You believe in what you’re building.So why aren’t more people buying?
For Muslim founders who’ve made their first sales,
but can’t work out how to get more.
You keep telling yourself it’ll pay off.
Once people start buying.Once people respond to my posts.Once the right people find me.Once I figure out what makes people buy.Once people see the vision.
And then you go home, but you’re still thinking about the business.
You’ve put in the late nights and the money. So why can’t you see what’s actually working?
Maybe the problem isn’t what you think it is.
- Sales were better last month. What changed?
- People keep telling me they love what I’m doing. So why aren’t they buying?
- Is it the product? The price? The website?
The things you could improve aren’t necessarily the things holding you back.
There’s always something to fix, change or try. The hard part is knowing which one is actually in the way.
You can do everything right
and still be working on the wrong problem.
Everyone has advice.
Your spouse tells you to keep going. A friend says you need to post more. Then someone on social media swears by building a personal brand, and if you ask AI how to improve your marketing, you end up with ten more things to work on.
Some of it might even be right.
So you spend a bit more time on content. You open the website to fix something that wasn’t even bothering you yesterday. And a week later, people still aren’t buying.
- Was the website actually putting people off?
- Did you need more content, or were the people seeing it never going to buy in the first place?
- Would a conversation with a potential customer have taught you more than another evening spent tweaking things?
You can’t know just by doing more.
And that’s the difficult part. You could spend another month working on the right thing, or another month working on something that was never going to make much difference.
How I work.
Understand
We start with your business as it is today. What have you tried? What’s working? What are you trying to figure out?
Connect
We look at how your offer, message, content and website fit together, and whether something in that picture isn’t adding up.
Focus
We work out what deserves your attention first, what can wait, and what to do next.
In their words.
I came in thinking I had a positioning and messaging problem. I was trying to solve so many problems at once that I couldn’t explain the one problem someone should come to me for.
Malik brought it back to something much simpler: who am I helping, where are they right now, where do they want to go, and what bridge am I actually providing? He wasn’t just answering the surface-level question. He was asking questions that helped me understand what might actually be behind it.
There are plenty of people who can talk about sales, positioning and revenue. It’s much harder to find someone who also takes the human being behind the business seriously. He’s one of the few people in this space I’d genuinely want to keep learning from.
I’d been stuck on how to get Tarbiyah Kids in front of more people. I picked Malik because I’d worked with him before, and he’s creative. He sees angles I’d never think of myself.
I’d been holding back because I didn’t want to come across as pushy. Talking to him flipped that. If I don’t talk about what I’ve built, I’m keeping something good from people. I started right away: I asked parents to share their success stories, and I’m building them into an exclusive newsletter.
If you’re unsure, do it. Malik looks at your situation and lays it out clearly, even the things you’ve stopped noticing. You come away with your overview back, a clear sense of why you’re doing it, and the direction you want to go. He’s also a trustworthy brother who takes Islamic guidelines into account.
We started by explaining our business model, to sharing problems within our business we find hard to overcome.
He challenged us with questions that really had us thinking about our whole business, this really helped us to see the bigger picture of our business and the goals we need to achieve to move forward. His advice was great and realistic and left us with changing the way we should be thinking in order to get closer to our targets and goals.
We are looking forward to working with him and having him on board with us to help us take our business to the next level.
This review doesn’t do the conversation justice.
When I first mentioned my interest in a talk with him, I didn’t know what to expect. What to ask for, nor what I wanted to do with my business. By asking the right questions, he knew what I actually wanted.
It was a discovery for me as well.
His advice intrigued me and made me think differently about my business and myself.
The follow-up questions showed me a lot about my own situation. Things I thought I knew, or was sure of, turned out not to be quite so. I came away understanding the problem much better, and clearer on what I want to do and what I need to do about it.
It made me think hard about things I’d never considered before, and that widened my view. I could see my situation very differently from how I could from inside my own head.
He responded so quickly and creatively, with several possible scenarios for my situation. I got plenty of new insights and ideas I hadn’t considered at all.
Had a great conversation with him.
Received clear and, most importantly, pragmatic guidance on how to get my business to the next level. Great to talk to, comes very prepared, develops a deep understanding of what drives you, and caters his advice accordingly.
If you’re not sure whether or not to go for it, take that leap and have a chat.
He managed to convince and motivate me to take it on. I found his questions good and easy to follow, and what I took away is that quantity sometimes comes before quality, and that I need to put more time in myself.
I’d strongly advise anyone to dare to have the conversation. It’s worth the time and effort.
Had a great conversation with him.
I had a great time talking with him. I can tell he’s a professional in his field, just by the way he talked me through everything. On top of that, he gave me the feeling that we knew each other for years.
In short… I’m sold. And I’m sure with him on my side, my business and I will have a great future ahead! If you’re not sure whether or not to go for it, take that leap and have a chat.
