Started from zero.

The beginning.

When I joined SadaPay as its first designer, the company was raising on a vision — Pakistan's first neobank — but had nothing to show. No product. No team. No brand. I was the only design voice in the building, figuring out what good fintech could look like in a country that had never seen one.

The first job wasn't a screen. It was deciding what kind of product we were building. Pakistan had banks — bureaucratic, paper-first, designed for the teller, not the user. Everything we'd ship had to feel like the opposite of that.

200,000 people signed up to wait for a product that didn't exist yet.

Before we shipped a single feature, we ran a gamified waitlist. Golden tickets, referral mechanics, branded Founders Club cards — the black edition in particular became a cultural object people referenced by name. It grew to 200,000 signups pre-launch. Eventually past 700,000. No paid acquisition.

SBP granted us a trial license — 1,000 users to onboard, extended to 10,000. We invited friends and family, then early adopters. They got hoodies, goodies, merchandise, the black Founders Club card. The hype built before the doors opened.

We couldn't print cards fast enough.

Public rollout hit and demand crushed our fulfillment. Physical cards ran out within days — people lined up for a piece of plastic in a country where nobody had ever lined up for a debit card before.

Onboarding took under two minutes in the app — CNIC scan, biometric liveness check, PIN setup. We were also the first neobank in Pakistan to integrate a Biometric Verification System with NADRA (the national ID authority), so users could verify by scanning a fingerprint through the camera. Higher limits, a layer of trust the category hadn't had.

We crossed 1 million, then 2 million users — and kept going. App Store hit 4.8★. Play Store 4.7★. Pakistan's largest neobank before the market had figured out what we were building.