Alhamdu­lillāh
— a short story of —
Hussain Abdullah

My birth certificate says Dhaka, but the first ten years of my life belong to Chittagong. I was born on 10 December 1998, and I grew up in Cosmopolitan Residential Area, in a quiet corner of the port city. My father, Sikder Manjurul Alam, had built a comfortable life for us by the time I came along. He had once been a Sergeant in the Dhaka Police, and even today, in our ancestral village in Satkania, Chittagong, the big house he built still stands. I do not say any of this to boast about a wealth that was never mine. I only mention it because Allah had given my father the means to make those things, and Allah, in His own time, took those means away again.

We were a joint family in those days, and that is the part of my childhood I am most thankful for. My elder brother Hussein Myenuddin Munna, my younger brother Hussain Jabiullah Rajon, my younger sister Fatema Fariha Nayla — and our cousins Nazifa Haque Nawar and Ajmaul Haque Alif — all of us under one roof, in one long, noisy house. There was always someone to play with, someone to share food with, someone to make peace with before bedtime. By the mercy of Allah, I never knew loneliness in those years. Later, life would split that joint family into two separate households, the way life often does, but the warmth of that early home is something I still carry.

By the standard of report cards, I was a good student in primary school. I do not say that with any pride — Allah had simply made the lessons easy for me at that age, and I was foolish enough then to think they would always be easy.

In 2010, my father passed away. I was in Class 8.

That is the sentence that quietly divides my life into a before and an after. Everything I write from this point onward is the story of the after, and of how Allah carried a boy who had no idea how he was going to be carried.

After my father's death, our family moved to Dhaka. The city felt enormous and indifferent to a boy from Chittagong. I enrolled at National Bank Public School and College in Moghbazar and started Class 9 there, carrying a Chittagong accent and a grief I did not yet know how to name.

Our system divides each academic year into three exams — first term, mid-term, and final term. In the first term of Class 9, out of about thirteen subjects, I failed in nine. I still remember the shock of opening that result sheet. The boy who used to sit near the top of the class in Chittagong had landed at the bottom of a Dhaka school. I am not sure I ever fully understood what happened that year. Grief takes strange shapes when you are thirteen, and I had not yet learned how to make peace with what Allah had taken from us.

And yet, somehow, I climbed back. I do not say I climbed back on my own, because I did not. Allah sent me many good teachers, and they did most of the climbing for me without ever making me feel that I was being carried.

The first was Selim Sir, my mathematics teacher. For reasons I still cannot explain, he decided to treat me as if mathematics was already inside me and only needed coaxing out. That kind of belief, when you are a broken fourteen-year-old, is medicine. After he started teaching me, my marks in mathematics began to climb back into the high nineties, and they mostly stayed there. I do not think he ever knew how much he gave me. I hope, one day, Allah lets him know.

The second was Kamruzzaman Sir, who taught physics. The story of how I became his student in any real sense is one I still smile about. One day I was sitting on the back bench, the class was loud, and I genuinely could not hear his lecture over the shouting around me. So I quietly opened the physics book and started reading the very topic he was teaching. He walked over, slapped me, and demanded, "beshi pondit hoye geso?" — "Have you become too much of a scholar?" I said, "No, sir. Sorry, sir. It's my fault — I couldn't hear you because of the noise." He went back to the front, the class fell silent, and the lesson continued. Later, on his own, he apologised to me for slapping me. I have never quite understood why he chose to do that. But from that day on, he treated me with a tenderness I had not earned, and that tenderness is what made me serious about physics.

The third was Rafique Sir, our chemistry teacher, who was famous for making us write — endlessly, repetitively, until the equations and reactions lived in our hands as much as in our heads. By the time I sat for SSC, chemistry too had quietly become a friend, almost without my noticing.

I finished SSC (2013) with an overall 'A' grade, GPA 4.88. It was not the perfect GPA-5 I had once dreamed of as a child in Chittagong. But considering where I had been at the start of Class 9, even an 'A' felt like something Allah had given me out of His own kindness, not out of any deserving on my part.

I stayed at NBPSC for Class 11 and 12, but those years were difficult in a different way.

