Two companies from Skopje, bootstrapped
Two products from Skopje, built as well as I could build them. What decided whether anyone paid was never the product. It was distribution, and nobody had told me.
2021 — Kromatika. I started it under the name Aristokrates. Bootstrapped: no round, no deck. $2M in grants, 1,000 users, and a peak valuation of about $26M in November 2021. The customers funded it, which sounds noble and mostly meant that if nobody paid this month, there was no month. It worked. I exited in 2023.
A year in, the token was named in an SEC complaint filing connected to the Wahi insider-trading case. I wasn't a party to it, but the token was classified as an unregistered security. That is a strange thing to read about your own work on a Tuesday morning, and it taught me more about the gap between what builders make and what regulators expect than any course would have.
2025 — Blockia Labs. A consulting company in Estonia, with a few co-founders from Sweden. In that period we started building Blockia Pay, a cross-border money-transfer product. Those were the first days of what is AgentaOS today. We built it for a few months inside that company.
April 2026. We formally split Blockia Labs. Blockia Pay became a separate product and I continued alone. It took four months to find product-market fit: from a payments product to a Merchant of Record. That wasn't adding a feature. It was changing the whole model.
August 2026. AgentaOS launched, for SaaS founders from Macedonia and beyond who want subscriptions, card and wallet payments without a US company. Still a solo-founder story, with a few people helping on compliance, and AI agents and tools. What's left of the whole road is the code, and the mistakes made.
If you're at the same stage, building something alone and asking whether it's worth it: it was.
2026 — AgentaOS
I started again. A merchant of record for founders in countries the big processors don't serve, run out of an Estonian company, from the same desk in Skopje.
Then four months at €0 MRR. Not €200. Zero. I talked to founders, wrote audits nobody asked for, rewrote the pricing page more times than I'll admit, and genuinely considered that I had misread the whole thing.
From 10 August, one month: €0 to €3,600 MRR. No ads. No sales team. The difference wasn't a feature. It was that I stopped waiting and started asking specific people, by name, whether they'd pay.
What both times had in common
Both times I thought the product was the work. Build it well enough and people come. Both times the product sat there, finished and good, while nobody came, because nobody had heard of it.
What moved the number was never a feature. It was distribution: who I talked to, where they already were, how often I showed up, and whether I asked them to pay. Kromatika grew because I put it in front of the right people every day. AgentaOS sat at €0 for four months because I stopped doing that to build, and started moving the month I started again.
The build gets written up. The raise gets written up. The part where you have a good product and no customers, and no idea whose inbox to walk into, is the part everyone skips. It is also where most products quietly die.
Why I run the room
Because from where I sit I watch it happen to other people. Founders here build genuinely good products, set a price, put up a link, and wait. They believe what I believed: that a good product finds its customers. It doesn't. Somebody has to carry it to them.
Software can't fix that. A room can: people at the same stage asking you every week who you talked to, who you asked to pay, and what they said, and asking again the week after. Distribution is a habit, and habits need witnesses.
There is no course, no certificate, no promise you'll be rich. There's a call every week, other founders telling you what didn't work for them, and a room that notices if you go quiet.
What I'm not
I'm not an investor, and I don't want equity. I'm not a marketing guru — I was at €0 for four months this year. I've never sold a company for a headline number, and if that's the credential you're looking for, this isn't the room.
What I do have: two companies built from here without outside money, a payments platform that shows me hundreds of founders' real numbers, and a strong opinion about pricing that I'm happy to be argued out of on a Tuesday.
