Ahmed Qureshi shares how he bootstrapped a data startup and survived the COVID recession

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Ahmed Qureshi shares how he bootstrapped a data startup and survived the COVID recession

July 20
09:35 2021
Despite the economic uncertainty and a volatile market brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ahmed shares how he was able to rise above the challenge and carved out his own space in the industry.

Despite the significant challenges startups face during the onslaught of COVID-19 last year, Ahmed Qureshi has shared how he was able to bootstrap a data startup, Brand Overflow, and survived the global recession.

Ahmed said he raised a little over $250,000 in 2020 without selling any equity at a time when the pandemic was on its way to crush economies globally.

“We sold lifetime deals to our software product. We created the deal in a very isolated environment so that we can try to get those super early beta testers that can really support our vision,” he says. 

Ahmed says the startup was in a really saturated market and was up against giant companies already dominating the market. 

While the early Lifetime Deal launch was a moderate success, Ahmed said he was running low on cash at the time and needed to get more exposure to a bigger audience to fund the startup.

Ahmed turned to StackSocial, which helped his startup gain features and reviews on YouTube. Brand Overflow has since taken the spotlight in several respected publications.

“With all the press coverage, I was able to land my first enterprise customers that only required API access to the system and not the dashboard and with huge limits, such as 500k on-demand keyword rankings per day in 10 different countries at the same time, which is around 5million operations/day,” says Ahmed.

From only five customers, Ahmed was able to lock in one-year contracts valued at over $30,000.

After the StackSocial deal ended, Ahmed continued the lifetime deal with his own efforts to raise capital for real growth. He reinvested everything he had while working on more features for the platform and its backend scalability.

“At that time, I was a marketer, live support, sales, frontend, backend, devops, designer, content guy – the pressure was even more than before,” he recounts. 

With great PRs, reviews, and word of mouth, Ahmed’s marketing efforts finally gave him a significant return on his marketing strategies.

He then started his office in a co-working space and began hiring his first employees to allow him to focus on running the business and scale fast.

Brand Overflow now leads the charge in providing an all-in-one SEO software that offers 20 tools designed to grow traffic and help businesses expedite the process of optimizing and ranking their website.

Its keyword tool has been mentioned in an article on the HubSpot Blog. Brand Overflow is now seen as an Ahrefs alternative and is perceived to take the lead. 

With its global presence, Brand Overflow is also bent on beating SEMrush, an online visibility management SaaS platform. 

Despite the economic uncertainty and a volatile market brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ahmed rose above the challenge and carved out his own space in the industry.

Individuals can learn more about Brand Overflow and the services it offers by visiting its website. 

Media Contact
Company Name: Brand Overflow
Contact Person: Muhammad Osama Khan
Email: Send Email
Country: Pakistan
Website: https://www.brandoverflow.com/our-story

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