Nizam Uddin

About Nizam Uddin

Long before Nizam Uddin became the CEO of one of Bangladesh's largest bootstrapped software companies, he was a schoolboy in a village in Pabna without electricity at home. Today he leads weDevs, the company behind Dokan Multivendor, the world's most widely used WordPress marketplace plugin, alongside co-founder Tareq Hasan.

His path from a rural classroom to running a company with customers in over a hundred countries is one of the more unusual founder stories to come out of Bangladesh's software industry.

A Village in Pabna

Nizam Uddin grew up in a village in Pabna district where his family didn't have electricity at home until 2003. Education mattered enough to his family that he earned a scholarship in class five to attend Pabna Zilla School, one of the more competitive schools in the district.

It was an ordinary rural upbringing, not the kind that usually produces software founders, which is part of what makes his later career notable.

The Cybercafé That Changed Everything

In 2001, while still in class seven, Nizam visited a cybercafé for the first time, paying 300 taka to explore the internet for a few hours. That visit turned out to matter more than he could have known: it's where he met Tareq Hasan, the person who would later become his co-founder and the CTO of weDevs.

Their friendship started over shared curiosity about computers, long before either of them thought about starting a company.

False Starts Before weDevs

Nizam's interest in entrepreneurship took shape around 2010, when he started looking for problems he could solve with technology. His first attempt was a campus news portal built with a friend, BM Sharif. A year later, he and Tareq tried again with an education platform offering physical training sessions, free video tutorials, online courses, and a freelancing marketplace all in one.

Neither venture worked out, and the education platform eventually had to be shut down. Both attempts, though, gave him a clearer sense of what he actually wanted to build.

Turning a Plugin Into a Company

In 2012, Nizam and Tareq rented a house in Rajshahi and started weDevs. Tareq had already built a WordPress plugin called WP User Frontend that had picked up a loyal following on WordPress.org.

When they released a premium version of it in early 2013, the company started generating real revenue: somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 a month, according to Nizam's own account of the period. That was the moment weDevs stopped being a side project and became a business the two of them could commit to full-time.

Where weDevs Stands Today

Under Nizam's leadership as CEO, weDevs has grown into a team of more than 50 people running nine revenue-generating products and two services. Its flagship product, Dokan Multivendor, is used to power more than 50,000 online marketplaces around the world, making it the most widely adopted multivendor plugin in the WordPress ecosystem.

The company has stayed bootstrapped throughout, funding its own growth rather than raising outside capital.

What Sets Him Apart

Nizam speaks often about using structured growth frameworks, including the AARRR model (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue), to keep weDevs' growth consistent rather than chasing short-term spikes.

He's also known for talking openly about the early failures that came before weDevs succeeded, a habit that has made him a recognizable voice for other Bangladeshi founders trying to figure out whether their own false starts mean anything. His story is less about a single big idea and more about sticking with the work long enough for the right one to pay off.