1999 → TODAY
Built eight. Kept the best one.
The full sequence is below, dates and all. I would rather you read the long version than the flattering one.
Outside the job title.
A few things that will not fit on a business card.
years.
Still asking why.
Next birthday: 7 January
Your timezone:
Another trip around the sun. Cake is welcome.
Yes, I have ADHD.
My curiosity takes the scenic route. Business, design, the universe.. there is usually another question waiting. ADHD is part of who I am, and I am comfortable saying so.
Yes, I noticed
it was 2px off.
I like things aligned. Everything. This little mess is bothering me too.
Pull up a chair.
What is the best thing you have eaten somewhere you did not plan to go?
Do you think we find order in chaos, or put it there ourselves?
Where would you drive if you had a day with nowhere you needed to be?
What is a question about the universe you keep coming back to?
What is a tiny family tradition you would hate to lose?
Which meal takes you straight back to your childhood?
What is something you used to be certain about and now question?
Who can make you laugh when you are determined to stay annoyed?
What would your closest friend say is the most predictable thing about you?
Which wrong turn turned out to be a very good idea?
What is something you notice that nobody else seems bothered by?
If we went on a road trip, who gets control of the music?
What is a completely ordinary moment you wish you could revisit?
What have you learned from a child that an adult could not have taught you?
Which city felt familiar before you knew your way around it?
What is a food opinion you are prepared to defend for far too long?
When did you last lose track of time in a conversation?
What is something you are happy to be a beginner at?
Which family story gets funnier every time someone tells it?
If you could watch one moment in the history of the universe, which would you choose?
What is the most ridiculous thing that has made you laugh in a serious situation?
What do you make time for even when you have no time?
Would you rather know how everything began or how everything ends?
What is a place you would take someone to explain where you come from?
What is something you love that you are absolutely terrible at?
Which smell brings back a whole place for you?
What is the kindest thing someone did for you without realising it mattered?
If your brain had browser tabs, how many would be open right now?
What is one thing you would like your family to remember about life with you?
Which everyday thing becomes strange if you think about it for too long?
What is the longest detour you have taken for good food?
When was the last time you said “I was wrong” and meant it?
What would thirteen-year-old you find funniest about your life now?
What is a question you wish people asked you more often?
Would you take a one-way trip into space if you knew you could never come home?
What is something you fixed that nobody noticed, but you could finally relax?
What is a small luxury you would keep even if you had to cut back on everything else?
Who taught you how to disagree without falling out?
What is a song that can change your mood before the first verse?
What is a place you remember more for the people than the scenery?
What is something you understand about your parents now that you did not understand then?
If everyone forgot what you did for work, what would you want them to know about you?
What harmless rule do you break whenever you get the chance?
When does silence with someone feel comfortable to you?
What is the most interesting thing a stranger has ever told you?
If you could keep one age for a year longer, which would it be?
What is something you changed your mind about after actually trying it?
How far into a good plan do you usually start improvising?
What is a skill you would learn just for the pleasure of doing it?
What should we have been talking about instead of the weather?
Take the scenic route.
Driving. Exploring. Finding somewhere I have not been. Street racing has been part of my story since I was 13.
Food is a good plan.
A place to explore, something good to eat, and time to enjoy both. That is a very good start.
How did we get to the universe?
Deep conversations, the universe, chaos. Start with a small question and see how far we go.
But I was curious, so I watched. I watched them chase colour across the sheets, watched what details they squinted at and why. And upstairs was the agency floor: a room full of Macintosh machines and people making graphics on them, which to a thirteen-year-old in 1999 looked like the future being manufactured in real time. I went back every summer.
By 2003 I was in the Cairo branch, officially fixing everyone's computers because the family knew I was the tech kid - and unofficially asking the designers questions until I was properly good at Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, and how print actually gets made. Nobody called any of it training. It was the best training I ever had.
The man was the chief financial officer of the Tropicana Hotels and Resorts Group - six hotels, four and five stars, and no website. He wanted an animated intro, a site for the group, a sub-site for every hotel, photos, rooms, and reservations arriving by email with replies going back. I sat there saying yes, yes, yes, assuming somebody qualified would be doing all this. On the way out my uncle said: I'll buy you the newest, fastest computer, and you will figure it out.
There was no Google yet. There was AltaVista, and Yahoo, and software bought on CDs in a shop with my uncle. The deadline was three months; I delivered in two - design, animation, logic, code, hosting, FTP, all of it self-taught in a hotel summer. That project is where I learned what this craft actually is: not design, not development, but every one of those disciplines aimed at a single problem until it gives.
Two blogs. "Nothing But Interesting" collected the strangest and most fascinating things happening in the world into one place, back when nowhere did that - within four months it had eighty to a hundred thousand readers a month. The second, "The West from a Middle Eastern Perspective", was for the western readers I kept attracting: a standing correction to what they assumed people like me thought.
I was also answering questions online constantly - technical ones, and, for reasons I still cannot fully defend, relationship questions. Not from expertise. I just said what I actually thought. The Associated Press noticed, asked me for one trial article, and signed me for a year of weekly columns in 2006.
What those years actually taught: writing consistently in public compounds, and an audience is an asset long before you know what it is for. Both blogs are gone. The lesson runs this site.
