Usama Liaqat

Background

Usama started building things for other people before he knew how to run a business. A landing page here, a CRM setup there, stitched across freelance marketplaces and late-night Slack threads.

For five years he worked with hundreds of clients across Upwork and Fiverr on CRMs, funnels, email sequences and automations. The work was good and the clients kept coming back, but the model did not scale.

Why he started Stepwise

Somewhere around client 200, the same pattern kept appearing. Fractional CMOs and small agencies had smart strategy and ambitious plans, and the work kept dying in the build phase.

Most of them did not need another freelancer. They needed a team that shows up on time, ships clean work and disappears behind their brand when it matters. So he stopped pitching himself as a freelancer and built that team.

We hire slowly. Everyone on the team has shipped enough to know what good looks like. Nobody on the team is ‘still figuring it out.’

Usama Liaqat on LinkedIn