By Sherin Shibu|Edited by Frances Dodds
Key Takeaways
- Nuseir Yassin is the founder and CEO of Nas.com, an AI-powered platform that helps solo entrepreneurs launch online businesses from a single product photo.
- Yassin left his software engineering job to travel and create Nas Daily, a one‑minute video series he produced daily for 1,000 days.
- With Nas.com, he is productizing his storytelling and growth experience into tools that automate storefront creation, marketing content and ads for small business owners.
He grew his social media accounts to over 70 million followers across a decade. Now, content creator Nuseir Yassin is crafting a platform to address a common desire he encountered while interacting with thousands of individuals for his social channels — the desire to be their own boss and start their own business.
Yassin is the founder and CEO of Nas.com, an AI-powered startup designed to help solo entrepreneurs start and grow their online businesses with a single product photo. Yassin studied economics and computer science at Harvard University, graduating in 2014. He started his career as a software engineer at Venmo.
In 2016, Yassin left his job to travel the world and document his experiences, launching Nas Daily, a one-minute video series that he sustained for 1,000 consecutive days and grew to a global media brand.
That venture into content creation, spanning 19 languages and multiple social networks, gave Yassin deep insight into storytelling, audience growth and digital marketing. With Nas.com, he is turning those lessons into software. The platform, which he founded in 2022, automatically builds storefronts, generates high‑performing marketing content and runs ads for creators and small business owners, lowering the technical and marketing barriers to solo entrepreneurship.
The platform has already minted four millionaires and earned funding from the likes of Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who made early investments in OpenAI, Stripe and DoorDash.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Pitching Nas.com
For someone who’s never heard of Nas.com, what’s the most concrete way you explain what it does for a solo seller in their first week?
In the first seven minutes, you take a picture of whatever you want to sell, and we handle everything else to help you find a customer to buy that thing. With that one picture, AI creates your store, makes your marketing, and helps you find the customer.
It really comes down to three main things: you can sell any product you want, market the product, and get paid. You upload a single picture of whatever you want to sell—yourself, your products, your candles—and AI automatically creates your product page, sets pricing and options, writes the content, and can even generate a video. With one click, you can market that product on Instagram and Facebook directly through Nas.com. We’ve simplified what used to be three difficult skills—coding a website, creating content and doing performance marketing—into one simple interface to create more entrepreneurs in the world.
His content background
You have a decade of experience creating content. How successful were you?
Across the internet, Nas Daily reached about 70 million followers and more than 20 billion views. We have around 5 million followers on TikTok and 55 million on Instagram on the Nas Daily channel. I built Nas Daily across virtually every social media channel and many languages: Nas Daily Arabic, Nas Daily Indonesia, Nas Daily Spanish, and more — 19 languages and six platforms in total, with about 70 million followers overall. It became a great lifestyle business, but I realized the bigger opportunity is being the platform for others rather than being the influencer.
What did it take to get that many followers?
It felt like eating glass. I made 1,000 videos in 1,000 days straight, which is where the name Nas Daily comes from. Each video took about 15 hours to make, and I produced them from 64 countries. The first 270 videos failed, and it was video 271 that finally broke through. To get attention and build a social media following, you need an irrational work ethic and passion. I don’t recommend it for everyone; at a certain level, it becomes a security concern and isn’t necessarily a healthy way to live. What I do think is for everyone is building a business and working for yourself.
What kind of content did you put out in those 1,000 videos?
I travelled around the world focusing on whatever was interesting about people and places. I looked for the most interesting people—founders of companies, people doing crazy or inspiring things—and made videos about them, plus personal stories. For example, I did a video in Bhutan about it being one of the most romantic countries, showing a nation that’s one of the least visited in the world. Another video covered the woman founder of Miami—Miami is the only major U.S. city founded by a woman—and others included a video about my friend’s death and my experience with Wikipedia. “Nas” means “people” in Arabic, and the channel was really about everyday people.
Origin story of Nas.com
How did you get the idea for Nas.com?