The company was me. I quoted like a firm, delivered alone in two months, and was paid in full - and then they invited me to Saudi Arabia, so I registered NHM Design to make the trip. That is how the company the case files on this site come from began: as paperwork for a plane ticket.
NHM grew to sixteen full-time people, plus nine part-timers and interns. The contracts got serious: Canon, Huawei, McVitie's, Samsonite and American Tourister through Al Quraishi, Michelin and Mercedes through Juffali, Mars brands as a vendor. The Canon street campaign and the Huawei activation you can read on this site both happened inside those years.
People assume a sale is an ending. Standing inside it, it felt closer to a receipt: proof the thing had been built well enough that somebody wanted it whole. Six years from a one-man quotation to a company worth buying.
I moved to Lebanon immediately after. Not to rest - to find out whether I could do it again somewhere the shortcuts didn't work.
The method turned out to be the product. Reborn, an advertising agency, brought me in to build their entire creative department from nothing - done in six months. Then TRACCS, the international PR firm, subcontracted me to found their digital department across every branch they had worldwide. That took about ten months, and the Four Seasons work in the case files on this site was delivered inside the department I had just built.
Building capability for other people, twice, at consultant distance - that is where I learned that a department is a product you can design, and that lesson never left.
My job was the part I had now done several times: make the machine work. Team, operations, process, clients. And once everything ran without me needing to be in the room, I did the thing I had learned to do on purpose: I left, in 2019.
Build it so you can exit it. It sounds cold until you realise it is the only honest way to build for a partner - the alternative is being the permanent bottleneck and calling it importance.
That merge was the quiet end of NHM as its own thing, ten years after it began as paperwork for a plane ticket. Nobody holds a funeral for a brand, but I noticed the day it happened.
I ran operations through 2020, and exited as the world was shutting down - which turned out to be the start of the strangest, most productive stretch of the whole story.
The first was Yallajeeb, an apparel brand. I found a supplier, kept the cuts identical and the colours varied, and put creative designs on them right as that wave was forming. Marketing was influencer seeding and the brand account leaving cheeky comments everywhere until people noticed. First three months: $163K in revenue.
The second was THOT Creative, an agency co-founded on the explicit understanding that my time in it was limited. We took Al-Dawaa Pharmacies - one of the biggest pharmacy chains in Saudi, the one that competes with Al-Nahdi - and ran campaign after campaign while their competitors waited out the pandemic. I exited in 2021, on schedule.
The lesson from the strangest year: when everybody stops at once, the price of moving drops to almost nothing.
Worksarabia was my answer to all three at once. A freelancer registered, paid, and had a website generated automatically - add your images and go. The platform carried courses on pricing, marketing and monetising the work. And the hard part, payments: one gateway under Worksarabia, with a sub-account and its own card for every freelancer, so a client anywhere in the world could pay and the money routed itself to a card the freelancer could draw on the same day.
I exited it in 2022 - and put everything the sale freed up into the company I had been circling for twenty years.
Typecta is all of it, built deliberately. Branding, web and outsourced marketing for businesses that need a team rather than a vendor - the model I kept proving inside other people's companies, finally under my own name. Still running it, still hands-on. The PBF and Ayam Al Lulu files on this site are Typecta engagements.
Eight companies in, this is the one I am not building to leave.
My son has ADHD. So do I - anyone who has read this timeline top to bottom has probably formed the same suspicion. Onesti's work helped him accommodate at school and manage his emotions, and watching that happen told me more about the organisation than any due diligence could.
So I became a partner in 2025, running marketing and technology direction. Most ventures I chose with a spreadsheet. This one I chose because I had already seen the product work, at home, on the person who matters most.
Influencer marketing runs on guesswork dressed as gut feel. fyuze.ai replaces it with depth: real data on who an influencer actually is and whether they perform, campaign planning built on that data, UGC creator discovery, and an AI layer over all of it that helps agencies find the right people and shape the right campaigns instead of buying reach and hoping.
Co-founder and CTO. Twenty-seven years after a printing press in Jeddah, I am still doing the same job: understanding the machine well enough to build the next one.
ON THE SALE, SINCE PEOPLE ASK
I SOLD THE OPERATION, NOT THE NAME.
Staff, contracts and the running business went to the buyer in 2015. The portfolio and the name stayed with me, which is why NHM Design reopened in Lebanon and later folded its assets into vzblt, the agency I co-founded in 2019. That is the whole story and it holds up against my CV.
DEGREES
None
Majored in Genetic Engineering and Business Administration, 4.85 / 5 with distinction.. then the money ran out and I never finished. The work never asked.
LANGUAGES
Five
Arabic and English, native. German, Italian and French, very basic.
COUNTRIES OPERATED IN
Six
Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Syria, Egypt.
AWARDS
3
2007, 2010 and 2012
ONE OLD OPINION, STILL HOLDING
Person to person, since 2007.
I wrote in 2007 that business would go person to person, not company to company. People buy from people. It was an unpopular thing to say to a room of brand managers at the time.
Nineteen years later the entire creator economy runs on it. The blog post is dated. The argument is not.
That is the history. What are you trying to build?
Thirty minutes. No deck.
“I recently had a coaching session with Nader, focused on my career as a chemistry teacher and scientific content creator. During the session, we discussed ways to grow my chemistry page and business, as well as strategies for effectively communicating scientific concepts to a broad audience.”