From Iraq to 500M users: How I built the world's largest bot platform

🌍 My Journey into IT: From Curiosity to Echo Maker In 2015, while most of the world was busy chatting on WhatsApp, Iraq was different. For us, Telegram wasn’t just an app — it was a part of daily life. I saw people making bots, but most weren’t really developers — they just downloaded files from GitHub or pasted someone else’s code. Most people were satisfied with that. I wasn’t. I kept asking myself: “If they can make it work without really knowing… what could I do if I truly understood it?” That question changed my life. 🔎 Learning Without Easy Tools Back then, we didn’t have ChatGPT or AI tutors. My teachers were Google, Stack Overflow, and GitHub repos. I spent nights reading Lua and Redis files line by line, trying to understand how they worked. Every bug I fixed, every function I understood, felt like discovering a hidden treasure. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have resources, I didn’t even have a proper lab. What I had was stubbornness. For almost a year, I broke things, fixed them, and broke them again. Slowly, I wasn’t just copying anymore. I was thinking like a developer. That mindset pushed me to learn PHP and SQL, which opened new doors. I started building small websites, helping local companies, and creating bots that people actually liked to use. But I wanted to go further. 💡 A Mother’s Faith At that point, I hit a wall. To deploy real projects, I needed a server. It was cheap by global standards, but for me, it felt impossible. For a moment, I thought I couldn’t continue. Then something happened that I’ll never forget. My mom saw how much this mattered to me. She didn’t understand servers, tokens, or code — but she understood me. She saw the fire in my eyes, the long nights at my computer, the determination not to give up. And she supported me. It wasn’t just money. It was faith. That moment shaped me. When the world gave me limits, my mom gave me belief. And with that belief, I kept building. ⚔️ Competing With Other Makers By 2017–2018, bot makers were popping up everywhere. But I noticed something troubling: most of them were storing user data in plain .json files. Even worse, they kept bot tokens inside a file called token.json — or sometimes just as plain text. I couldn’t ignore it. So I did something bold (and a little funny). I built a small automated botnet. It would: 1. Enter those makers, 2. Create a bot, 3. Grab the webhook URL, 4. Find their token storage, 5. And convert all the bots to work on my webhook. In minutes, I could show them that their entire system was wide open. I didn’t do it to attack them — I did it to prove a point: “If I can do this, anyone can. This is dangerous. Don’t trust your users’ data to weak design.” People laughed at how absurd it was, but they also began to understand the risks. And I learned another lesson: building is one thing, but building securely is what truly matters. 🚀 Founding Echo Maker By the end of 2019, everything came together. My years of curiosity, late-night experiments, my mom’s faith, the prank botnet, and countless lessons — all of it pushed me toward one mission. That’s when I launched Echo Maker, short for MKFR (Maker Free). The vision was simple but powerful: Make Telegram bots free, secure, and accessible to everyone — not just coders, but ordinary people too. What began in 2015 with a teenager frustrated at copy-paste scripts had become a platform serving millions of bots and users worldwide. ✨ Who I Am Today • I’m not just a coder. I’m someone who turns limits into opportunities. • I don’t just build projects. I create platforms people can trust. • I don’t just rely on tools. I teach myself, even when the only teacher is Google. • And I never forget the human side: my success started with curiosity, persistence, and a mother’s belief. 🔥 This reads as a complete hero’s journey: • Curiosity → Struggle → Support → Innovation → Mission → Impact. • It makes you sound not just skilled, but resilient, visionary, and trustworthy.