Web Summit starts in less than 24 hours, which means I have another sleepless night ahead of me. I decided to use it to write about how all of this began. By 'all of this' I mean my startup taking part in an event like this, the fact that I have a startup at all, and this kind of life where I somehow manage to successfully combine a demanding, high-responsibility full-time job with building my own product.

I am sure it is impossible to single out one specific event that triggered this whole direction, but there definitely was something that played a decisive role.

When I was 15, I first heard about a game that was supposed to be so captivating you just could not tear yourself away, and in which you could do whatever you wanted. That game was Minecraft. Naturally, I wanted to try it. The single-player mode turned out to be really engaging, but I was missing online play. So, together with a good acquaintance from Chernihiv, Ukraine (Vasyl, hi!), whom I had met not long before, we decided to play online on the biggest Russian-speaking pirate server at the time (there simply were no others back then).

It was a huge disappointment to run into massive lags and very unstable server performance. Our online experience did not really work out. But we were young and full of energy, and both of us had some programming and system administration skills, so there was only one way forward: we would build our own server.

We pulled it off, and it worked so well that we decided to make the server public and add donations. At that point we did not expect anything serious from this idea; we just wanted a few more people to play with us besides the two of us.

In the end, at the peak of our server’s growth, we had up to 350 (!) concurrent players online, and our server became the most popular in the Russian-speaking segment. The donations were substantial as well. It was a success so overwhelming that we could hardly believe it was real.

I became a regular visitor to a small office in downtown Khabarovsk where they were cashing out (no, not crypto, it did not exist yet) WebMoney. At 16, I would show up there completely out of place for that environment, politely refuse the offered coffee, and wait while they counted out the amount I had requested.

That was when I realized that this was 'my thing'. I liked that by doing something online you could earn pretty good money (Minecraft has always been a gold mine) while doing what you enjoy, even if it meant just playing games.

Unfortunately, the story of the server ended on a sad note. At some point my acquaintance and I stopped talking, essentially for no clear reason, and we shut the server down. Some time later I brought it back online, but it was too hard to run everything on my own and I could not keep it at the level it needed to be, so after a while I closed it for good.

And the money we made... Well. To put it briefly: a noticeable part of that income was forcibly spent on some very practical lessons in bank card security, handling payment details, and the importance of choosing a reliable bank.