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character.

School finished at 14:00. By 15:00, I was on my bicycle delivering food for Bolt Food.

No dramatic origin story. I had plenty of friends, plenty of time, and a simple question: what else am I doing? Why not spend two to four hours a day working? There was still time to hang out and fuck around afterwards.

Customers kept asking how old I was. Then came the next question: ‘What are you going to do after school?’ Order some food, get a teenage courier, discuss his future at the door.

I didn't have a perfect answer. But I liked earning my own money. It let me live, eat, go out, and do things more freely. The deal made sense to me: put the effort in, get paid for what I do.

At eighteen, while I was still delivering, I went to university to study business. I stayed for four months.

Mostly, I went for connections. I wasn't expecting someone to teach me how to become a businessman. To me, business is probably eighty percent practice and twenty percent theory. You have to deal with actual people, actual decisions, actual money. We live in the real world.

When I arrived, I practically interviewed the whole group. I wanted to know what everyone was planning to build.

Only one person said they wanted to start some kind of business. Most were there to have more job options after university.

That confused the fuck out of me. I'd come looking for people who wanted to do business. They were studying business to get a job. Fair enough for them, but what was I doing there?

Then we had a business project. Two months to prepare it. People formed groups and planned food trucks, car services—the usual stuff. I kept looking at the ideas and wondering how the margins were supposed to support five people.

I worked alone. Didn't want a group.

My idea came from scrolling Instagram: OnlyFans management. In Lithuania, at the time, OnlyFans still felt like some American shit happening somewhere far away. But there was a business model there.

I put the project together a few hours before the lecture. No slide deck. I stood up and talked for ten minutes.

The teacher laughed and told me I needed to make something real.

I understood her reaction. You can have whatever opinion you want about OnlyFans. I wasn't presenting it as something good or bad. I was presenting a business model that could work.

Later, when I was already a barber, I actually did it. It made money. But that belongs to another chapter.

What stayed with me from university was the feeling that I was simulating work. Attending lectures. Having a project to do. Looking like I was moving towards something, while becoming less convinced that I wanted to be there.

So I left.

Courier work made sense for that part of my life. University helped me realise what I wanted to spend my time doing. Neither had to last forever.

I wanted more knowledge, more connections, more money. And I wanted to get those things by doing something real.

The takeaway / I didn't want to keep studying the idea of business. I wanted to try doing it.

Barbering started with my friend Ignat. My first barber, a dear friend, and the person who put the idea in my head.

He wanted to open a studio with two chairs. One day, he asked if I wanted to become a barber.

Why not?

That was enough for me to go and learn. The funny thing is, he never opened the studio. I'd started preparing for a place that didn't end up existing. But Ignat still helped me find my first job—and somehow my first barbershop was top, top. Number one in Lithuania. Ahahaha. Quite a fucking place to start.

Before that, I went to Minsk, Belarus, for barber courses. It was cheaper there.

On my first lesson, I had my first real client.

A real person, sitting in front of me, waiting for a haircut. I had never touched barber equipment in my life. Now I was supposed to use it on someone's head.

Crazy scary.

Luckily, my coach was great. That first step into barbering wasn't me watching from a safe distance for weeks. I had someone in the chair. I had to start.

When it came to finding models, I downloaded Tinder and wrote that I needed people for haircuts.

Some of the guys thought I was gay. I'm not. I was looking for heads to practise on. Ahahaha.

And honestly, the beginning went well. I had plenty of paying clients early on. I made mistakes, of course. I was learning. But I had people coming in, I was doing the work, and I was earning money.

In the first month, I made approximately what I'd spent on the courses and equipment. Everything I'd paid to get started, earned back in about a month.

That felt fucking good.

Within the first two months, I already thought I was good at it. My ego is fucking awesome. It didn't need much time to get comfortable.

But the reason I've stayed is simple: I love my clients. They're great guys. I enjoy seeing them, I enjoy cutting their hair, and I do it well.

Since then, other businesses have come and gone. I've tried things, made money, lost interest, moved on. Barbering has kept its place through all of it.

It started with a friend asking, ‘Maybe you want to try?’ I'm still behind the chair.

The takeaway / Sometimes ‘why not?’ turns into something you want to keep.

Five years without really talking, and then Gleb booked a haircut.