We were no longer a well-off family. My father had been comfortably placed in his time, but after he died, that comfort slipped through our fingers faster than I could understand. My mother, Fatema Mustari Nadia, took a job at Siddheshwari Abhidhan Coaching Centre on a salary of eight to ten thousand taka a month (back in 2012, if I'm not wrong). Eight to ten thousand taka, for a household. I do not know how she managed it. I only know that she did, and that whatever I have today began with what she carried in those years.

It was my mother who pushed me, gently, into the world of tuition. In 2013, she spoke to an English teacher named Kutub-e-Zahan, and through her I got my very first student — her own daughter — whom I taught at home. That was where my tutoring began: not as a job, just as a small thing I did at home to bring a little money in. From that one tuition, more came, the way work tends to come in Dhaka, by word of mouth. One student became three, three became seven, seven became more than I could keep track of.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention something important. I once went through a major incident — a scam.

After coming to Dhaka, during a difficult time when I was searching for work due to family needs, a company called "Ericsson Electronics" opened an office in Paltan. It turned out to be fake. They offered me a job and convinced me to pay 10,000 BDT, saying they would provide a laptop on the first day and needed a deposit to ensure I wouldn't run away with it. At that time, 10,000 BDT was a significant amount for me. They gave me a joining date one month later, but when I went back after a month, the company had completely disappeared. I couldn't seek justice — I didn't know how to, and I didn't have the strength or resources to pursue it. It was a very difficult experience.

In April 2016, when I finished HSC, I joined Abhidhan Coaching Centre as a teacher in a more formal way — the same coaching centre where my mother worked. That was the moment my tutoring started being bigger, properly, my profession. A year later, in April 2017, I added a second teaching role at Huda Academic & Model Test Care, also in Dhaka, where I taught Mathematics and Science. By the start of 2019, I had taken on a more dedicated role at Huda Academic as a Mathematics Teacher, teaching students from Class 6 to Class 10 in both English and Bangla versions. By Allah's mercy, my students seemed to like the way I explained things. In time, the tuition work pushed my income up to around fifty or sixty thousand taka a month. Our family started breathing a little. We even managed a small savings for the first time in years. Alhamdulillah for every single taka of it.

But every taka came at a cost, and the cost was my own studies. I had no time left for myself. The little time I did have, I lost to the ordinary distractions of being young in a city. My HSC preparation suffered every term. I knew it was suffering, and I did nothing about it, because survival was louder than ambition.

And yet — and this is the part I cannot explain except as a gift — I scored an 'A', GPA 4.75 in HSC too. Not because I had studied well, but because mathematics and science had been planted so deeply in my hands by the teachers Allah had sent me that no exam could really catch me out. I do not call that achievement. I call that mercy.

After HSC, I followed the example of one of my mentors at Abhidhan, Habib Sir, and enrolled in Honours in Physics (2017) at Habibullah Bahar College, under the National University of Bangladesh. I tried, in the beginning. I really did. In my very first year I came out with a first-class result, and for a brief while I was the boy in the class everyone followed for help. I do not want to make that sound like more than it was. It was first year, in one college, in one university. But it was something, and I am thankful Allah let me have at least that much before the path turned.

There is a small detail from those first-year days that I want to put on record, because it humbles me every time I remember it. Back in 2017, a friend told me, very seriously, that we should buy Bitcoin. I did not pay attention. The price was low. I was busy, distracted, focused on physics. I should have listened. I tell this story now and I laugh, but every time I tell it, there is a small voice inside me whispering, see, Hussain — you do not actually know what is good for you. Only Allah does.

The deeper truth of that period is this: even as I was passing physics, I was quietly losing my belief that physics would ever lift my family out of where we had landed. I needed something else. Something that paid in this world, not just in marks on a transcript.

And then I noticed the thing that had been beside me all along — the computer. I had always loved computers. I loved exploring software, trying new apps, breaking things and putting them back together. The computer had quietly become my closest companion. So I started leaning into it. I read more about it, played with it more, learned more from it than from any textbook. Physics began to drift away from me. I failed a few subjects in second year, scraped through into third year, and then failed everything in third year. And that is when I quit my Honours degree altogether.

On paper, that decision looks like failure, and I will not pretend otherwise. Inside my own life, I believe Allah was simply turning me toward a road I would have refused to walk if He had not closed the other one.

