Podcast Blog #3: Owais Raza — Finding the resources that help you overcome fear and discover success, no matter your age (Fear is a Liar: Ep. 3)
Many of the entrepreneurs we meet on Fear is a Liar are driven by curiosity and passion to get started in their careers. But for Owais Raza, entrepreneurship was a necessity. From the age of 12, he was building a business in order to contribute to his family after his father — the family’s sole breadwinner — left.
While his family tried to hide their struggles, Owais felt the pressure and stood up to it, finding a way to contribute through social media marketing.
In this episode, we hear how he turned a harsh family situation into motivation to become an entrepreneur online in middle school, and podcast host in College.
Here are some takeaways from my interview with Owais:
Contributing to the family — at only 12 years old (2:40) Owais’ entrepreneurial spirit was uncovered not by interest or curiosity, but by need. His father abandoned his family when Owais was 12 years old. Coming from a “brown” household, divorce is uncommon for people to be open about. Prior to the divorce, his mom had been a stay at home mom, so when his father left — they had no income. With his sister away at college, it fell on Owais and his brother to help make ends meet, but neither could legally work as they were both under 16. The only place that didn’t discriminate by age where you could make money was the internet.
His brother took on the majority of the financial burden and found success in e-commerce. But Owais felt obligated to contribute. While his family tried to hide their struggles from Owais, he knew what was really going on and wanted to find a way to help.
“The most I can do is to make sure I’m doing something on the side as well to provide value to the family and at least take care of myself,” Owais said.
So what did he do? He turned to Google and looked up “How to Make Money”. Eventually his search led him to Instagram marketing and making money by creating meme pages. He never took his own skills seriously until businesses were approaching him, focusing instead on the urgency of helping the family.
By selling off the pages he grew and started selling shout-outs on the pages. He eventually grew his business to $2k per month. But it wasn’t all good. Word of mouth traveled and people started coming to him, mostly friends of his family, asking for advice. While that’s generally a good thing, he didn’t appreciate that they all wanted free advice, over and over again. At 16, he found himself spending more time helping people out than focusing on classes. He needed to find a way to charge for his advice and work with actual big companies — stepping up his business.
A teenage kid self-publishing a book in 308 Days (10:08) How did Owais approach free advice everyone asked for? He decided to write a book. Yes, as a teenager. He paused his social media marketing work for 308 days with a plan to self-publish a social media marketing book. He figured the book would give him credibility in the market, and would provide an outlet to make money when someone asked him for advice.
But where did he learn to self-publish a book people would find value in? Just like his original search for “How to Make Money”, he turned to google to see how other people had done it. He watched lots of people in the marketing world talk about lead generation and keeping an email list. Then when the book was ready, he followed suit.
The book looked at Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube with sections on how to create, grow, and monetize your accounts. While he knew the book was the best way to monetize his skills, it was challenging and created a fear of being able to accomplish what he had set out to do. But, he took on the mindset that if he could make it past the book, nothing could stop him.
Now, when businesses doubted his skills, the book provided credibility. And with that credibility, he turned it into a formal agency, Mysterious Media.
Shift from working to survive — to a passion (17:25) For years, Owais had operated Mysterious Media out of necessity to support himself and his family. Social media marketing was feeling redundant. Now, he wanted to spend time on a project he really loved, that he did because he enjoyed it.
When he was younger, Owais used to make Minecraft videos, but his classmates made fun of them, even though he quickly earned 5,000 subscribers. The videos got flagged and reported by classmates and eventually taken down.
At UT Austin, he wanted to put himself out there again with some kind of project similar to his Minecraft videos. He couldn’t sleep for weeks as he thought about launching a podcast. Thankfully, the Minecraft experience built his thick skin, and soon he launched his podcast, “Crushing It”.
Now when he takes on new ventures like his podcast, people are surprised at his confidence and the skill he has to launch these projects. But he simply tells them he taught himself with the resources on Google. He feels people are so reliant others are going to tell them how to do things. His brother always directed him to resources when Owais wanted to learn e-commerce, and it taught him at an early age to be self-sufficient in solving problems.
Now, he certainly still had doubts with the podcast. How do I create a system? How do I get people on board? How do I do it at zero cost? How do I ration time? The self-doubt and dread of judgment still lingered. But after a while, he learned “to stop giving a shit”. He describes himself as “60%” there — the percentage of the time he can say “Go eff these people, I’m going to do what I want”. While he wants to grow to 100 percent, he’s come a long way from an earlier part of his life where he described himself at 10 percent.
He’s replaced the fear of judgement with the fear of what if — what if he doesn’t go after what he wants. He fears looking back on his time at UT and thinking he could have gone harder. That regret would have been the ultimate disappointment, and it’s what motivates him today.
Outro (25:05) It’s not easy to start a business or pursue a project while going to college, But Owais is giving UT students a chance to do just that and tell their stories on his podcast. Next steps? He plans on taking the podcast national, creating a movement of students facing their fears and daring to be great — all, even before they ever get that college degree on paper.
Shout-outs: A quick shout out to Stefanie, Zane, and Simon who helped me produce the show. Thank you. To my daughter Savreen and our future Gyani’s, I hope you hear or read about this episode one day, and it provides some value on your journey. For the readers and listeners, if the show provided positive takeaways, please subscribe, leave an apple podcast review, and share with others in your network.
Thanks for checking out the FEAR is a LIAR podcast blog — Where we share how my guests embraced all the FEARs related to risk, self-doubt, failure, unknowns, what didn’t work, and how they dealt with it.
I’m out.
Ep #3: Fear is a Liar Podcast with Owais Raza & Ronnie Gyani
- 0:00 | Intro
- 2:40 | Contributing to the family — at only 12 years old
- 10:08 | Self-Publishing a Book in 308 Days
- 17:25 | Moving from working for survival to working for love
- 25:05 | Outro
Links & Resources
- Owais Raza LinkedIn
- Owais Podcast “Crushing IT”
- My Podcast Blog post on episode with Owais Raza
- My Website
