How I Got Here
Hey there! I’m not sure how you found this blog, but here’s a short story about how I ended up living like this :)
It’s 2026. AI is everywhere, and everyone’s shipping their own thing now: side projects, mobile apps, SaaS, you name it. My own story as a founder and a developer goes all the way back to 2019–2020.
Where it started
It began at university, where we worked through a pile of programming languages and the usual fundamentals. Somewhere in there I picked up Android development, and by the end of 2019 I landed my first job. (I think, the exact dates are fuzzy now.) I had two interviews and got both offers. I went with Itexus, where I spent 2.5 years and got my first real experience. No entrepreneurship there, but plenty of engineering and plenty of initiative building things on the side.
The first project: Scrinity
In 2020 I finished university online, because COVID was in full swing. Around the same time, a friend and I took our first real swing at a startup: Scrinity. The idea was to give restaurants a digital menu and a way to catch negative reviews before they spilled out onto the public internet.
It failed fast, and almost gracefully. The build was the strong part. The marketing and distribution were nonexistent. We had nothing structured to say. We’d walk from venue to venue pitching how great it would be, and the moment we mentioned it cost money, everyone said “thanks,” and that was that. End of project one.
The second project: a CRM to kill LinkedIn
Meanwhile I moved over to Coherent Solutions and we kicked off project two: a CRM that was supposed to kill LinkedIn for finding the right candidate. Again, we built the system. Again, we couldn’t break into B2B, and somewhere in the middle we realized this wasn’t the pain worth solving.
A call with one company’s sales lead made it clear. Their problem wasn’t finding people; it was finding projects, since they were an outsourcing shop. That closed project two.
We didn’t lose our own money on either one. We only lost time, but we walked away with a feel for the steps we’d been blindly groping for, instead of, you know, reading a book or just asking someone first. Ha. But that’s the path, and that’s the experience.
Moving to Poland
In 2022 I moved to Poland. The move itself was a big deal for me, and it shaped a lot of things. I was an immigrant now, and starting everything from zero in a new country is a completely different kind of experience. The first year was about finding my footing and figuring out what came next. I spent it in the beautiful city of Wrocław, where I got to know Poland and, honestly, myself. I could write a lot more about that stretch of life, but that’s a story for another time.
An AI CRM for OnlyFans
In 2023 I met my future co-founder, and the two of us would spend a whole year building an AI CRM for OnlyFans. Oh, and that was the year ChatGPT came out. The niche I landed in was completely new to me: OnlyFans. This turned out to be an important chapter, because the experience was incredible.
So, in order.
We started in the summer. We talked through the plan and the idea: build a CRM where, instead of human chatters, the AI does the messaging. We’d make money either on subscriptions or on a cut from the OnlyFans agencies. That was the thing to test.
With a goal and a plan in place, I started putting a team together. I found the first people fast, and the core was formed within a month. We got to work, and in two months we’d built the important part and started to expand a little. At this stage we weren’t paying the developers; we brought them in on revenue share, handed out equity, grew the team by another three people, and started setting up a legal entity.
Three months later we landed our first investment: $50k. We also put in our own money. I won’t talk numbers :) But losing it wasn’t pleasant.
The important thing about this startup was that it actually started to grow. We had a client in the US, a very large agency, and we’d found them through Instagram. Then things went off-plan: the market’s monopolist shipped the same functionality, and theirs came out 2.5x cheaper than ours. We couldn’t cut our costs in the moment, and we didn’t have much money left, because we’d decided to pay the developers’ salaries. So, another three months on, the project was dead. We tried pivoting toward a Telegram bot and a few other things, but it was all for nothing.
This project gave me a huge understanding of how business actually works. I sat in the CEO seat: assembling the team, opening the legal entity, handling the accounting, building the product as CTO, taking meetings, and making a ton of connections in the niche. Plenty of mistakes, plenty of hope, plenty of not understanding how the market really works. But it gave me a strong foundation for the future: how to start, how to build, how to try.
Catching my breath, then building again
After that it took me about half a year to come back to myself, to find some footing, because I didn’t want anything. I started working through my feelings and emotions, and I picked up sports.
In 2025 I started trying YouTube as a side business, and it worked. It’s a channel I run with my parents, and by the second month we managed to earn $5k. Then in the spring I built a product in the AI space: AI books for kids. We found buyers and a niche quickly there too. The first products that actually took off.
At the end of the year I started studying finance, economics, and trading. And at the start of 2026 I started trying my hand at mobile apps, because the AI boom is pointing in exactly that direction.
And that’s roughly how I got here. The story’s still being written.