Oh, I also forgot to mention this. If I'm not mistaken, I tried to join the Bangladesh Air Force three or four times. I performed well in the IQ tests and passed them each time, but I didn't do well in the viva. I always had a strong desire to become a pilot. If I had the financial means, I would have pursued it privately. Unfortunately, it didn't work out with the Bangladesh Air Force either.

My mother, somehow, managed to put together enough money to buy me an Acer laptop. It cost forty thousand taka. She placed it in my hands and trusted me to make something of it. I cannot describe what that machine meant to me. It was not just a laptop. It was a trust — from her, and through her, from Allah.

On 6 December 2015, I created my account on Freelancer.com. That date is the real beginning of my freelance journey. For a long time I used to mistakenly remember it as November 2016, until I went back and checked. The truth is older and kinder than my memory. I was just turning seventeen, and I was opening a profile on a global marketplace from a small room in Dhaka, with no real idea what I was doing.

My profile is still there: freelancer.com/u/abdullahtofa. In the early days I had no clue where to start, so I did what every confused beginner in Bangladesh was doing in 2015 — I looked for data entry jobs. The internet was full of people promising that you could make a living typing data into spreadsheets, and that was the small door I stepped through first. Over time, I completed more than twenty jobs on Freelancer.com and was reviewed by seven clients. I scored 97% on the Level 1 exam for the Preferred Freelancer Program SLA, and 77% on the Level 1 US English exam. Small numbers on a small profile. But to me, at that time, they were proof that the door was real.

The early jobs were strange and wonderful. LinkedIn profile searching. Typing Bengali scripts into Word documents in Bengali. For one of those jobs I earned forty or fifty US dollars, which, when converted into taka and into the size of my world at that time, felt like a great deal of money. I had nothing, and Allah had given me something.

And then there were the reviews. Even now, years later, they make me smile. I want to put a few of them down exactly as they came in, with all their typos and exclamation marks intact, because they meant — and still mean — more to me than any certificate I have ever held in my hand:

"A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++"

"Hussain has done an excellent job with my project."

"very good job, i recommended thanks so much is very very professional, i give him a million stars a good person to"

Reading those words, my heart would lift. I would feel a fresh willingness to do more, to do better, to be worthy of the kindness of strangers. But the platform itself had a problem I could not solve from inside Bangladesh: a lot of the data entry projects on Freelancer.com were fake or scams or wild goose chases. Real, sustained work was scarce. I needed skills that nobody could fake their way past.

Around this time I found a coaching centre in Mirpur, Dhaka, called Independent IT. I enrolled, and that is where I first met SEO. To attend the classes, I had to take a bus from Mouchak to Mirpur three or four days a week — thirteen kilometres each way, twenty-six kilometres a day, through a city that does not move when you need it to. Dhaka traffic ate hours of my life on those routes, and the buses had stoppages every few minutes. It was not easy. I was tired all the time. But I am thankful for that tiredness now, because tiredness in the path of learning is a mercy compared to the alternatives.

Independent IT cracked something open for me. From SEO, I moved into expired domain research. From expired domain research into social media management. From social media management into the wider world of digital marketing. One skill led quietly to the next, the way one stepping stone leads to the next when you are crossing a river. Alhamdulillah, the work began to come.

I opened my first Fiverr account at fiverr.com/abdullahtofa. (That link no longer works, and you will understand why in a few paragraphs.) On Fiverr, over time, I completed more than two hundred jobs. By Allah's mercy, I did not receive a single bad review across all of them. I was rated four to five stars consistently.

In 2019, I created an Upwork account too — you can still find me at upwork.com/freelancers/abdullahtofa — and I delivered a long string of five-star projects there as well.

Beyond the platforms, a quieter world of email-based clients began to grow around me. Clients who had found my work somewhere, liked it, and contacted me directly, paying directly. That is how I started working with Proxy1Media.com, formally joining as a Virtual Assistant in December 2016 — a relationship that has now run for nearly a decade. At Proxy1Media I helped lead website development projects, worked alongside a team of profit-driven solutions specialists, supported market-driven analysis for search engine marketing, and helped build the proxy1media.com website itself together with the team. From those same kinds of direct relationships came TheElectricViking.com, WP-Meister.com, and many more. I do not list these to look impressive. I list them because every one of them was a door Allah opened that I had not asked Him to open.

