Tareq Hasan

Tareq Hasan is a Bangladeshi software developer and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CTO of weDevs, the bootstrapped WordPress product company behind the Dokan multivendor marketplace plugin, WP User Frontend, WP ERP and the FlyWP server control panel.

Hasan is a self-taught programmer. After his higher secondary exams he got his first mobile phone and taught himself HTML and CSS on it, building his first website from the phone. He bought his first computer in his first year studying computer science at Rajshahi University and soon began releasing free WordPress plugins; he has been a WordPress.org member since 2009 and maintains the Bengali locale.

He started weDevs on his own and was later joined by co-founder Nizam Uddin. The company was set up in 2012 in a rented house in Rajshahi and moved to Dhaka in late 2013. Its model was simple: release useful free plugins on WordPress.org, then sell professional versions. Uddin has recalled that monthly revenue rose to roughly $8,000 to $10,000 once the paid versions arrived. Dokan, launched in 2014, turns a WooCommerce store into a multivendor marketplace and became the company's flagship; the plugin directory lists it on more than 30,000 active sites, and weDevs says it powers over 40,000 live marketplaces.

weDevs now ships more than twenty products, including WP ERP, WP Project Manager, weDocs, weMail, Appsero for plugin analytics and licensing, and FlyWP, a hosted server panel for WordPress. The company has grown to roughly 120 people and, according to its co-founder, has never taken institutional funding. Future Startup named Hasan to its 15 Under 35 list in 2015. Originally from Bangladesh, he is now based in Istanbul.

Hasan matters because weDevs is one of the best-known examples of a software company built from Bangladesh for a global market, using open-source distribution instead of venture capital.