The story behind the only friends & family platform built for DTC brands.
I was born in New York. We moved back to Pakistan when I was young. I came back to the U.S. at 14, on my own, to Pittsburgh — while my parents and younger brother stayed home. I lived with my aunts.
I started working at 15. Dishwasher. Goodwill warehouse. $7 an hour. At 16 I started teaching myself how to build websites — no money, just interest, $100 here and there for a logo or a small project. By 17 I was consulting and coaching small Shopify operators. By 18 I was working at the dollar store for $7.50 an hour and starting college the same year. Through college, I worked the paper store, worked on campus, kept the e-commerce projects going, kept the consulting going.
I moved a lot. Pittsburgh, then New Jersey, where I lived with a different aunt. I slept on campus. I slept on couches. I lived in hotels and Airbnbs trying to find a rhythm while finishing school and running side projects online. The day my last final ended, I started my first agency job. From there, I worked my way through the e-commerce world the long way: agency work, then growth roles at DTC brands directly, owning operations and strategy at Shopify Plus stores doing real revenue.
That’s where the FAFF in faffly comes from. It’s the initials of my family — the four of us. The “ly” is for family, full stop — yours, mine, anyone building a brand with people they care about behind it.
By the time I was inside my third DTC brand, I had seen the same pattern everywhere. A friends and family program run out of a Slack channel and a spreadsheet. Discount codes ending up on Reddit and Discord. Ex-employees still on the list months after offboarding. HR answering DMs at 11pm because there was no real system for any of it.
I’ve applied to over a thousand jobs in DTC and e-commerce over the years, and interviewed at 40+ of them. When I asked about benefits, friends and family as a real structured program almost never came up. The brands that ran F&F programs ran them informally: a Slack channel, a spreadsheet, a vague “ask People” instruction. There’s no infrastructure here. There’s barely a category.
It wasn’t a tooling problem. No one had ever built it.
Every DTC brand has a friends and family program. Almost none of them have a real platform to run it.
So I’m building one.
I’m sponsoring my parents to move back to the U.S. My brother is still in school back home. I’m building faffly alongside a full-time job, on nights and weekends, because the problem is real and someone has to build the platform that solves it. I named it after the people I’m building it for.
If you’re a DTC founder, a Chief Marketing Officer, a VP of Sales, in HR, or anyone running employee perks at a brand you actually care about — I think you’ll see yourself in faffly. We’re onboarding our first 20 customers as Founding Partners. I’d love to talk.
— Fardan
“Every DTC brand I’ve worked with has dreamed of a robust friends and family employee program. Almost none of them have built infrastructure for it. faffly is what I wish I’d had.”
— Fardan