While building Nas Daily, I met roughly 100,000 people in person. I saw in many of their eyes that they hated their jobs and lives and had a constant desire to do something different, work for themselves, and control their own schedules. I’d already experienced the difference that working for myself made in my life; at Venmo, I was overpaid and underworked—I worked about four hours a day and made over $100,000—yet felt no meaning or passion. When you work for yourself, your life changes, and I wanted others to experience that. Helping them build their own businesses felt like the starting point.
What did it take to leap from content into an AI‑driven business with generated ads and storefronts?
We’re careful not to send the message that this is “easy money.” If you think one click of AI will create everything and you’ll just sit there printing money, that’s not our positioning. Our message is: life is better when you work for yourself, and now technology can help you do that through this business platform. It still takes work to build a business; it’s still hard, but it doesn’t have to be as hard as it used to be. In the past, it could take two months to start selling online; now it can take as little as five minutes. You can take a picture, start a free trial, and accept payments within about ten minutes.
Nas.com has created millionaires
How many new entrepreneurs has Nas.com created so far?
We’ve had hundreds of thousands of people express interest in building a business. We have tens of thousands of paying users running active businesses on the platform. The big success is that we’ve created four millionaires on the platform.
Could you tell me a success story?
One big success story is a woman in Singapore who teaches financial advice under the brand “Singapore Budget Babe.” She monetized her financial knowledge on the platform and made over a million dollars. Another story is a 60‑year‑old farmer in Mexico who wanted to build a business teaching farming; he now makes about $1,000 to $2,000 a month on Nas.com. I consider that an incredible success because technology used to gate people like him out, and we’ve made it simple enough for him to participate.
Those four millionaires you mentioned — what industries are they in?
They’re in very different industries: one in events, one in education, and one in fitness, among others. The beauty of Nas.com is that you can sell almost anything. We support all types of products: physical goods like candles and cookies, events (for example, meet‑ups after you’ve sold 1,000 candles), memberships (such as 20 dollars a month to join a network), and coaching (like teaching others how to make candles). Our users all share one thing: they want to work for themselves as solo entrepreneurs, but they monetize in many different ways.
Finding customers and marketing
How do you help sellers find customers?
It’s all about integrations. We help you create the content and then we help you run ads. For example, for a “Dubai Entrepreneur Networking Night” event, a user spent about $200 on ads we ran on Instagram and Facebook. That resulted in 32,000 views, 971 page visits, and 130 ticket buyers. We aim to be your marketing arm across channels like Meta, TikTok, Google, and eventually Amazon listings, which would otherwise be too complicated for most people to manage on their own.
How do you determine what goes into an ad?
We have 10 years of experience creating content and understand what makes a good or bad piece of content. We’ve turned that experience into programmatic “styles” that tend to perform well. For example, if you’re selling a candle, we might create a UGC‑style or unboxing‑style video. We know the script should begin with something paradoxical or superlative—“the best candle,” “the worst candle,” “the healthiest candle,” “the coolest candle”—and we generate that script using AI, guided by our internal rules about what makes a strong ad. This kind of automation would have been impossible five years ago, but AI now allows us to generate effective ads quickly.
So you create the ads using AI?
Yes, the ads are all AI‑generated. As of two weeks ago, AI has gotten good enough that the average person often cannot tell the difference between an AI‑generated ad and a human‑made one. I expect that by the end of the year, about 90% of AI ads will be unrecognizable as AI to 90% of humans.
Pricing and competition
How much does it cost to use the platform?
Pricing ranges from as low as $10 a month to up to $99 a month, with an average of about $30 a month. For roughly $1 a day, you get your own website, payment processing in every country, AI-generated marketing content, the ability to list unlimited products and ownership of your customers.
How does the company make money?
We make money through subscriptions, a small cut on marketing spend and a small cut on some transactions. If you advertise $100 through our platform, we take about $5. We also take about 1% on some transactions, but we charge 0% on physical products because we want to be competitive as an alternative to Shopify, at least for now.
