Standing on set with a national brand as a client, it hit him that the agency he had built with a handful of friends, starting with zero capital, had a real shot at growing into something much bigger.

Today, as CEO of Candid Studios, the marketing arm of what began as Think Candid, Shafin is entering his seventh semester and final year at BUP, running an agency whose client list includes POND’S, Sunsilk, Dove, Lifebuoy, Lux, Horlicks and Clearmen. His path offers a rough blueprint, and a few warnings, for any student weighing the same jump.

Start with people, not capital

With no money to offer, the only thing available to trade was conviction. That means finding co-founders who buy into an idea before there is any proof it works, and being upfront that the early days will run on effort rather than pay. Shafin pitched the idea person by person, eventually convincing Monjurul Hossain, Ahmed Yasar Sameen, Ishaque Shariar and Ragib Hasin to join as co-founders, with Nuzhat Hayat Khan and Rushaed Ahsan Chowdhury coming on board soon after. The lesson: recruit for belief first, and let competence catch up.

There is no boundary between class and client work

Anyone staying enrolled while building a business should assume work will not respect a schedule. “In the agency business, there is no such thing as a routine,” Shafin says. “Work can come knocking at any hour. None of us were willing to fully compromise on our academics, so the more work we had coming, the less we slept.” The trade-off is rarely between business and studies; it is between business and sleep.

Take calculated risks before you have the answers

Every growing client roster brings financial questions with no clean answer: when to hire, whether to buy equipment, whether payroll clears if a client’s spending dips. Waiting for certainty before deciding is not really an option. “We didn’t really have the answers back then,” Shafin says, “but we took calculated risks anyway.” The judgement to make those calls tends to come only after making a few of them.

Differentiate instead of copying

The clearest piece of advice Shafin offers other students is not to start a business simply because it looks like everyone else is, and not to copy an existing model wholesale. Find one specific point of difference and build around it. While competing agencies leaned on Instagram-template content, Candid leaned into storytelling; while others took weeks to deliver, Candid promised same-day turnaround. “Finding such small ways to differentiate from the pack is all it takes,” he says. “This mindset works for literally any line of business.” That approach, applied to reels for Nemesis and later POND’S Miracle Lab event, is what turned a favour done for friends into a growing client list.

Hire for mindset, not resume

A common early mistake is judging new hires purely on immediate output. “Hiring shouldn’t just be about immediate output; it’s about personality, mindset and potential,” Shafin says, adding that giving people room to learn before expecting results builds the kind of loyalty that pays off later. It is a slower way to build a team, but it tends to produce one that stays.

You need less experience than you think

Shafin pushes back on the idea that inexperience should hold anyone back. Most of what running a business requires gets learned on the job, mistakes included, and each one tends to teach something worth knowing. What matters more, in his view, is confidence and drive; the rest follows. It is advice that shows up again in how Candid expanded its own services over time, adding static design, motion graphics, AI-assisted video production and brand strategy well after the team had already started, because clients kept asking for more than reels.

The only real advice: start

Asked what he would tell a student sitting on an idea but too hesitant to act, Shafin keeps it simple. “The first step is the hardest, so just do it and get it out of the way,” he says, adding that picking something genuinely enjoyable makes the rest easier to sustain. Looking back at Candid’s own run, from unpaid reaction videos for Nemesis’s “VIP” album launch to campaigns for Sunsilk, Dove, Lux, Lifebuoy and Horlicks, and now a co-founded event company, IRL, on the side, he says he would not change any of it. “Every mistake has taught me something new,” he says, “and it was a lesson worth learning.”