Let’s talk about your business.
Pick a time that suits you. I’ll ask about the business, you tell me what’s not working, and you’ll leave with a clearer idea of what to look at first.
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Who you’d be talking to.
I’m Malik, the person behind Obi Consulting.
I’ve spent more than eight years in marketing and branding. I ran my own agency and worked as a creative director at an e‑commerce brand, where a lot of the job came down to asking whether something was actually helping the business or only felt productive.
At the e‑commerce brand, that once meant removing an entire collection. It wasn’t an easy decision. We’d put money and time into researching and developing that market, and removing the collection meant accepting we wouldn’t get any of it back. But it gave us a clearer focus, there was less to manage, and in the long run the business made more money. Doing less of what wasn’t working left more room for what was.
I also know what it’s like to work a 9-to-5 and spend whatever time and energy you have left trying to build something of your own.
Alhamdulillah, having a job meant I had an income. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to build something of my own and create a better life for my family.
When you’re in that position, it’s easy to get pulled in a hundred different directions.
You scroll through social media and find business experts sharing advice that sounds like exactly what you need. You save the posts, make a mental list of things to implement, and convince yourself that maybe this next idea will be the one that changes things.
Meanwhile, there’s a website to improve, a product to work on, and content to create. All of it takes time, and all of it feels important. But it’s not always clear whether you’re getting closer to the business you imagined.
And because you’re building it yourself, there’s a limit to how much the people around you can understand. They can support you, encourage you, and want the best for you. But they aren’t necessarily the people you can sit down with and work through the decisions you’re facing.
One thing I’ve come to appreciate is how much difference it makes to have someone in your corner who can think things through with you. Someone to bounce ideas off, challenge your thinking, look at what you’re working on, and help you stay focused on what matters.
The value isn’t always obvious in the moment. A better decision might not lead to immediate results. But it can save you from spending months, money, and energy pursuing something that was never going to get you where you wanted to go.
That’s a lesson I learned through my own experience, and a big part of why I started Obi.
I want to help Muslim founders give what they’re building a real chance, without having to figure out every decision on their own.
Before you book.
Is this for a business like mine?
You’re probably a good fit if you’re a Muslim founder who’s made your first sales, but can’t work out how to get more. You’re doing most of it yourself: the product, the content, the website, the branding. And you’re not sure which of those things is actually worth your time.
Many founders like this are building alongside a full-time job or a family, but you don’t have to be. You don’t need a big audience or a lot of revenue. You do need to have started selling, so there’s something real to look at together.
If you haven’t launched yet, I’m probably not the right person for you yet. The same goes if you already have a team and the problem is how the business runs.
But if you’re thinking, “I believe in what I’m building. So why aren’t more people buying?”, that’s exactly the kind of question I help founders work through.
What if I spend an hour talking to you and get nothing useful out of it?
That’s a fair concern. Your time is valuable, and I don’t expect you to spend an hour with me just because the conversation is free.
I can’t promise a solution before I’ve understood your business. What I can promise is that I won’t fill the hour with generic business advice. I’ll ask questions, challenge what we’re assuming, and look at what you’ve already tried.
You may leave with a clearer understanding of what’s actually getting in the way. You may discover the problem isn’t what you thought it was. Or we may find that I’m not the right person to help.
Any of those is more useful than pretending I have an answer before I’ve understood the business.
Is this secretly a sales call?
No.
The first conversation is about understanding what’s actually going on in your business and deciding whether there’s a problem I can genuinely help you with.
If I think I can help, I’ll tell you how. If I don’t, I’ll tell you that too. And if there is a fit, you don’t have to decide anything on the call. You can take what we discussed and decide what you want to do.
I’d rather have an honest conversation that goes nowhere than turn a useful conversation into a sales pitch.
Are you just going to tell me what I already know?
Maybe you already know the obvious things. You know you should post more, tighten your offer, finish the website.
But knowing what you should do isn’t the same as knowing what to do first, or what’s been getting in the way.
I’ll ask about what you’ve already tried, what’s taking your time, and what’s actually moving the business forward.
I’m not there to give you advice you’ve already heard. I’m there to help you work out what deserves your attention first, and why the rest can wait.
What if you judge me?
You built the business, so of course some of its problems can feel personal. If things aren’t working the way you’d like them to, it can be uncomfortable to have someone else come in and look at them.
I’m not there to decide whether you’ve been a good or bad founder. I’m there to understand what’s actually happening and why. Businesses change as they grow, and things that worked at one stage can become problems later. Responsibilities get blurred, people get used to coming to you, and you can end up holding things together simply because that’s how it has always been done.
That’s not something I need to judge. It’s something I need to understand.
And if I see something that isn’t working, I’ll tell you. The point isn’t to make you feel good about the business. It’s to get an honest picture of what’s going on, so we can work out what needs to change.