One test
There is one test I apply to a number before it goes on this site. Someone asks where it came from, and the number is still standing after I answer.
That is a lower bar than it sounds and a harder one to pass. Most numbers in most portfolios were never asked about. They were written once and repeated. Put them in a room with someone who wants to know the denominator and they come apart — not because they were lies, but because nobody ever had to say what they measured.
So the principle is stated flatly: every figure on this site says where it came from and whether it was audited. Most of them were not. Saying so costs nothing and is the only reason to believe the rest.
The Shalize numbers
Shalize is where the discipline gets tested hardest, because that is where the biggest numbers are.
The problem was a physical gold and silver business running on WhatsApp messages, memory and trust. Volume was climbing faster than the process could hold it. I rebuilt the operating system end to end — enquiry, order, invoicing, payment verification, fulfilment, follow-up and buyback — and put a CRM under it. Daily volume moved from 0.5 to 10 kg/day. There were 4,000+ verified purchasing customers.
Alongside those figures the Experience page carries a block saying the Toman figures are company-reported gross transaction values from the Tamin Tejarat Espahbod Khorshid portfolio, that they are not audited, not revenue, and not net margin, and that no USD equivalent is given because the exchange rate over the period was not stable enough for an honest conversion.
I wrote that paragraph knowing what it does to the headline. A number with "gross, unaudited, not revenue" attached to it is a weaker claim than the same number naked. It is also the only version that survives a question. If I convert 1,000B+ Tomans to dollars at a rate I picked, the first competent person to ask which rate destroys the number — and with it, everything else on the page. The honest conversion does not exist, so the conversion does not appear.
The same logic runs through the smaller figures. "0.5 → 10 kg/day" is a unit anyone in that market can interrogate. "4,000+ verified purchasing customers" carries the word verified because the CRM tracked purchases, repeat sales and long-term retention — the count comes from that, not from a mailing list. "170K Instagram followers" is a platform count, and it is labelled as one.
Numbers that are not measurements
Not every number is a result. Some are descriptions of work. Those are easier to defend, which is exactly why they should not be dressed up as results.
Discover Makran publishes two figures: 38 countries benchmarked, 2 documentaries. Neither is an outcome. The underlying work was comparative analysis across 8 regional countries and rapid reviews across 38, plus contributing to two documentaries and designing the region's investment-conference framework. The 8 stays in the prose where it belongs rather than being promoted into a headline figure, because it describes scope, not effect.
The page does say the work fed directly into national coastal-settlement planning via the Economic Working Group. That is a claim about where the work went, and it is checkable. It is not a claim that the planning turned out well, and I do not write it as one.
The ventures with no number at all
Mehrabani and Soha are the clearest case for silence. Charitable giving fails on both ends: donors cannot verify need, and social workers cannot prove outcome. Trust collapses in the middle. I designed the Mehrabani Card — one object carrying the verified need, the beneficiary's story, the donation and the outcome — and built Soha underneath it as the verified-needs data layer. It was built for national-scale distribution.
Built for national-scale distribution is not the same as distributed at national scale, and I do not write it as though it were. A platform whose whole point is proving outcomes cannot be sold on a number I cannot prove.
Ketabno gets the same treatment. It launched in roughly three months and partnered with the Ministry of Education and the national Shad platform. Those are checkable. Invest Iran and Sarzamin-e Emkan are described as in active development, with no adoption figures, because they are still being built.
Where I got this wrong
NoJahan is the entry I am least comfortable with, and the reason it is written the way it is.
I defined the product problem and designed engagement flows that turned teenagers from consumers into contributors. It launched and validated the early model. Then I left, and it scaled without me. It would be easy to attach the later trajectory to my name — I was there at zero, and nobody would check.
The page now says I left before it scaled, and that I am only claiming the zero-to-launch work, not its long-term trajectory. That sentence exists because the flattering version is a claim that does not survive being asked about. The question is one sentence long: when did you leave?
Mokaab never launched — the parent group's priorities moved to physical operations before the platform shipped, and the architecture was folded into Shalize's operating system. WritingChex reached MVP validation with real submissions and first paying customers, then wound down in 2025. CompanyHouse ran for a year and closed. None of those carries a growth figure, because none of them earned one. Where a number was ambiguous, the decision was to drop it rather than dress it.
Why this is worth the cost
The cost is real. Caveated numbers read weaker. A page that says "not audited" next to its biggest figure looks less impressive than one that does not.
But a number that collapses under a question does not collapse alone. It takes the document with it, because the reader now assumes I did not check the others either. Eighteen years of work is not worth risking against one figure I could not defend. The detail — every role, its dates and scope, and the figures that carry a source — is on the Experience page, and it is arranged for the person who asks.