I am from Abbottabad, Pakistan. It is a small city in the hills, and it is home. Everything I have built — Buzz Capitol, Digi Skill Pro Academy, findservicenest.com, more than fifteen YouTube channels, six books — started there. People sometimes ask me whether starting from a small town held me back. The honest answer is: it decided some things, and it did not decide others. Knowing the difference matters more than the town itself.
Your hometown decides your starting point. It decides what is around you when you are young: the schools, the people you meet, the examples of what a working life can look like. In a small city, you see fewer big companies and fewer obvious paths into media or technology. That is real, and I will not pretend it is not. When I started, there was no local roadmap for what I wanted to do. I had to find the road myself, mostly online.
But your hometown does not decide your reach. The internet changed that equation completely, and it changed it for everyone at once. A student in Abbottabad can take the same free class as a student anywhere else. A reader in another country does not know or care where an article was written. A client hiring a service does not ask for your address before asking whether you can do the job. The work travels; the writer stays put.
That is the first thing my hometown taught me: place is a starting point, not a limit. It taught me to be resourceful, because when the thing you need is not nearby, you learn to find it online, to teach yourself, to ask strangers for help and to help strangers in return. Some of the most useful skills I have came from that habit — looking for answers instead of waiting for them to arrive.
The second thing it taught me is patience. In a small city, things move at their own pace. People know each other. Reputation travels by word of mouth, and it travels slowly — but it also lasts. That shaped how I think about building anything. I did not chase a quick splash. I built steadily, in my own name, one article and one video and one class at a time, because that is how trust works where I come from: you show up, you do the work, and over time people believe you.
There is a part of this story I want to be careful about. I am not saying that where you are from does not matter at all. It matters. It shapes your accent, your manners, your sense of what is possible, and the problems you understand first-hand. I understand what it means to start with limited resources, because I lived it. That understanding is part of why I made Digi Skill Pro Academy's classes completely free. In 2025, more than ten thousand students joined, and more than five thousand of them reported that they started earning. I do not claim those numbers as a triumph of mine; I mention them because they are the reason the academy exists — to give people starting from places like mine a way in.
Starting from Abbottabad also taught me something about independence. When you are far from the centres where decisions get made, you learn to make your own decisions. Buzz Capitol is an independent news and media platform because I wanted it to be free to say what it thinks. That independence was not a strategy I read in a book. It was a habit I learned from building things on my own terms, in a place where nobody was going to build them for me.
I still live and work from here, and I do not see that as a compromise. The world comes to my work through a screen, and my work goes out to the world the same way. My channels reach more than ten million followers across platforms. My books reach readers I will never meet. None of that required me to leave. It required me to stay, and to build something worth finding.
If you are starting from a small town, here is what I would say. Do not waste energy resenting your starting point. Use it. The constraints of a small place teach you to be self-reliant, and self-reliance is the most portable skill there is. Start with what you can do today, with the connection you have. Publish your work under your own name. Let the internet do what it is good at: carrying good work further than its author's address.
Your hometown decides where you begin. It does not decide how far your work can travel. That part is yours.
Sami Ullah is the Founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Buzz Capitol, Chairman of Digi Skill Pro Academy, and author of six books. He lives and works in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
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