Person · Founder · Operator
Muhammad Rassam
He wrote the ugly internals of trading systems. Now he writes the playbook for selling without raising a dollar.
Mo Rassam, mid-stride - somewhere between code and copy.
He wrote the ugly internals of trading systems. Now he writes the playbook for selling without raising a dollar.
In July 2024 he posted four words that quietly redrew his career: "I'm parting ways with Antematter." Three years of blockchain agency work, account abstraction, and real-time trading systems - and he walked toward marketing instead of away from it.
Today Muhammad Rassam runs the kind of portfolio that doesn't fit on a business card. He is co-founder of Ertiqah, the studio behind the "Efficient Entrepreneur" newsletter. He is Chief Marketing Officer at LiGo, a tool that drafts LinkedIn posts in your own voice. And he co-founded ColdSend.pro, a cold-email platform stitched together on top of Azure Communication Services. One operator, three products, all pointed at the same idea: that a small team armed with AI can do what used to take a department.
That belief isn't a slogan he prints on a deck. Colleagues describe him as one of the rare people who is genuinely AI-first - the kind who says "Claude" the way other founders say "let me check with my team." The newsletter he helps write is, in effect, a public lab notebook for building an AI-first business from nothing.
Rewind to where the engineering started. Rassam earned a BS in Computer Science from the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences - FAST-NUCES, the school that mints a large share of Pakistan's working engineers. His early posts read like a person who actually shipped: he once described building real-time high-frequency trading systems as "pretty ugly," because the honest version of robustness rarely looks elegant under the hood.
At Antematter, the agency he co-founded around 2021, the work skewed deep-tech: ERC-4337 account abstraction, blockchain infrastructure, AI agents. The company grew past 60 people across more than 30 projects. He learned to sell complicated things to skeptical buyers - which, it turns out, is most of what marketing is.
Then he changed lanes. Not because the engineering bored him, but because he kept noticing the same gap: great products dying of silence. The pivot wasn't a retreat from technical work. It was a bet that distribution is the harder, less-crowded problem.
The studio behind "The Efficient Entrepreneur" newsletter. The pitch: build an AI-first business from scratch and show your work. It reached a 5-figure ARR without raising outside capital - Rassam joined as co-founder about two months after launch.
An AI tool that learns your writing style and drafts LinkedIn content in your own voice - "Let it Go." Thousands of founders and agency owners use it to reclaim the 10-20 hours a week that posting usually eats.
Cold email, re-plumbed. Instead of leaning on Gmail or Outlook, ColdSend builds a replies-and-sequencing layer on top of Azure Communication Services - infrastructure aimed at agencies who live and die by deliverability.
A rough sketch of the pivot - from writing systems to writing the words that sell them. Illustrative, not audited.
↑ ANTEMATTER ERA · ↓ ERTIQAH ERA
In one year, he read roughly a thousand resumes. Most people would file that under tedium. Rassam turned it into material - blunt LinkedIn writing about what actually separates a hire from a stack of identical bullet points. The lesson he kept returning to: skills you can see beat credentials you have to take on faith. It's the same instinct that later made him bullish on "vibe coding" - showing the work over describing it.
He is allergic to the usual creator math. "I do not want to go viral," he wrote - which, coming from a marketer, sounds like a chef refusing salt. The logic holds up: virality is a lottery ticket; a 2,500-person list that trusts you is a business. He optimizes for the second thing.
There's a throughline from the trading desk to the newsletter. Both reward people who can be honest about how messy real systems are. He called HFT internals "pretty ugly" not as a complaint but as a fact - robustness is unglamorous, and pretending otherwise gets you burned. He writes about startups the same way: fewer hero arcs, more first-365-days reality.
And he's an unusual kind of AI native. Not the person who tried ChatGPT once and tweeted about it - the person who rebuilt his daily workflow around models until "ask Claude" became reflex. That's the quiet thesis behind Ertiqah: a tiny team, heavy automation, no funding round, real revenue.