I want to slow down here, because this part of my story matters to me, and I want it told properly. I am not telling it out of bitterness. I am telling it because the truth deserves to be on a page somewhere.

Sometime in 2023 — I cannot give the exact date because I have tried very hard to forget it — Fiverr blocked my account. Two hundred completed jobs. Not a single bad review. Years of work. Gone, in a single automated decision, for what they called accepting payment outside of Fiverr.

Let me explain what actually happened, because I have nothing to hide.

I had a client who needed a website built. He had already placed his order on Fiverr for the website work itself — that part was clean, on the platform, paid through Fiverr, exactly as the rules require. But to build a website, you also need a domain and hosting. My client did not know how to buy a domain or hosting. He also did not want to share his credit card details with me, which is completely normal and I would never have asked him to. So he paid 260 US dollars directly, outside of Fiverr, for one year of domain and hosting — because if that 260 dollars had been routed through Fiverr, both of us would have been charged Fiverr's roughly 20% fee on each side, and the client would have ended up paying close to 40% extra on a cost that was never even Fiverr's service to deliver.

There was no fraud. No backdoor deal. No attempt to cheat the platform. Just a freelancer trying to spare his client an unfair charge on an unrelated purchase. For that, Fiverr cancelled my entire history on their site.

I posted about it in the Fiverr community forum, and Fiverr — I want this on the record — deleted my post. That post is gone now. I leave it to the reader to decide what it means when a company removes a complaint instead of answering it.

I sent message after message to Fiverr support. I asked for a chance to explain. I showed them that people in the forum had been kind to me, defending me, asking Fiverr to give me one last chance. The door stayed shut. Here is the email I sent them, exactly as I sent it, because I want the words I used in that moment to stay on the record:

"I want to get back to fiverr. I did a mistake. But I didn't get a change to explain. I had posted in on the forum. Can I get a second chance? If you see my account, you will find I have completed a lot of orders without doing any violation of terms. And the issue is that I was not doing business outside. I had a running order on Fiverr. The client didn't know about domain and hosting. So I had to help him with buying the domain and hosting. Is there anyway you can help me? I just need my account back. I have repented for years till now."

I can say this calmly, with my hand on my heart: I do not believe I did anything wrong on Fiverr. I have asked for the account back many times. I have repented for years. The door has stayed shut. And I have come to accept that whatever Fiverr was to me, Allah had decided its time in my life was finished, and that is His right.

My Fiverr journey ended with thousands of dollars earned through the years, alhamdulillah, and I am thankful for every one of those dollars, because every one of them was rizq from Him. Fiverr could have helped me. Fiverr chose not to. I am writing this chapter so that, one day, when this story becomes a book, anyone reading it can understand what platforms can quietly do to the people who help build them.

Outside of Fiverr and Upwork, I also worked on PeoplePerHour. My profile is at pph.me/abdullahtofa, and Allah let me earn from there too. Alhamdulillah.

There is something I almost forgot to mention, and I want to mention it now precisely because it is humbling. There was a time when poverty pressed so hard on me that I genuinely wanted to become a Pathao rider. I thought, at least the bicycle will earn what I need. I never did become a rider — Allah turned the road in another direction — but later, when I was able to build small businesses of my own and sell products, I used Pathao to deliver those products to my customers. The same company I had once thought of riding for, I ended up using to grow what I was building. That is how Allah has worked in my life, again and again. He pushes you close to the edge, and then He turns the edge into a beginning. None of it is my doing.

The technical skills came the way most things have come to me — by sitting with them until they gave in. I learned SEO at Independent IT, but I learned WordPress development entirely on my own, by using it every single day, breaking things, googling errors, reading forum threads at midnight. Back then, it was hard. There was no ChatGPT. You could not type, "How do I fix a 404 error?" and get a polite paragraph in return. You had to read ten Stack Overflow threads, try four solutions, break the site again, and start over. I am thankful I learned it that way. Allah used those long nights to build a kind of patience in me that I lean on every day now.

And then there is video editing, which has its own beginning, and a much sweeter one.

