Abdurrehman Rafeeq — Mani

I was twelve when I
wrote my first line.

I am seventeen now. In between I learned to build software, started selling on Etsy and eBay from Pakistan, and got tired enough of the tools I was paying for that I wrote my own. That is all Zyvavo is.

Scroll — it builds itself
01 — Twelve

Nobody set me a syllabus.

There was no computer science class and no bootcamp. There was a lot of reading things I did not understand yet, and breaking them until I did. I was twelve, and I had time.

02 — Thirteen

Then I started selling.

Etsy first, then eBay. Selling from Pakistan means the small frictions are not small: a listing photo that will not upload because the file is 8 MB and the line is slow, a payment method that half the internet does not accept.

03 — Fourteen

The tools were built
for somebody else.

Thirty dollars a month is a real amount of money here, and every tool wanted it for something I would open twice a week. The free tiers gave you three images and then asked for a card that would not go through anyway.

04 — Fifteen

So I wrote my own.

First a script that pulled product data off a page while I was looking at it. Then one that cut backgrounds so my photos would pass Etsy's size rules. None of it was meant to be a product. It was meant to save me an evening.

05 — Sixteen

The scripts got good
enough to be embarrassing.

Embarrassing to keep to myself, I mean. If a thing saves me four hours a week it will do the same for the next person selling out of a bedroom, and they are not going to write it themselves.

06 — Seventeen

Zyvavo.

Four things shipping, more being built, one balance across the ones that cost anything. Every piece of it written by one person who uses it on his own listings before anybody else sees it.

See what it turned into
The tools

Each one replaced something annoying.

Not a roadmap somebody drew on a whiteboard. Every one of these started as a job I was doing by hand.

01

Sellovo

Finding one product worth listing took an evening of switching between AliExpress, eBay sold listings and a spreadsheet. It does that part now, in the tab I am already in.

Open 02

Zyv-Studio

Etsy wants 2000 px on the short side. eBay shows the gallery square. My phone gives me neither, and the file is always too heavy to upload. Five tools, one image, no re-uploading between them.

Open 03

Zyv-Scan

Buying a used laptop meant trusting a stranger's description of the battery. This reads the wear, the disk's own SMART log and how hard it throttles under load, then explains all of it in plain Urdu or English.

Open 04

Zyv-Wallpapers

Linux never got a decent live wallpaper, and the ones that exist eat your battery behind a full-screen window. 579 KB, hardware-decoded, and it stops itself the moment you cannot see the desktop.

Open
Numbers, honestly

Including the unflattering ones.

Most about pages pick the metrics that look good. These get updated whether they improve or not.

4Things shipping
5Still being built
1People working on it
0Investors, ever
  • It is not a company. There is no support team. There is me, and an inbox I read. If something breaks at three in the morning it stays broken until I wake up.
  • It is not the fastest. The models run on hardware I can afford, so cutting out a background takes seconds rather than milliseconds. I would rather be slower and charge three credits than rent a GPU cluster and charge you for it.
  • It is not finished. Some tools in the menu are things I am building, not things you can use today. They are marked as such, because showing you the plan beats pretending the plan is already done.
Contact

It really does reach a person.

Bugs, refunds, feature requests, or telling me the site is broken on your phone — all the same inbox, and I answer it myself.

Write to me support@zyvavo.com · usually within a day