People in Azimpur call Kazi Amjad Hossain the freelancer master, which he finds a little embarrassing. He is from Mymensingh, the son of a retired army officer, and the story of how he came to earn two lakh taka a month from clients abroad is mostly a story of things not working.
The failures first
In 2011 an older acquaintance in Mymensingh taught him the basics of digital marketing — enough to know the words, not enough to make a living. In 2013 he moved to Dhaka to learn properly and enrolled at several of the training centres around Farmgate that advertise freelancing careers on lamp-posts. “They didn’t teach much of anything,” he says. He came out with no skills, no money and the conviction that nowhere in Bangladesh could teach him. “I was like a cow that had been burned by its own shed. I had started to believe that even if I learned, it would be no use.”
The turn
He decided to stop paying for freelancing courses and fix the thing he could see was actually in his way: he could not hold a conversation in English. He enrolled in a language course in Azimpur, finished it, and in 2013 opened an account on Upwork. Then he waited. For months nothing came; he taught himself from YouTube and Google and built small practice projects. In mid-2013 a client gave him one small digital-marketing job. That, he says, is where his career begins. He worked the marketplace for two straight years, then in 2015 completed a web-development course and got a remote job as a developer with a German company, Berlin Bytes, working from Dhaka.
The agency
In 2017 he changed course again and founded An IT Academy, a digital-marketing and web-development agency that is also a school. He finished his own education alongside it — an MA in Islamic History from Nasirabad College, Mymensingh, in 2018. Today the agency employs 25 young freelancers and has trained more than 1,500 students, of whom over a thousand are working as freelancers or running digital businesses. Most paid nothing. “Many wanted to learn but had no money, so I taught them free,” he says. “Some paid a token amount. They have become freelancers and entrepreneurs and are supporting their families. That I can contribute to the country directly and indirectly — that is my pride.” He is building a website to teach online, for all of Bangladesh.
What the route teaches
Three things in his story recur in almost every honest account of Bangladeshi freelancing. The paid “freelancing course” is usually the first way a beginner loses money. English, not software, is the skill that unlocks the first job. And the first job takes months of unpaid waiting that most people cannot afford, which is why the ones who make it tend to be those with a family behind them, as Amjad had. The generous thing about his academy is that it removes the first obstacle and lends people the third.