We'd been friends before. He came in, we reconnected, and became close again. Then he asked if I wanted to start an OnlyFans management business with him.

As always: yeah, why not?

I'd already presented the idea at university. Now there were two of us ready to actually try it. We did everything together.

We found our first model on Tinder. I'm good-looking. Finding someone wasn't the hardest part. Ahahaha. She was a good girl, we agreed on a deal, and we took care of everything.

In the first week, we earned 2k. The first fucking week.

That went straight to my head. The money felt easy. Everything felt easy. We'd started something, it was working, and suddenly my ego had all the evidence it needed.

I was the king.

Did I do anything smart with that money? No. I fucked that part up. Mostly, I enjoyed the feeling of being someone who could make it.

I'm better now. Still the king, obviously.

But even in that first month, the work was already draining me.

I'd wake up at eight or nine, get to the barbershop for ten, and cut hair until nine in the evening. Then I'd go to Gleb's, and we'd work on the accounts until three in the morning.

Go home. Sleep a few hours. Get up. Back to the chair. We repeated that for around six months.

Try being fully there for your clients all day when you were working until three the night before. Then finish that day knowing you still have another shift waiting for you. There was money coming in, so I kept trying to make it work. But I wasn't prepared to live like that.

The stress showed up physically, too. I had a skin problem on my thighs that flared up under heavy stress. It's something that still comes back when the stress gets bad.

At the beginning, we could handle everything ourselves. As it continued, we needed help: chatters, a virtual assistant, people who could take work off our hands.

I didn't have the experience to build that properly. So I kept putting more of my own hours into it, even when there weren't enough hours left.

I tried to keep it alive. I didn't see good money coming in and casually decide I'd had enough. I wanted it to work. But wanting it and knowing how to run it were two different things.

Eventually, the lack of experience killed it.

That part is mine to own. We proved we could make money with the idea. I still had to learn how to manage the work, hire people, and build something I could actually keep running.

The takeaway / Making money in the first week doesn't mean you know how to run the business for the next six months.

After OnlyFans management ended, I went back to a routine I already knew.

Get to the barbershop at ten. Work until nine. Go to the gym. Go home. Doomscroll. Sleep. Do it again.

For about six months, that was my life.

The money we'd made had fucked with my sense of what was normal. Once you've seen that much come in over days and weeks, earning fifteen euros per client feels different. I was doing the same work, but now I kept comparing it to what we'd been making.

In my head, I was worth more. I'd already made more. Surely I knew what to do.

Except I didn't really know. I'd helped build something that made money, then watched it fall apart. I had confidence in what I could earn, but no clear idea of how to get there again. Maybe I was afraid to try.

That was difficult to sit with while cutting hair all day.

From the outside, I probably looked fine. I smiled at clients. Had conversations. Did my job. Inside, I was fucked. I wasn't enjoying work anymore, and pretending I was became part of the working day.

After what I'd called success, I felt like I was back to being a regular worker for someone else. And the person I worked for kept making it sound like there were no good opportunities outside barbering at his shop.

I already felt stuck. Hearing that made it worse.

Then I'd go to the gym.

I'd love to say I was building discipline, clearing my mind, enjoying the process. I hated the gym. Never liked it. I just needed something to do. In that sense, it served the same purpose as scrolling on my phone: something to fill the hours before I had to get up and repeat the day.

Eventually, I hated that barbershop so much that I left.

I went to Cyberpunk Barbers. Met Nedas. That's where things started to change.

I was still a barber. Still cutting hair. But being in a new place, around new people, gave me room to enjoy it again. I'd spent months thinking I couldn't stand the job anymore. Then I moved, and the work started feeling good again.

That new place gave me a new life.

I didn't suddenly have every business figured out. But I liked being at work again. I liked what I was doing. After six months of smiling through a day I wanted to finish, that meant a lot.

The takeaway / I needed to leave that shop to find out how much I still liked being a barber.

Gleb suggested selling travel bags. I thought, why not?

Our first attempt at e-commerce. Ahahaha. We ordered twenty or thirty bags—the kind you can fit everything you need for a trip into—and decided we were going to sell them.

The business basically died the day the bags arrived.

Before that, it was an idea. Then the stock turned up, and we actually had to get people to buy it.

We tried Vinted, Skelbiu, and Facebook groups. Put the bags out there. Sold zero.

