Hi! My name is Rooholamin Honarvar, and I build systems so the work does itself.
I was born and raised in Tehran. This is my room.
I started programming at school with Macromedia Flash, and I shipped my first project at sixteen.
In 2014 I wanted a replica of the One Ring and could not buy one anywhere in Tehran. On AliExpress I saw I could order ten and sell the other nine.
Ava and I started Fantazio, and for the first few months the top cabinet of that closet was its whole warehouse.
I studied entrepreneurship at Semnan University, from 2009 to 2014.
I was head of the university’s music committee. We put on more than thirty concerts while I was a student.
I was already building websites for clients, and back in Tehran, Fantazio had started.
Business first, then software: I still look at every problem that way.
After university I worked in IT. In 2015 I joined Beris.
Sohrab and I were a team there. He pushed me into a new era of programming and helped me more than anyone. At night Fantazio kept growing, one parcel at a time.
In 2016 I spent a weekend at Startup Weekend Tehran: ten or twelve teams building a product in two days. I did not know yet where it would lead.
When my time at Beris ended in 2016, I gave Fantazio everything.
By 2016 Fantazio had its own place: a processing room, and a reception desk with our name on it.
Every order was picked from these shelves, packed here and shipped to a fan somewhere in the country.
Then the dollar rose so far that importing stopped making sense, so we started making things ourselves.
In 2017 Fantazio merged with Boomerang, Ali KiaKazemi’s clothing and printing company, and suddenly we had a factory.
We printed for more than a hundred partner businesses and sold more than fifty thousand garments.
Black Friday 2020 was our golden day: more than 1,500 orders and 5,800 products in two days.
Orders used to arrive on flash drives, then on Telegram. I built the platform that runs this floor: partners upload their artwork, each of the twelve to fifteen people here sees only their step, and every order reaches the accountant.
This was my office at Fantazio, and for seven years it was also where I worked for LegalSoft, a legal-tech company in the United States.
It began in 2018 with a landing page, through a teammate from that Startup Weekend. Then an accident-intake app, and then Practice 360, the software more than a thousand US law firms were onboarded onto.
During COVID, Fantazio could not pay its people. I worked here for LegalSoft and put my own salary into the company so everyone got paid.
In January 2025 my time at LegalSoft ended, and Fantazio had all of me again.
Fantazio Studio was our video team. Our channel, FantazioTV, published 35 videos before the war in 2025 put it on hold.
Its shelves hold what we made: resin figures and the illuminating wand, the product I am proudest of.
Fantazio sold stories, from films, fantasy and books. We even built a Sorting Hat quiz for Persian-speaking Harry Potter fans.
In 2026 I moved to Canada and started over: a new country, a new bank, a credit score I had never had.
Every door on this street is a business I built for: a yoga studio, a massage clinic, a paralegal, a colour-management company and a plant-sensor startup.
Even the newsstand: a Toronto home builder wanted a housing magazine that publishes every day.
I don’t have an office. I work from home, and some days from a café like this one.
When I moved to Canada, I grabbed every opportunity to build something.
Some of what came out of it is on this table.
Most days I work here, in my office at home.
People I worked with at LegalSoft came back with new work: an AI receptionist whose team I now lead, and the referral system I first designed in 2019, rebuilt around AI.
I still support my business in Iran from here. And beside my screens runs the system my father wrote more than thirty years ago. More than a thousand credit funds still use it, and I am rebuilding it without losing a single rule.
That is my story so far. If you have a problem, I would like to hear it.