We have never been in the same room

2023: it was meant to be professional

There are about 13 time zones between Multan and New Hampshire. One of us 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 we adopted. It is what the distance did to us. We were running a company the way WorkBOS works years before WorkBOS existed.

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 us was certain the thing would hold at all. 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 us describe those years:

“Through disputes, still respectful. Every challenge was met with dignity. Even in disagreement, the foundation of respect never cracked.”

That is the part we are proudest of, and it is the part with no metric attached to it.

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 blossomed into a genuine friendship,

“founded on mutual trust, respect, and admiration”

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

Nine things that were already real

Before there was a product there were nine organisations, and most of them do not sell anything. icu.ngo, aftertheicu.org and posticu.org are digital guides for families sitting beside an intensive care bed, and support for the people who come out of one carrying Post Intensive Care Syndrome. 4help.org is a searchable database of more than 100,000 crisis hotlines and helplines. Someone types one word into it at two in the morning and gets a number that answers.

hashtagcodes.com and starstar.com make phone codes people can remember, sold to nonprofits. raineragency.com is the agency. rainerphi.org is the philanthropic side of it. And stompout.org is a global petition against mass tobacco production. All nine are live. Go and check them.

2025: the software cost more than the work

Nine organisations meant nine sets 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 our size. Support arriving in an inbox. Every one of them billed per seat, per month, per organisation, and not one of them knew the others existed.

So we became the integration layer. 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. Between the licences and the copying, the stack cost more than the work it was supposed to support. For the nonprofits it was worse than expensive. It was the reason the software simply never got bought.

So we stopped renting nine stacks and built one workspace. Projects, CRM, HR and payroll, real double-entry accounting with a general ledger, marketing and support, on one set of records, with an AI Chief of Staff that has to ask before it does anything. Aqsa, our CTO, builds it, and she is in Multan too. Her portfolio is at devaqsa.com.

It was an internal tool long before it was a product. That is the honest origin. We were the first users and we still are.

2026: 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.

Where we actually are

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. If a claim is not on one of those two pages, we are not making it.

What we are trying to do

Rob has forty years of law behind him, a place on the 1999 list of the 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Massachusetts from Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, a Presidential Lifetime Volunteer Service Award from 2024, more than 15,000 recorded volunteer hours and a patent. Tariq has fifteen years in operations, finance and strategy, four languages, four children and a faith he keeps quietly. His integrity is something he lives rather than talks about.

Neither of them measures this company in revenue. The number they care about is the number of lives made even fractionally better. It is a strange metric for business software. It is also the only one the two of them have ever fully agreed on.

So if WorkBOS saves a small charity the money it was spending on eight subscriptions, and that money goes back into the work, we have done the thing we set out to do. The people are on /team. The company and its paperwork are on /about. And one day, we would like to be in the same room.