I learned video editing because I wanted to impress my wife — although she was not yet my wife when I started. Her name is Salma Fariha Taifa, and the first videos I ever edited were slideshows of our photographs together, set to music. She would watch them and tell me how beautiful they were, and that gentle praise gave me more reason to keep editing than any client ever could. That was 2019. Without realising it, I was being taught a skill that, by Allah's mercy, would one day put my work in front of large audiences.

From those first slideshows, slowly, my editing improved. Today I have worked or am working with channels and clients including Mr. Untold Nightmares, The Electric Viking, AutoKult, BizStories, Klatschpressendomi, Proxy1Media, and many more YouTube creators. Alhamdulillah for every single one of them.

Among those, the relationship with The Electric Viking has been the most defining. In January 2021, I joined as Team Leader at The Electric Viking, working full-time and remotely from Dhaka for a Melbourne-based operation. Sam Evans visited us in Dhaka too. I now help lead a team, overseeing video editing and social media marketing. Under our work — and I want to stress, our work, not mine alone — the channel's social media engagement grew from a small base into a large, active community. The Electric Viking, formerly Electric Singularity, is a YouTube channel from Australia that brings EV news from Tesla, GM, Ford, Rivian, Toyota, BYD, Xpeng, Zeekr and the wider electric world. Being part of building that has been one of the great mercies of my professional life, and I am thankful Allah placed me in that team.

In December 2024, I also began working as a Freelance Video Editor with WP Meister, by Panosch Media GmbH, working remotely for an Austrian-based team. The project there is a German-language celebrity channel called Klatschpressendomi. I have been editing for that channel since its earliest days — back when it had only about a hundred subscribers — and Allah, through the work of many people, has now grown it into a much larger and more loyal audience. Some of the storytelling videos on that channel are ones I am quietly thankful to have helped craft.

Between these long-running roles, I have also worked as an SEO Specialist for clients in other countries. From July 2020 to December 2022, I worked part-time and remotely for DevStream, based in Greater London, England, where I managed social media posts, conducted SEO for clients' websites, resolved Google Search Console issues, set up Google Analytics and Tag Manager, improved website visibility through SEO techniques, and worked to enhance client websites' performance and user experience.

Around the same period, I served as Marketing Manager at Spartans Warrior Zone in Kilsyth, Victoria from February 2019 to July 2022, and as Marketing Specialist at Elite Homes and Renovations in Queensland from May 2020 to January 2022. I also handled day-to-day operations as Shop Manager at A1 Supplements in Melbourne from October 2019 to September 2021. From August 2020 to July 2021, I worked as an SEO Specialist at Peters Pure Animal Foods in Campbellfield, Victoria, where I managed their Google My Business profile, implemented local SEO strategies, helped set up a new website, optimised images with ALT tags, and worked on growing their online visibility and organic traffic. In parallel, from June 2020 to July 2021, I was a Marketing Specialist at Olympus Packaging in Ferntree Gully, Victoria. And for a shorter, intense run from June 2020 to December 2020, I served as Marketing Manager at Echo Bathroom Renovations in Croydon Park, New South Wales.

I list all of these together not to make myself sound impressive, but because each one of them represents a real person somewhere in the world who chose to trust a young man in Dhaka with their business. In a single calendar year — 2020 — Allah let me hold work for clients in England, in Victoria, in Queensland, and in New South Wales, all at once, from a single laptop in Bangladesh. Sometimes I still cannot quite believe it happened. It happened, and I had very little to do with it. He arranged it.

In July 2016, I started what is today Growthworx BD — but in its first life, it was not called Growthworx at all. It was called AnsDigi. I started it with two friends, Mohammad Shahriar Salman Khan and Sikander Morshed Chowdhury. Neither of them knew video editing. I taught them what little I knew at the time, and we sat in a single HOT room together and built something out of almost nothing, and we called it AnsDigi.

Over time, AnsDigi grew up and became Growthworx BD. Growthworx is built on a simple promise: we help businesses grow with flexible, results-driven marketing, web, and video solutions. We deliver custom websites, offer WordPress hosting and maintenance, create tailored designs, and provide SEO services. Our team also focuses on professional video editing for brand storytelling. None of that is something I built alone. The team built it, and Allah blessed the work.

