31/12/2025
As 2025 comes to an end tonight, I want to wrap it up by sharing some of my proud achievements, a failure, and the lessons I learned from those...
Launched Marqto, a marketing agency to make marketing less of a headache and more of a high five for businesses, earlier this year with my best friend from university, Muhammad Shahid. It was our first time doing a startup of our own, and we hustled and learned a lot from it. From spending days brainstorming a meaningful name for our agency, doing its branding, creating its social media presence, setting up systems and structures for efficient operations to appearing in an online investor meeting, researching, finalizing, and renting an office space, and working our hardest to close clients left, right, and center. It eventually failed after 7 months of hard work due to shortage of cash to inject in our startup. Learned a hell lot from it though.
Got serious about LinkedIn and building my personal brand over there, something that I wasn't doing before. For this, I completely reworked my LinkedIn profile; experimented with several AI tools to create the best headshot I could for my Profile Picture, redesigned my Profile Cover, revised my Headline, and rewrote my About description. Also connected with amazing people (founders, marketers, social media managers, designers, and recruiters) and received 2 new recommendations from fellow marketers for my online consultations on effective lead-gen strategies for paid ads. Grew my followers to 10K+ later this year, so it was all worth it.
Launched my WhatsApp Channel called "Marketing, Memes & Everything in Between ๐ฅ" to share updates about my life, what I'm working on, and other things I find interesting, with my channel followers. The idea was to launch my own WhatsApp community, but instead, I started off with a channel first so I can touch base and test the waters, and if everything works out well, then only I'll launch my own. I basically preferred to not have my own community than to have one that people prefer to leave after joining. So yeah, the goal is to still operate my WhatsApp channel for some more time until I'm ready to create a well-moderated WhatsApp community, because at the end, moderation in a WhatsApp community is key to keep it helpful and valuable for everyone inside.
Created "The Curious Marketer ๐ฅ", my LinkedIn Newsletter, just last month with one purpose: to give out as much value as I can with my content about marketing, branding, productivity, and other genuinely interesting things I come across. Hit 1,039 subscribers in just a week and now sitting at around 1500 subscribers (all thanks to you guys for the love and support.๐งก).
So yeah, that was my year. Catch y'all in 2026! ๐
Lessssgooo...
