Qysh Me means "How To" in Albanian. I co-founded it in 2011 with Korab Osmanaj, and the reason was not a market opportunity. It was the phone.
People kept calling. A cousin, a colleague, somebody's father. How do I create a Gmail account. How do I do this thing on the computer. We answered the same questions over and over, one person at a time, which is a terrible way to answer a question. So we started writing them down in Albanian, where nobody else was writing them.
The first articles were written after night shifts, during early morning breaks, for free. One of them was how to create a Gmail account. That is not a glamorous start. A few hundred articles later it did not matter.
The team assembled itself. Fisnik Sylka emailed us a suggestion about SEO, unprompted, and became our SEO Manager. He is now an SEO strategist working with international clients. Dardan Hasku came in on social and later started his own agency, Dardha. Uranik Begu joined the leadership team when we incorporated in May 2013.
We covered what people actually asked about. Technology, health, money, ordinary life. Written plainly, in Albanian, not translated into it. That distinction mattered more than any growth tactic we tried. Readers can tell when something was made for them versus localized at them, and they reward the difference with trust you cannot buy.
Traffic came mostly from search, from Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and the diaspora. We crossed 100,000, which felt enormous at the time and still does.
We also broke things constantly. Servers gave up under traffic we did not plan for. We were hit with DDOS attacks we could not name yet, and spent nights guessing. Bugs, outages, small fires on ordinary Tuesdays. You learn more in one bad night than in a quarter of good ones.
My work was not only marketing. I worked on the product: the content platform, the publishing workflow, the information architecture that let a small team keep hundreds of articles in order instead of in a pile. Then the rest of running a company. Business development, monetization, hiring, and the calls nobody enjoys making.
In November 2019, after nearly nine years, Dua.com acquired Qysh Me. They connect Albanians around the world, so the fit was obvious, and they had resources we never did. An Albanian-language how-to site getting acquired is not a story anyone expected. That is roughly the point.