Alongside Growthworx, I have also been a Content Creator on YouTube since January 2017, leaning on the teaching background that started in those Dhaka coaching centres. My channel lives at youtube.com/@hussainabdullahtofa, and I am thankful for everyone who has ever stopped by and watched something I made. Although my channel was initially education-based, I didn't continue with it. Now, I create videos on different topics part-time, and I enjoy it.

For about a year, from August 2019 to August 2020, I also took a project-based government job as a Computer Operator at E-Passport Bangladesh, working under Tiger IT Bangladesh's project. It was a stable, steady role inside a government office, and there was a part of me that found a strange comfort in the routine of it after so many years of running from one freelance project to the next. But the more I worked there, the more clearly I felt the truth: my real work was elsewhere. I didn't feel comfortable with the behavior of one of the Army officers there, so I left the job in August 2020. I did not look for another office job. I let it close, and I returned to freelancing fully. It was not an easy decision, and I made it knowing only that Allah had been providing for me through freelancing for years and that I should trust Him to keep doing so.

I am also a government-verified freelancer in Bangladesh since 2020 — a small certificate, but one I am thankful for, because in its own quiet way it means my country has acknowledged the work that Allah has let me do.

On 13 May 2022 — 12 Shawwal 1443 in the Islamic calendar — I married Salma Fariha Taifa. The girl whose appreciation of my first slideshow videos had quietly turned me into a video editor became my wife. I do not know how to write enough words about her without writing a separate book, so I will not try here. I will only say this: the life I had imagined for myself when I was a broken Class 9 student in Moghbazar did not include this kind of joy, and I receive every day of it as a gift from Allah that I did not earn. I remember going out to eat with friends and only having enough money in my pocket to pay for a single samosa. It made me feel so small at the time. My friend Syed Tahseen Ahmed always told me to be patient and that better days would come. He was right. Alhamdulillah, Allah has been kind. Without His mercy, I wouldn't want anything else in life.

On 16 November 2025, our son was born. We named him Hussain Muhammad. He is, at the time I am writing this, the centre of every prayer I make. Every time I lift my hands to Allah, his name finds its way into those words.

In November 2024, I went to Thailand. It was my first international trip, and standing in another country for the first time, I understood something I had only read about before — that the world is large, and that every life inside it is small, and that being small in a large world is a kind of peace if you let it be. I'm sharing this because it was an emotional moment for us. Even my wife had tears in her eyes seeing that we were traveling abroad. We never imagined this would be possible. Alhamdulillah, Allah made it happen. I have also travelled in many places inside Bangladesh, with my friends and with my family, and there is hardly a corner of this country I do not still want to revisit.

InshaAllah, I would like to travel more of the world with my family and my friends one day. I would like my son to grow up seeing more of it than I saw at his age. But I say this knowing that none of it is in my hands. If Allah opens those roads, I will walk them with thanks. If He does not, I will be at peace with that too.

This is not really an ending, because the story is not finished. I am only twenty-seven years old as I write this, and there is still so much I would like to do — for my mother Fatema Mustari Nadia, for my brothers, for my sisters, for my wife, and now, most of all, for my little son Hussain Muhammad, for my friends and team.

Whatever I have today is from Allah. He gave it. He can take it back at any moment, and that knowledge keeps me from holding anything in this world too tightly. The accounts, the clients, the team, the work, the family — all of it is on loan from Him. I am only a temporary trustee of any of it.

If you have read this far, I would like to ask you for something. Please pray for me. Pray that I lead a quiet, content life. Pray that I always have my hands raised to Allah for everything I need, and that He never makes me stretch my hands toward anyone else. The life I had with my father was beautiful in its own way, even if it carried the usual weight of family trouble. The life I had after my father was, for a long time, very hard. I do not want anyone else to face what I had to face in those years. Life is not a bed of roses. I have learned that with my own skin, my own hours, my own tired eyes — and even that learning was a mercy from Him.

If there is one sentence I would like to leave at the bottom of this page, it is this: a forty-thousand-taka Acer laptop placed in your hands by your mother can become a small door, and a small door, if Allah wills, can become a life. Alhamdulillah for everything Allah has given me. Alhamdulillah for everything He has withheld from me, because He knows what I do not. And alhamdulillah, in advance, for whatever is still to come. MashaAllah.