Greg

I'm planning to be more intentional on X in 2026, so here's who I am and what I do: I'm Greg. - Running 4 companies with ~40 people, 0 outside investment - 1M+ transactions processed on Easytools, our creator stack - Bootstrapped a Polish AI education company to $8.2M - 20,000+ graduates from Samsung, Allegro, PwC, Orange - 50%+ course completion rate (industry average: 5-15%) Most of this happened in the last 3 years, and almost all of it came from ignoring the playbook everyone else copies. I grew up in a Polish apartment block. Built websites in Flash at 14 for Quake clans. Learned to code by retyping examples out of physical books because YouTube didn't exist yet. That whole arc, from retyping code in a Polish apartment as a kid to running 4 companies between Mallorca and Warsaw, is the lens I see everything through today. Here's what I'll be posting about: - Lessons from 200K customers across 18 yrs of selling online - Running 4 companies async with a small team + automations - What it actually takes to build a serious company without a single round of VC - How giving course authors the majority of profit became our biggest moat - Why education and tools belong in the same business, not separate ones - The founder traps that quietly kill bootstrapped companies before they scale Most founders I meet are quietly burning years building the wrong thing the wrong way. VC traps, cofounder traps and "best practices" that only work at scale you'll never reach. My goal for 2026 is to give you the unedited version of what actually works. Follow if you want the full playbook. I'll link every thread I write under this post. Let's go.

If this resonated, repost the first tweet so the next person stuck at €0 sees it. And follow @greg_rog for more on the unglamorous early chapters that built 4 real companies.

If you're at $0 right now on something you're building, you're not behind, but in the most important chapter. Find your 6 Quake players. Ship something ugly. Learn what they want from how they use it, not from what they say. That's what I'd tell the 14-year-old version of me.

My first business made $0. A website for a Quake clan in 2026. But every single skill I use to run 4 companies today started there. Here's the lesson I'd tell my 14-year-old self:

"Not ready" is the most expensive lie a builder tells themselves. Every month you wait is a month of customer learning you forfeited, revenue you didn't reinvest, and word of mouth that never compounded. You don't get those months back.

I can code. I chose no-code. That single decision is why I run 4 companies instead of 1.

We give 14-day no-questions refunds at premium pricing. Most founders are scared of this. We use it as a weapon. Trust is the highest-converting copywriting.

I built an agent that finds podcasts I should be on. - It scans my niche. - It pitches the host. - It books the call. - It puts it on my calendar. I didn't do any of those four steps. The agent did.

Our course completion rate is 50%+. Industry average: 5-15%. How? → Live cohorts. → Community accountability. → Real homework with real feedback. → Practitioners as instructors (not lecturers). Most edtech tries to scale through self-paced video. We scale through structure. The math is better.

In 2007 I sold tech courses on DVDs through Allegro. Pre-streaming. 18 years later, that DVD business became Eduweb, one of Poland's largest edtech platforms. Every winning business looks dumb 10 years before it works. If you wait for it to look smart, you're already late.

A founder picking a city should not ask where the prestige is. They should ask where the density of operators in their phase lives, at a cost that doesn't drain the runway, in a time zone that fits their customer. Prestige is a lagging indicator.

The €0 phase is the point. It's where you learn to make something real for people you can see, before money distorts your judgement. Skip this phase and every product you build later will be aimed at a fantasy customer.

Most "exits" are not really exits. They are just employment contracts with earnouts, integration commitments, and four more years of working for someone else. They're selling the next decade of their life, not the company.