Hi 🤚🏻, My name is Vlad.

Today I live in a lovely house in the middle of Silicon Valley, utilizing my 15 years of experience in IT to build the ultimate One App to Connect Data, AI, and Operations with Ease.

But it wasn’t a Startup story at all!

Unlike most brilliant entrepreneurs like Roy Mann (Monday), Zeb Evans (ClickUp), or Ivan Zhao (Notion), I was born in a tiny village in Eastern Europe with less than 140 households.

As you understand, it was pretty much impossible to pick up ideas from the corporate team survey 😂 or rebuild Craigslist ending up with a PM product like ClickUp.

However, something much bigger brought me to the edge of the biggest tech revolution of our century.

We might forget that, but it’s not about MBA or VC — it’s the ability to Think BIG, DREAM free, and never-ever give UP that unlocks the biggest achievements you can imagine!

My dream was to play music. Specifically, the electric guitar which my family couldn’t really afford.

At that time, the United Nations project bought a computer for our School Library. You could register and use it for an hour every day.

So the plan was born: if I couldn’t buy an electric guitar, I should sell it 😇
Crazy? Ha? )))

I started learning PHP, HTML, and CSS to build a marketplace. In a month, my first fully functional Online Music Instruments store was launched.

Somehow, I managed to write a simple PHP parser and uploaded images, descriptions, and actual prices of thousands of products in a couple of days. I was 13, and of course, I didn’t have money to buy anything.

But I had a beautiful website that looked like a huge corporate store.

Small problem: nobody knew me, I had $3, and it was my entire marketing budget 😂

So, I started doing what I could — mimicrating SEO practices from TOP stores in Europe. Users began seeing my website on Yahoo, Google, Bing, and other Search Engines. Still no orders, but it was a good cold start!

How to convince users to make orders? I’ve optimized everything: the order button, checkout page, account page…

You can imagine my feelings when realizing that the beautiful FLASH-based masterpiece 😇 I designed is loading for minutes on most devices; people simply go away.

It was a tough decision, but I sacrificed this piece of coding art.
The same day, people made orders.

HAPPY END! 🎉
No…

My family didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t want to bother them since they were critical about the internet anyway. Moreover, my grandmother always said: “it was possible — everyone would do it…”

Nonetheless, I was 14 and couldn’t open a bank account to collect money online.

Fortunately, a national delivery company launched a new service called “pay-as-receive.” So now I could send orders and get cash without company (Disclaimer: I paid TAX later 😇).

But where to get products?
For months I just called users and canceled orders saying, “We are sorry, it’s not in stock.”

Wholesale companies didn’t want to hear about 14 years old “buyer”.

So, one day I changed my voice on the phone, collected orders for two weeks, and made THE most important CALL in my life.

I had a big order, even for this wholesale company.

Somehow, I convinced their sales team to send products using the pay-as-received option. I also promised to send them my company registration documents. Which I did four years later 😂.

That was my first cash )))

Hundreds of life-hacking stories later, we opened physical stores in three countries; I learned 3D modeling, built a custom CNC machine, spoke to dozens of the best guitar players in The World, and launched my own Electric Guitars Manufacturer. This photo was taken ten years ago!

You can imagine the number of operational and engineering challenges my team, and I hacked for 15 years. 😵‍💫

I’m so grateful to the Internet community, which gave me my first “degree” in Lifehacks Science 😇 the way earlier, I wrote my Ph.D. thesis at the classic University.

Today, I’m giving back, helping millions of entrepreneurs around the globe with iForels so THEY can focus on their own BIG DREAMS 🌟!!!

I sincerely hope my life journey will convince some of you to recognize the importance of perseverance, creativity, and dreaming big, so you can prove on your own example that even the most unlikely beginnings can lead to incredible success.

Good luck, folks!