My name is Md Shafiul Alam Siddiqee Shrestha. Most people call me Siddiqee Shrestha. I am 19, I live in Dhaka, and I build software and companies.
The power cut
My first website went live during a power cut. I was thirteen, sitting in the dark in Dhaka, hotspotting from a phone at five per cent battery, trying to work out why a contact form would not send. It was my first paying client. COVID-19 had just taken most of my family’s business income, and the sum involved was small enough to be embarrassing and large enough to matter. When the form finally sent, the client wrote back: it’s perfect. The payment landed that week.
That is the entirety of what I understood about business at thirteen, and I have not had to revise it much since. Business is the act of creating value for someone who needs it. Everything after that has been a question of scale.
I had learned to build from YouTube tutorials on my brother’s laptop during quarantine. When my ICT teacher asked why, I told him I wanted to see happiness in my parents’ faces and be able to contribute something. My older brother, a far better student than I will ever be, turned down a scholarship to Purdue to stay in Bangladesh while the family found its footing. I have been financially independent since I was about fifteen.
What I build
Two products have most of my attention. VivaBoard is an AI interview ecosystem for Bangladesh: a bilingual mock interview where an AI examiner speaks its questions aloud, listens to the answer, generates the follow-up that the answer actually invited, and returns a scored report with the full transcript. The hard part was never the reasoning. It was Bangla speech - an examiner that mishears you is worse than no examiner, because it teaches you the wrong lesson.
Kemon (কেমন) is a local discovery and review platform built around a single rule: you cannot leave a review without uploading the receipt. Proofs go into a moderation queue with image-hash checks against every document already in the system, so a bill that has been screenshotted and passed between accounts is caught before a human looks at it. Businesses can respond to a review, and can report it for moderation, but can never delete it. This makes reviewing meaningfully harder, which is the point: in Bangladesh nobody trusts online ratings, and they are right not to.
Before those, I built the web infrastructure for MunAlert, a missing-children alert platform run in partnership with CID Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Police, over a four-year collaboration with Sadat Rahman. Four children have been located through it. That number is the whole scoreboard, and it is the only figure I quote for that project.
I also run Let’sGo, the digital agency I founded in March 2022 at fourteen. Six to seven people, UK and international clients, close to a hundred websites between the agency and the freelance work before it.
How the projects choose themselves
I started building to help my family. At some point the same skill turned outward and the pattern has held since. University of Dhaka students standing at stops with no way to know whether the bus had already gone became LalBus, which around ten thousand people now open every day. Friends who were quietly struggling with anxiety, and who could not ask for help without the asking itself becoming a disclosure, became Janao. Wanting kindness to leave something behind became Seed for Deed, which plants a tree for every good deed someone reports, and which now has corporate sponsorship funding its first ten thousand trees.
I have also closed things. Dumpy, a doorstep e-waste and recycling startup I co-founded, collected six kilograms of plastic bottles and four of cardboard through debate events and then stopped. It is on the work index with the others, labelled Closed, because a record that only contains the things that worked is not a record.
The instinct underneath all of it is not complicated. If a problem is hurting people and I have the skill to respond, I think I have a responsibility to try.
Why I left science
I finished school in the science stream with a perfect GPA of 5.00, and then chose business studies for college. People read that as a retreat. It was the opposite.
By sixteen I had been running client work for three years and had watched good products fail and mediocre ones win, and I could not explain why. Science had given me a rigorous toolkit for questions about how the physical world behaves. The questions I had were about why one business model succeeds where a better-built competitor does not, and how an idea becomes something that scales. Those need a different toolkit, and I would rather be properly trained in the thing I actually intend to do than decorated in the thing I already knew I could pass.
Teaching, and the servers
I founded the IT Club of the Laboratorians at Government Laboratory High School and ran workshops in UI/UX design, ethical AI and digital marketing - a curriculum taught by students, to students, because nobody else was going to build one. I was also President of the Debating Club, established in 1993 and one of the more serious ones in the country, General Secretary of the Cultural Club, and Vice President for administration of the Quiz Club.
Around four hundred junior students have come through mentoring with me, in debating, development and freelancing. The part I care about is smaller than that number suggests. Teaching someone to build a portfolio site is not much use if they cannot afford to host it, so I host theirs on my own servers. That is the difference between a workshop and someone actually earning money, and it costs me very little. Several of them are now taking client work of their own.
What I am working toward
A company that starts in Bangladesh and reaches globally. Not a Bangladeshi company that eventually moves, and not a global company with an office here - one built for this market first, on the assumption that solving a hard problem properly for a hundred and seventy million people produces something worth exporting. VivaBoard and Kemon are both being built on that assumption. We will find out.