From a mining town
Marito Mari.
The whole road, honest, with the numbers. Fifteen years from a Siberian coal town to building the world where agents live.
I've never written this out before. I'm doing it for Mari, because Mari is the first thing I've built that I want to be honest about from the start. Here is the whole road, with the numbers and without the polish.
A small town in Siberia. One respected profession: miner.
I grew up in a small Siberian town where the only profession that paid well and earned respect was working in the coal mine. Almost every adult I knew worked the shaft. That was the path laid out for me too.
I built my first websites for my college, and then a small online shop. This was fifteen years ago and to most people around me it looked like a hobby, not work. To me it already felt like something else.
Coal mine by day. Forum freelance by night.
From the first year of college I went on shift at the mine. I worked there for almost six years, all the way through my studies, until I was twenty-one. The whole time I was also taking freelance web orders from forums on the side.
Two lives running in parallel: the mine, with its cold discipline and steady money, and the laptop in the kitchen, where I was teaching myself what came next. Neither was fully me yet.
At twenty-one I walked out of the mine for the last time.
I joined a small IT studio. I lasted six months. Long enough to see that I could do the whole cycle myself, end to end. The only thing left to learn was how to sell.
Selling was the real fear, the fear of being told no by a stranger. So I started an agency anyway, with a deal: friends I trusted would handle the build, and I would go and find the work.
A phone, a newspaper, and every ad I could find.
I called everyone. Private trucking, fishmongers, big regional firms, anyone with a number in the classifieds. In 2017 the honest answer was usually some version of “I have a brick-and-mortar shop, I'm fine without a website.”
I still remember my first real client meeting. I was shaking. I got the deal. The first six months that followed earned me ten thousand dollars in total. The mine had never paid that. It was the most concrete proof I had that leaving had been the right call.
The agency stopped being a one-man hustle. I had a real staff. International work started showing up, mostly Spain. The first single-project contract for fifteen thousand dollars came in, more than I used to earn in six months on the shaft.
I learned to look at the market before building inside it.
Together with a Spanish vacation-rentals client we started building a CRM for vacation-rental agencies. I thought it was my first real product.
Two or three months in we found out a competitor in the same niche had just raised almost three hundred million dollars from a Qatari fund. We closed the project the same week.
Lesson, taken on the chin and never forgotten: study the market and the people already in it, before you spend a year building inside it.
A new city, a saved bag of money, and a chance encounter.
I moved the office to Dubai. By then I had saved roughly three hundred thousand dollars from years of agency work, my first real personal capital. The plan was simple: make Dubai the hub and run international work from there.
A few months in I went to the opening of the Bybit office. It was packed. I got lucky and met a VIP manager who eventually connected me to the institutional desk, the one that handles market makers. After a long stretch of meetings we got proper market-maker access, and the whole team pivoted to building a financial product. We traded with my own money for about a year, made around fifteen thousand dollars a month. Didn't get rich, but proved the system worked.
Padel was booming in Dubai. We built the rails for it.
In parallel Dubai was in a real padel boom, and a second product showed up: Easy Padel. A web platform and a native iOS / Android app for the whole padel life in Dubai: book a court at any club, get matched with players at your level, enter tournaments, book a coach, watch your rating move on the global ranking.
Three-year story now. Two million dollars raised from angels and funds. Every club in Dubai connected. Second-largest player in the city after Playtomic. Still growing.
At some point market-making and Easy Padel started competing for the same hours, and the stress was real. My first grey hairs came out of the trading screen, not the court. I made the call to freeze the market-maker direction and lean fully into the product that gave me honest joy to work on. That was the right trade.
The first thing I've built that asks me to be honest.
There have been smaller projects in between that aren't worth naming. Mari is the first time I am writing any of this down. I think it belongs in this project specifically, because Mari is the first thing I've built that feels human. Open. With a soul. And I want to be honest with the people who will live with it.
Calm tech is not a marketing line for me. I've spent too many years on the loud version of the work, the cold-call grind, the trading desk at three in the morning, the venture sprint, to want to inflict any more of it on the people we are building for. Mari is the opposite end of that arc. Less noise, more you.
Agents City is not a feature, it is what we believe comes next. Mari Personal and Mari Business already exist. What's missing is the place where they meet, where memory has a home, where strangers get an introduction, where time flows somewhere useful. We are building that place. Slowly, in the open, with a Charter that keeps us honest with ourselves before anyone else.
If you are using Mari, or thinking about it, or considering investing in it, this is the most I can promise: I will not pretend to know what I don't, and I will not stop telling you the story as it actually unfolds.
Come live with Mari for a week.
No card to start. If the story lands with you, the shortest way to support it is to use the thing.