Our Story

It was January 2017, and Trump had just won the presidential election — to the surprise of most of the media and nearly all the polls. At this time, I had left my engineering job and started trading stocks full-time

I spent my time researching companies, digging through earnings reports, and trying to understand each CEO’s vision to decide if the business was worth investing in. At one point, I had a passing thought: the government is kind of like a massive public company, and the prime minister or president is basically the CEO. Every country has growth metrics, a balance sheet, debts, assets, and employees. Most importantly, it has shareholders and stakeholders — the public, and other nations.

Just like a CEO has KPIs (key performance indicators), we also judge our leaders on things like GDP growth and the performance of major stock indexes like the FTSE or the S&P 500.

That thought stuck with me. I kept comparing the stock market to politics. Investors can see a company’s stock price move in real-time and use it as a reflection of sentiment — how others feel about the CEO’s performance. But when it comes to politicians, all we have are approval ratings. They’re vague, the small sample size makes them inaccurate, and by the time they’re published, they’re already outdated.

I started asking myself:
Is there a way to measure public opinion on politicians live, 24/7?
Is there a chart that shows how a leader is performing now — and how that sentiment has changed over time, alongside big news events?
Can I vote on legislation, or at least see how others would vote?

I assumed there must be an app like that. But I couldn’t find anything. That’s when the idea started to form — first for an app, then a company.

Years went by. Life threw a bunch of curveballs, as it always does, and the idea drifted into the background.
But I stayed close to my interests in coding, economics, and politics. Eventually, I decided to take coding more seriously and found a tutor.

That’s when I met Alex Cizek — soon to be my good friend, and eventual co-founder.

With Alex teaching me, I progressed very quickly. Building an app no longer felt like a distant dream. Around this time, Trump was ramping up for his third presidential campaign — and all those thoughts from 2017 came rushing back. Surely someone must have built this by now?

Still nothing.

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea after all. So I started talking to people — friends, family, strangers — to see what they thought, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Eventually, I mentioned it to Alex. He liked it. That was encouraging. We kept up with the tutoring.

But over the next couple of days, the idea grew on him — fast. Before I knew it, Alex had already begun creating early versions of the app’s UI.

From that point on, the idea took over. It dominated our tutoring sessions, and we realized we weren’t just talking about an idea anymore — we were building it. So we made it official. We formed Votap Ltd.

Several months and many iterations later, we’ve launched the first version of Votap — with a flexible roadmap in place for new features and improvements in the future.

Zahoor Ali
Co-Founder & CEO