search engine is built specifically to deal with how people spell Urdu in English script — via a beautiful interface. A team of musicians and journalists has compiled playlists that cut across genres, decades and moods to offer music-lovers a window into the wonderful textured world of Pakistani music.

When we started building Patari, I was working as a freelance programmer. Patari’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Iqbal Talaat was the CTO at a Karachi-based company and co-founder Humayun Haroon was also freelancing. Programming pays well — really, really well — and we were all earning six-figure incomes. We gave it up because we were tired of working on products we didn’t care about for clients that we didn’t care about. It was time to focus our energies on something we were deeply committed to and so the decision to leave behind the corporate world was a very easy one.

That said, doubt is a constant foe for any entrepreneur — it never goes away, lurking, ready to pounce at the slightest of chances. As business magnate Elon Musk says, “Doing a startup is like eating glass while staring into an abyss.” Two years after we first set out to create an online streaming platform, we were desperate and doubt didn’t set us back much. We had very little left to lose.

We debuted Patari to 800 users at first, inviting them to test out the system. In two-and-a-half weeks, these users binged on over 100,000 songs. The platform went viral and it was like being strapped to a rocket ship which had a mind of its own.

With our phenomenal growth came great responsibility — something I still fear. While this is something that every entrepreneur struggles with, the weight of expectations only drives us to work harder. There are many people we have to prove right — and probably and equal number of people to prove wrong.

Make it work