About not 9-5 Faizan Patankar

So you want to find out about me?

I live two lives.

One during the day, the 9-to-5, if you can call that since it’s mostly more than that. Which is exciting. It feeds my tech ego professional and pays for the bills. Bills, the one thing that drives living for 99% of us.

You can read about my day life on LinkedIn.

The second life is after-work. Fun, creative, and wildish. 

Might have got carried away there a bit. I love technology and spend time trying to build products and write articles.

As a first generation immigrant, I do what any first-generation immigrant does. Dream. And dream big. And sometimes I achieve some of the dreams. ANd fill up the gap with even larger dreams.

That’s kinda how life works for the first-generation immigrant anywhere.

I like to think of myself as a Maker.

What sort of maker? you ask.

It doesn’t matter. I like making digital things. I’ve had success with some of them, and others lay somewhere in the product graveyard along with millions of other projects that didn’t become a success for makers everywhere.

Here’s a list of things I made:

  • Career Geek Blog – over 125,000 readers annually in a niche career market. I sold the site. Successful exit.
  • Jobbuddy – this was a site to manage your job search. Closed in 6 months. Bad mistake closing it early.
  • SAIL – a list of startup accelerators and incubators in the UK. Built with NoCode. A movement I support.

These are some of the things I’ve made that I can share without embarrassment 🙂

From all of this, I have the one thing which is most important in the success of any B2C product. Build the community.

Build the community, before you build the product.

Build the community during your product development.

And build the community after you launch the product.

It’s better to have 10 hardcore supporters of your product, than have 100 meh users. Building a community isn’t easy, and damn its hard work.

I love that hard work 🙂

And I hope you do too.

On my site FaizanPatankar.com I just share things I find fun enough to write about. I love writing and would happily blog for anyone. It just so happens I write for myself at the moment!

That’s enough about me I think.

Tell me more about you, Tweet me or connect with me on LinkedIn (if you prefer the more formal tone :D)