Is Shopify your main competitor?
Essentially, yes. Shopify is an amazing $150 billion company, but it doesn’t work well for new entrepreneurs. It’s too complicated and doesn’t help you with marketing. The entrepreneur’s priorities are: first, product; second, content; third, marketing — using that content somewhere. Shopify focuses mostly on creating the product store, whereas we focus on helping you create content and then market it. Many Shopify users have a store but don’t know how to get traffic to it, and that’s what we aim to solve.
Growth, traction and fundraising
How many people are on the Nas.com team, and where are they based?
We’re about 40 people. Engineering is based in Singapore, and marketing is based in the United States, and I’m the founder and CEO.
How much did it cost to start the company?
A lot. We’ve raised a total of $40 million, including $27 million in the round we’re now announcing. Building technology is very expensive if you want really good engineers, but I believe the opportunity is in generating billions of dollars’ worth of value in the form of new businesses on the internet.
How much in sales did the company do last year, and what is it projected to do this year?
Last year, we started at about $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and ended at around $8 million in ARR.
How Nas.com grows
What tactics do you use to grow Nas.com?
We grow Nas.com using Nas.com. We market Nas.com with Nas.com because we’re also a business on our own platform.
Can you give an example of that?
In Mexico, we run an operation called ECO Mexico by Nas.com. We built that business on Nas.com and sell a product called “Build your own e‑commerce in 2 hours.” Around 4,000 people signed up for it and came to events where we introduced them to Nas.com. We found those people by marketing ECO Mexico through Nas.com itself, and we host workshops and events for potential new customers to try the platform and build their businesses on top of it.
How do you market these products and campaigns?
We create different events for different campaigns in different markets. Inside my own Nas.com account, I have hundreds of businesses I’ve started — Miami Social for Miami entrepreneurs, an education business, internal company businesses, and even a clothing business where I sell my t‑shirts. In the clothing business, I have about 200 members and made around $3,000 selling t‑shirts as a test, with the revenue going to my bank account every two weeks.
Nas.com’s value proposition to investors
What about the company was attractive enough to draw investment from someone like Vinod Khosla?
Vinod is one of the biggest champions of entrepreneurs I’ve ever met; he truly cares about the “small guy” and “small girl” who just want to work for themselves. He understands our mission and sees that existing solutions are too complicated and B2B‑oriented. Shopify, for example, is built for companies like Apple or Tesla, not for a mom in Wisconsin who wants to sell her creations. Vinod believes AI will make everything accessible to the “little guy,” and Nas.com is explicitly designed for that user.
Advice for founders and entrepreneurs
What hard, concrete advice do you have for founders?
I hope you enjoy eating glass. I hope you enjoy doing hard things. Starting a media company or a channel is difficult, and starting a technology company is difficult. More generally, building something out of nothing is hard — whether it’s a human giving birth to a baby or a founder giving birth to a company. My advice is to “choose your hard,” because whatever you do will be hard.
What makes the road to entrepreneurship easier?
AI will make it easier, and I believe that 100%. If you couldn’t speak English before, now AI can help you communicate in perfect English; if you couldn’t make content, now you can. If you couldn’t do marketing before, AI can help you market. But it still won’t be a walk in the park.
When it comes to this specific business, what have you found particularly surprising?
I’m most surprised by how fast technology has advanced in the last three years. What used to take me 15 hours per video felt like an irreplaceable skill set, and I thought no one else would have access to those capabilities. Now AI can replicate much of that in seconds. Technology has evolved so quickly that if a company “sleeps” for a month, it can find itself out of business.
Feature image credit: Nuseir Yassin. Credit: Nas.com
By Sherin Shibu
Sherin Shibu is a business news reporter at Entrepreneur.com. She previously worked for PCMag, Business Insider, The Messenger, and ZDNET as a reporter and copyeditor. Her areas of coverage encompass tech, business, strategy, finance, and even space. She is a Columbia University graduate.
