You think nobody is watching. Then a stranger taps your shoulder and says “I’ve been learning from you for months.”
Eid Day 2. Alone in a cafe until 12:30 AM. And it was one of the best days I’ve had in a while.
Let me explain.
All my friends who are also colleagues had gone to their hometowns. Islamabad was quiet. My family had their own plans. And I had a Sunday with no structure and no obligations.
I had two choices.
Call some professional friends who I knew were still in the city. Or do something else.
I didn’t call them. Not because I don’t like them. But because I knew exactly how that meetup would go. Technology. AI. Business. Clients. The same gupshup we have every day at work. I didn’t want that on Eid.
So instead, I picked up my laptop and went to a cafe alone.
I got there around 5 PM. I ordered something. Opened my laptop. And started working on one of my hobby projects.
Not a client project. Not something for Uptech. Just something I’m building because I love making things. Because somewhere in between running a company and managing people and making difficult decisions, I am still just a guy who loves to code and build.
I left that café at 12:30 AM.
Seven and a half hours. I barely noticed.
That’s what AI tools like Cursor have done to building. The joy is back. Years ago, you’d spend hours on a comma error, a missing bracket, something ridiculous. Now you’re just… building. Actually building. And it feels like it used to feel when I first fell in love with this stuff.
But here’s the part I wasn’t expecting.
During those seven hours, three different people came up to me at different times.
Not friends. Not people I knew. Complete strangers who recognised me.
Each one said something that felt the same: “I follow your posts. I’m learning a lot from you.”
I sat there for a second after each one left.
Because I’ll be honest with you. My engagement numbers aren’t huge. I don’t have tens of thousands of followers. Sometimes I post something and wonder if anyone’s even reading it.
But in one evening, three separate people, at three separate times, told me that something I wrote had mattered to them.
I felt more validated in those three moments than from any post metric I’ve ever seen.
And then I thought about entrepreneurship loneliness in a different way.
We talk about it like it’s just about work. About having no co-founder, no one who understands the pressure. But it’s also this: your social circle quietly shrinks. University friends move on. Professional friends are everywhere but you don’t want every conversation to be about work. And you end up in this in-between space where you’re not exactly lonely, but you’re also kind of alone.
What I realised last night is that building in public quietly builds a different kind of community. One you can’t always see. People who read you, follow you, learn from you and most of them never say a word.
Until they do. At 9 PM in a cafe on Eid.
To anyone building something and feeling like nobody is watching: they are. You just don’t always get to see it.
Keep building. Keep sharing. Even when the numbers don’t show it.
Umar H.
Originally posted on Facebook on 23 March 2026.
