We have never been in the same room

2023

It was meant to be professional

There are about 10 hours between Multan and New Hampshire. One of them is asleep for most of the other one’s working day. Nothing survives that on goodwill and a quick call. Every decision had to be written down. Every approval had to be recorded. Every handover had to make sense to a person reading it eight hours later, alone, with nobody awake to ask.

That was not a philosophy they adopted. It is what the distance did to them. They were running companies the way WorkBOS works years before WorkBOS existed.

The hard part

The part that usually gets left off a website

It was not smooth. There were phases of silence. There were disagreements, some of them long, and stretches where neither of them was certain the thing would hold. Two men from different countries, different faiths and different first languages, negotiating over text, with the clock against them. Every pause was followed by a return. Someone always came back. Here is how the two of them describe those years:

2024

He put it in writing, in public

In 2024 Rob wrote a professional recommendation for Tariq. Writing one is ordinary. What it said was not. It described Tariq not as a colleague but as a cherished friend, and it named the distance instead of pretending it away: despite the geographical and cultural differences between them, the working relationship had become a genuine friendship,

“founded on mutual trust, respect, and admiration”

He wrote that about a man he has never stood next to.

The problem

Ten apps that do not talk to each other

Every organisation meant another set of the same overhead. Projects in one tool. Contacts and outreach in a second. The books in a third. HR in a spreadsheet, because nothing affordable did HR at their size. Support arriving in an inbox. Every one billed per seat, per month, per organisation, and not one of them knew the others existed.

So they became the glue. A donor was a contact in the CRM, then a line in the accounts, then a name in a spreadsheet, typed in by hand three times. For the nonprofits it was worse than expensive: it was the reason the software never got bought at all.

So in June 2026 Tariq stopped renting stacks and started building one workspace: projects, CRM, HR and payroll, real double-entry accounting with a general ledger, marketing, phone and support, on one set of records, with an AI Chief of Staff that has to ask before it does anything. They built it for themselves first, and they are still its first users.

Proof we can show you

We run our own companies on it

Before there was a product there were the organisations, and most of them do not sell anything. ICU Guide and After the ICU are guides for families sitting beside an intensive care bed, and PostICU (posticu.org) stands up for the people who come out of one carrying Post Intensive Care Syndrome. 4help.org is a directory of more than 100,000 crisis hotlines: someone types one word into it at two in the morning and gets a number that answers.

Hashtag Dialing Codes (hashtagcodes.com) makes short #codes people dial from any mobile, PoundcodesUSA builds marketing on them and DirectDial provides business numbers. Rainer Agency (raineragency.com) is the agency. Rainer.NGO (rainer.ngo) has been the home of their volunteer projects since 2006, Rainer Philanthropies is the philanthropic side, StompOut Tobacco is a petition against mass tobacco production, and Shahzad & Rainer LLC(shahzadandrainer.com) is the company that builds WorkBOS. Every one of them runs on it.

The people

Three people, two countries

Aqsa Mumtaz, our CTO, builds the product, and she is in Multan too. Her portfolio is at devaqsa.com. Everyone who builds it is named, with links you can check, on /team.

• 
  Muhammad Tariq ShahzadFounder
• 
  Rob RainerCo-Founder
• 
  Aqsa MumtazChief Technology Officer

Where we are

Why five seats are free

Because the organisations that needed this most were the ones that could not pay for it. That is not generosity dressed up as strategy. It is the original problem written into the price list. A five-person charity gets the whole workspace at no cost. Paid plans add seats, modules and resale rights, and those are what fund the free ones.

WorkBOS is early, and you should hear that from us rather than work it out later. The contracting entity is Shahzad & Rainer LLC. We hold no SOC 2 report and no ISO 27001 certification today. /compliance sets out what is and is not in place, and /security lists the controls that really exist.

Neither founder measures this company in revenue. The number they care about is the number of lives made even fractionally better. So if WorkBOS saves a small charity the money it was spending on eight subscriptions, and that money goes back into the work, it has done what it was built for. The company and its paperwork are on /about.

And one day, they would like to be in the same room.