Still an F grade student
Five years, seven milestones. No degree, no investors, no handouts. Just a kid in Egypt who kept finding a way.
Started coding and building games
I taught myself programming because I wanted to see things work. Mostly games.
Failed school
School didn't work out. First clear sign the normal route wasn't going to be mine.
Failed again, so I sold my homework for 50¢
Failed a second time and went looking for money everywhere. Used ChatGPT to do homework for older kids for about 50¢ a piece. I was never the smart kid. I was the kid who kept finding a way.
Learned mobile apps, then landed my first SaaS client
Learned iOS from @blakeandersonw. Then landed my first real client work, building for ServiceAgent, a hiring automation SaaS. About $2,000 in a week, paid in splits by a US founder I met on Discord. First real money, made from Egypt on a beaten Windows laptop.
Built a ton of SaaS and mobile apps. Most of them failed.
Roughly ten SaaS ideas and ten mobile apps. No architecture, no deployments, no idea how the App Store worked. Just AI tools and force of will. Most never got far enough to fail properly.
Stopped starting things and started shipping
The switch from starting things to shipping things. iOS apps with real paying users, TestFlight, App review, marketing, support, and bugs I had to fix instead of run from. Then PeddieHacks, where 48 hours with three people I'd never met won me the Judge's Prize. After that I moved from building products to breaking them, tracing on-chain cases worth up to $1.5M.
Six-figure offers, and a $13K month
Joined Candle as a founding engineer, co-founded Stratos and took it to $1.5K MRR, and started MXC Enterprises. Started getting six-figure offers while still in high school and turned some of them down. Some months cleared $13K, and my mom doesn't have to worry about the bills anymore. Posting in public put me in rooms with founders and investors I had no other way to reach from Egypt.