Not ‘sales were slow.’ Not ‘we struggled to make a profit.’ Literally not one fucking bag. They're still lying somewhere.

I could make this sound more complicated. Talk about the market, the competition, the strategy. But honestly, we hit the first bump and stopped. We weren't interested enough to figure it out.

We liked the idea of having an e-commerce business. When it came to selling the actual bags, neither of us gave much of a shit.

That's quite a problem when you've just bought twenty or thirty of them.

Looking back, it's funny. Two guys who'd already made money together, defeated by a small pile of travel bags. No dramatic collapse. Just stock arriving, a few attempts to sell it, and absolutely no desire to keep going.

I don't regret trying. But I can see our part in it clearly: we barely gave it a chance, because we didn't care about the business we'd chosen.

‘Why not?’ had got me into barbering. It had got us into OnlyFans management. This time, it got us some bags.

The takeaway / Before buying the stock, make sure you actually want to do the work that comes after it arrives.

Gleb had another idea. ‘What do you think about selling websites?’

Yeah, why not? Let's go. By then, this was becoming a familiar way to start a business.

We bought a website from a guy in Pakistan and decided he'd be our developer. He charged a hundred euros per website. We were going to sell them to Lithuanian businesses for two thousand.

On paper, beautiful.

We had someone to build the websites. Now we needed people to sell them. So we found five guys through friends and offered them two hundred euros for every sale.

One developer. Five callers. A contact list. An agency. At least, that's what we thought we'd put together.

The developer messaged us every day asking if there was any work he could do. He was ready.

The sales team was having a harder time getting started.

Every day, someone was going to call. Going to start working. Going to get on it. Then barely anything happened. Five guys, one contact list, and somehow making calls was the thing nobody wanted to do.

When a call did happen, the pitch was basically: ‘Hey, my name is Dave. How's your day? By the way, do you need a website?’ No? ‘Okay, have a nice day.’

End of call. Back to waiting for a business to appear.

We had no paying clients. Zero. The developer kept asking for work, and we had nothing to give him.

It's easy to look back and call the salespeople lazy fucks. We certainly thought they were. But we were the ones running it. We'd recruited people, told them what they could earn, handed over a list, and expected that to be enough.

We didn't know how to manage them. We didn't know how to turn all those promises to start tomorrow into actual work today.

One guy did pick up the phone and made a decent effort. That made it even clearer that the others weren't really trying. Still, we never got the whole thing working.

After around three months, it ended.

Honestly, saying we ‘ran a website agency for three months’ almost gives us too much credit. We arranged the basic pieces. We had a price, a developer, and people who'd agreed to sell.

Then we waited for those pieces to become a business. They didn't.

We did a shitty job. That's the useful part to remember. Hiring five people had made the idea feel bigger, but we still had to give them direction, follow up, and deal with what happened when nobody did the work.

We weren't experienced enough to do that yet.

The takeaway / Five people saying they'll work is still zero people working until someone actually starts.

Softly started with us getting drunk as fuck.

That's the origin story. No market research presentation. We decided to sell sofas, sourced them from Poland, and brought them to my dad's warehouse.

Another business with Gleb. Another ‘why not?’ But this time, we actually worked.

That's the biggest difference between Softly and the bags or the website agency. We wanted this one to work, and we put effort into it. We got customers. Sold sofas. Organised deliveries. Then had to get those fucking sofas into people's homes.

I was still barbering four days a week. If I had a gap between clients, I could deal with something for the business. Outside those four days, I had time to build it.

I always have time. That's how I look at it. There's usually something I can do to move things forward. With Softly, there was always something to do.

One delivery sums it up pretty well.

A family bought a sofa and asked if we could move their old one to another house. Fifty euros extra.

Yeah, why not? Fifty euros sounded good for moving a sofa.

The old sofa was on the sixth floor. Eleven people stood watching while we dealt with it. Little kids were smoking vapes. We were there trying to get the furniture moved with an audience following the operation.

Then we drove it to the other house.

Old, run-down place. Holes in the floor. A tiny entrance. No lights, so everyone was using flashlights while we tried to work out how to get the sofa inside.

You agree to move one piece of furniture for fifty euros, and suddenly you're navigating holes in somebody's floor by torchlight. But we got it done. Everything was good.

