How 27-year-old Syed Balkhi found success creating top-notch resources for beginning web designers. The 21st century was still in its infancy, the internet was racing towards ubiquity, and a 12-year-old boy was sitting alone in his room. He had just moved to America from Pakistan with his parents, and he spoke very little English, which also meant he had very few friends. Young Syed Balkhi discovered, however, that computers didn't care what language he spoke or what country he had emigrated from. “I discovered that computers were my friends,” he says. So he gave them his time, energy and attention to learn how to code and build websites. That same year, he made his first dollar from a website he created. At 27, Balkhi considers this one of the most trying times of his life, but also the moment when the first bricks were laid on his path to success.
The founder of WPBeginner, the employee email database world's first and largest WordPress resource website, and co-founder of numerous associated companies, has been named the best entrepreneur under 30 by the United Nations. Its websites receive millions of page views each month, and its plugins and software are used on more than 5 million sites. And to think it all started with a lonely kid who just wanted to find a way to play video games at school. Balkhi started out by creating a web proxy, allowing him to bypass his school's firewall, and before he knew it, he was a high school student running his own freelance web development business. In the early 2000s, building websites wasn't as intuitive or user-friendly as it has since become, so Balkhi taught himself how to develop and sell websites affordably using custom PHP frameworks.
However, when he moved to the University of Florida in 2007, he decided he wanted to devote his attention to something other than creating and maintaining his clients' custom websites. Rather than relying on him for updates and maintenance, he wanted his customers to be able to manage their websites themselves. He offered each of them to find someone else to maintain their websites for them or have them move their sites to a five-year-old content management system that was rapidly growing. : WordPress. Fill gaps When Balkhi offered to convert his clients' websites, some refused and moved on, but many accepted his suggestion. Nevertheless, he found that even months later, his clients came back to him with questions.