The Man Who Ships While You Sleep
The alarm doesn't go off at 11pm. It's when the house goes quiet. Kids down, partner resting, the upstate New York dark sitting heavy outside the window. That's when Mubashar Iqbal - known everywhere online simply as Mubs - opens the laptop and starts building the next thing.
He has been doing this since before most of today's tech founders were in high school. His first tracked project, Game Navigator, shipped in 2000. Not as a prototype. As a product. That was twenty-six years ago. He has not really stopped since.
The total is now past 126. That number includes everything from a viral job-automation predictor that hit 14 million page views to a sourdough bread timing calculator. What connects them isn't theme or industry or even ambition in the traditional sense. It's the rhythm: see a problem, build a solution, ship it before you talk yourself out of it.
Just because you build something small and quick, doesn't mean it won't have a big impact.- Mubashar Iqbal
From Rawalpindi to a Racket at 2am
Mubs was born in Pakistan, raised in London after his family moved there, and eventually landed in the United States. He studied at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK before crossing the Atlantic to work in the American startup world. He's worked with agencies in San Francisco and New York, served as CTO of MadGlory Interactive, consulted across industries, and co-founded things that got traction and things that didn't.
None of that really explains him. What explains him is a self-reported sleep schedule that has run at four to five hours since high school - not due to anxiety or stress but because the waking hours are more interesting than the sleeping ones. This is not a hustle-culture affectation. It's just how the operating system runs.
He currently lives in the Saratoga Springs / Clifton Park area of upstate New York, roughly two hours north of the city, in the kind of place where the quiet actually sticks around. Good conditions for building.
The 2016 Crown and What It Actually Meant
Product Hunt's Maker of the Year award in 2016 was the moment the internet pointed a spotlight at what Mubs had been doing in the dark for years. He had been runner-up in 2015. He won in 2016. He was runner-up again in 2017 - that year Pieter Levels took it. The three-year podium finish told a story: this was not a fluke moment, it was a sustained pace.
Product Hunt ran on makers building in public, shipping projects and sharing the journey. Mubs was a natural there - someone who documented everything, connected with others, and kept a public record through tools like I Worked On, a project tracker he built himself because he wanted something to show for the years.
- 2015 - Runner-up, Golden Kitty Maker of the Year
- 2016 - Winner, Golden Kitty Maker of the Year
- 2017 - Runner-up (Pieter Levels won that year)
- Three consecutive years on the podium - no other maker matched it
- Used Product Hunt as a launch platform for nearly every major project
Will Robots Take My Job? (The One That Got Away - Into Millions of Browsers)
Coverage came from Fortune, Fox News, Mashable, LifeHacker, The Next Web, Vice, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, and Business Insider. Mubs did not have a PR firm. He had a Product Hunt page and a Twitter account.
When the traffic surge pushed the site past Algolia's free tier limits, Mubs had a choice: pay roughly $300 to upgrade, or tweet about the problem. He tweeted. Algolia's team saw it and extended his usage cap for free. A small moment that captures something larger about how Mubs operates: in public, transparently, with a community that pays attention.
He eventually sold Will Robots Take My Job? - buyer and price undisclosed. The important detail: he built it at night, in a few weeks, for fun and a bit of intellectual curiosity about automation data, and it became the most-read thing he ever made.
The Stack Behind 126 Products
Mubs has a stack he returns to. Laravel for backend, hosted on DigitalOcean with Laravel Forge. Vue.js or React on the frontend when needed, Bootstrap when not. He's comfortable in Ruby on Rails and Node.js. He calls himself technology-agnostic - the point is the problem, not the tool.
The real stack is behavioral. He targets two-week build sprints. He gets 10-12 real users to try something before announcing it. He invests in shareability: custom open graph images, clean URLs, one-sentence value propositions. He launches on Product Hunt for credibility, then pitches press from that platform of proof. He does not wait for permission or perfection.
- Two-week sprints from idea to launch
- 10-12 users for feedback before announcing
- Custom OG images and viral loops built in from day one
- Product Hunt first, press second
- "Scratch your own itch" - every product solves a personal pain
- About half of all projects are built in partnership with others met online
- Good enough beats perfect, every time
Bluesky and the Cooperative Turn
In November 2024, as tens of thousands of users migrated from Twitter/X to Bluesky, Mubs did what Mubs does: he saw the moment, built a directory, and launched it. The Bluesky Directory catalogued tools and starter packs for the new platform and hit one million visits during the migration wave. Flipboard's Surf browser partnered with it shortly after.
Around the same time, a different kind of project was forming. Mubs joined the Limeleaf Worker Collective, a member-owned, democratically managed software cooperative based in Saratoga Springs. On April 22, 2025, he was admitted as an Owner-Member - the candidacy period unanimously waived by existing members. No long vetting process. They wanted him in quickly.
The cooperative model is interesting for someone whose entire career has been solo or semi-solo building. It represents a shift toward something more durable, more community-anchored, and more structurally aligned with how Mubs has always preferred to work anyway: with people he respects, on things that matter, without someone else's board dictating the terms.
Episode List and the Favorite Nobody Talks About
When asked to name his favorite project, Mubs doesn't pick the one with 14 million views. He names Episode List, built in 2001. An online TV guide - specifically designed to help him track reruns and figure out what episodes he had and hadn't seen. A personal problem, a personal solution, built at a time when the internet was young enough that you could still find a gap nobody had filled.
That answer tells you more about Mubs than the viral numbers do. He's not building for the hit. He's building because something is missing and he can see the shape of the thing that should fill it. The hits happen when that thing turns out to be missing for millions of other people too.
Side Project MVP and the Teaching Turn
In mid-2024, Mubs launched the Side Project MVP newsletter - a practical resource for people trying to build products while holding down a job. Not motivational content. Not theory. Tactical notes from someone who has shipped 126 products with a family, a full-time workload, and four hours of sleep.
It's the natural endpoint of decades of building in public: at some point, the process itself becomes the product worth sharing. The lessons about what makes a side project survive its first week, how to find collaborators in Slack communities, when to sell, when to keep building - these are worth more than the average playbook because they come from someone who actually ran the experiment 126 times.