That was Softly. A sale could turn into a whole fucking episode, and we were the ones who had to see it through.

We kept going because we had a feeling it could work. There was demand. We were making sales. Over a year, we did two and a half times what we'd started with. Look at the percentage, and it sounds like a good business.

Then look at the money left for the people doing the work. Around a hundred euros on a sofa. For three people.

Three people sourcing, selling, organising, carrying, driving, and dealing with whatever was waiting at the other end of the delivery.

We'd proved we could put effort into something and get results. But the result still had to be worth the effort. A good percentage didn't make the actual amount in our pockets any bigger.

Eventually, I closed it.

I'm glad we tried properly. This one never left us wondering what might have happened if we'd bothered to work. We did work. We went out, sold the sofas, and delivered them.

And after all that, the money was pocket change for what it took.

The takeaway / Before getting excited about the percentage, count what's left—and how many people worked for it.

After Softly, I kept coming back to the same problem. Marketing.

Different businesses, different products, but getting customers was always something we needed to get better at. I'd spent time finding things to sell, finding people to work with, and figuring out how to deliver. I wanted to get better at bringing the business in.

That's where Emailflow started.

This time, I'm building it alone. I'm the founder, and right now that means I'm also the person doing the work.

Learning. Building automations. Sending cold emails every day. Working on SEO, VEO, GEO—trying the things that could help people find me while I go out and find them.

I'm still looking for the first client.

That's where the story is today. I can tell you what I'm building and what I want it to become, but I'm still working towards getting someone to say yes and pay for the service.

The focus is the UK. More businesses, more money, more opportunities. I want to give myself access to a bigger market, and then figure out how to earn my place in it.

There's a lot to work through. Finding that first client. Getting the funnel working. Preparing the onboarding so that when someone does sign up, I can take them through the process properly.

Some days, it's a lot of effort before you have much to show anyone. I'm building knowledge and systems, but I still need customers. I've been through enough attempts to know that getting the pieces ready is only part of the job.

One decision is already different this time: I'm hiring instead of partnering.

I want to take responsibility for the direction and bring people in for clear jobs. I've had businesses where we were all involved, but still didn't manage to make the work happen. I want to handle that better.

The goal is ten subscribers to the service by the end of 2026. First, I need one.

So if you ask what's working at Emailflow right now: me. Ahahaha.

I'm putting in the effort, learning what I'm missing, and trying to turn the next conversation into the first client. This chapter is still being written.

The takeaway / Right now, the goal is simple: earn the first yes, deliver the work, and build from there.

Deep down, I'd always wanted to make clothes. I just hadn't given the thought much attention.

I wanted something mine. Mine mine.

Something I could wear because I'd decided how it should look. Then keep changing it as my taste and skills developed. That became Gudsex.

The idea behind the name is simple: if you love something, do it gud.

And yeah, I love sex. But the name connects to how I enjoy life in general. You meet someone or discover something new. You get curious. Get closer. Find out what's underneath—the naked truth. You figure out whether you actually want it.

Then you want to make the experience good. Give pleasure and get some yourself. Enjoy it enough that you want to fucking scream.

There's so much to discover and enjoy. I want Gudsex to carry that feeling: curiosity, confidence, pleasure, the willingness to get involved and live.

The first pieces are simple. A blank T-shirt and a cap with the logo. Nothing particularly special yet. I'm comfortable saying that.

The samples are here. An idea that used to sit somewhere in my head is now something I can hold and put on.

From here, I want to keep improving it. Get more practice. Add some spice. Keep the things I love and remove the things I don't. Make each version closer to what I want to wear.

I'm doing this alone. I work on Gudsex when I'm happy.

And I'm happy every day. I'm not sitting around waiting for inspiration. I fucking love living life. There's always something I want to try, make, wear, or experience, and Gudsex gives me somewhere to put that energy.

Who's it for? People like me.

Young people building something, working in business, going out, clubbing, partying, still finding time for sport. People with things to do the next morning who also want to enjoy tonight.

I can picture the person wearing it because I'm making the clothes for myself first. Would I put this on? Would I keep reaching for it? What would make me like it more? That gives me somewhere honest to start.

Marketing is next. We'll see what other people think.

For now, the samples exist. I wanted something of my own, and I've started making it.

The takeaway / If you love something, do it gud. Then keep making it better.