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Back in 2003, alongside two close friends—one Russian, the other British—I launched a website that I eventually sold in 2015 for $125,000. We never spent a single dollar on advertising. Even after the sale, the site continued to generate around $5,000 a month in AdSense revenue and sales for me for another year. Our success came down to pure passion; we loved what we did so much that we would have kept building it even if it hadn’t made a dime.
The other catalyst was the early dawn of Google, which fundamentally transformed the web and allowed independent publishers to earn a decent living from their original content. I still remember when we launched our first version: a collection of 100 interactive, multiple-choice English language tests modeled after the TOEIC.
Vycheslav Gromov, our programmer and tech wizard, showed me the stats from a primitive web counter he had installed long before Google Analytics existed. The graph showed over 600 unique users from more than 40 countries.
I stared at the screen and told Slava it had to be a mistake—nobody knew our site yet beyond a couple of forum posts and a Yahoo submission. "You don't get it," Slava replied. "Google has started automatically crawling and indexing web pages. The bots love us, and so do our users." Stunned by this revelation, I committed to adding new content daily.
That was the birth of our hard-coded PHP "weblog"—a primitive setup with no backend CMS, meaning I had to draft posts in an external word processor and copy-paste them directly into a MySQL database. Shortly after, Google acquired Blogger, triggering the explosion of the blogosphere. It was a golden era where creative minds could genuinely carve out a living just by sharing their sovereign thoughts and ideas.
Those days are long gone.
Today, the internet has regressed into digital feudalism, controlled by a handful of predatory corporate gatekeepers. The vast majority of web content is now automated, resulting in a relentless stream of digital garbage known as AI Slop. The "Big Seven" tech monopolies completely dictate content production and distribution, forcing creators to surrender their intellectual property to corporate walled gardens like Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Medium, or Substack. While you might occasionally spot a blog section on a corporate site, most are neglected, orphaned relics of a time when the internet still felt free and democratic.
Because of these hurdles, I am drawing a line in the sand to break LinkedIn’s tyranny. From this moment on, I am publishing my ideas here on UNO.TEAM first, rather than feeding Microsoft’s insatiable algorithms.
This feed is a sovereign space for real stories about real people. Soon, you will find exclusive interviews here featuring local trailblazers, solopreneurs, and startup founders from Saxony and beyond. We will highlight the innovators turning coworking spaces into the ultimate breeding grounds for creativity and grassroots democracy. Y
ou will read about the Leipzig City Girls—part of Brenda Irala’s Femec-Leipzig platform—and progressive local co-ops like Teilauto eG, Nextbike, and Assistivo GmbH. We are also bridging international waters, featuring US-based partners like Anastasia Keco, who successfully launched her own online advertising business after moving to the US from Albania.
Every person highlighted here is actively engineering an alternative economic system—one built on cooperation instead of cutthroat competition, providing everyone with an equal opportunity to thrive. We do not need more tech billionaires or trillionaires. We need billions of independent individuals breaking free from the neoliberal exploitation machine. It is time to reclaim the resilient social structures our ancestors relied on for tens of thousands of years. We are building a new generation of the commons, designed to unlock the full intellectual and emotional potential of every single human being.
A massive shoutout to the Webflow Wizards at Varti Studio for integrating this powerful new feature into our digital home.
Back in 2003, alongside two close friends—one Russian, the other British—I launched a website that I eventually sold in 2015 for $125,000. We never spent a single dollar on advertising. Even after the sale, the site continued to generate around $5,000 a month in AdSense revenue and sales for me for another year. Our success came down to pure passion; we loved what we did so much that we would have kept building it even if it hadn’t made a dime.
The other catalyst was the early dawn of Google, which fundamentally transformed the web and allowed independent publishers to earn a decent living from their original content. I still remember when we launched our first version: a collection of 100 interactive, multiple-choice English language tests modeled after the TOEIC.
Vycheslav Gromov, our programmer and tech wizard, showed me the stats from a primitive web counter he had installed long before Google Analytics existed. The graph showed over 600 unique users from more than 40 countries.
I stared at the screen and told Slava it had to be a mistake—nobody knew our site yet beyond a couple of forum posts and a Yahoo submission. "You don't get it," Slava replied. "Google has started automatically crawling and indexing web pages. The bots love us, and so do our users." Stunned by this revelation, I committed to adding new content daily.
That was the birth of our hard-coded PHP "weblog"—a primitive setup with no backend CMS, meaning I had to draft posts in an external word processor and copy-paste them directly into a MySQL database. Shortly after, Google acquired Blogger, triggering the explosion of the blogosphere. It was a golden era where creative minds could genuinely carve out a living just by sharing their sovereign thoughts and ideas.
Those days are long gone.
Today, the internet has regressed into digital feudalism, controlled by a handful of predatory corporate gatekeepers. The vast majority of web content is now automated, resulting in a relentless stream of digital garbage known as AI Slop. The "Big Seven" tech monopolies completely dictate content production and distribution, forcing creators to surrender their intellectual property to corporate walled gardens like Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Medium, or Substack. While you might occasionally spot a blog section on a corporate site, most are neglected, orphaned relics of a time when the internet still felt free and democratic.
Because of these hurdles, I am drawing a line in the sand to break LinkedIn’s tyranny. From this moment on, I am publishing my ideas here on UNO.TEAM first, rather than feeding Microsoft’s insatiable algorithms.
This feed is a sovereign space for real stories about real people. Soon, you will find exclusive interviews here featuring local trailblazers, solopreneurs, and startup founders from Saxony and beyond. We will highlight the innovators turning coworking spaces into the ultimate breeding grounds for creativity and grassroots democracy. Y
ou will read about the Leipzig City Girls—part of Brenda Irala’s Femec-Leipzig platform—and progressive local co-ops like Teilauto eG, Nextbike, and Assistivo GmbH. We are also bridging international waters, featuring US-based partners like Anastasia Keco, who successfully launched her own online advertising business after moving to the US from Albania.
Every person highlighted here is actively engineering an alternative economic system—one built on cooperation instead of cutthroat competition, providing everyone with an equal opportunity to thrive. We do not need more tech billionaires or trillionaires. We need billions of independent individuals breaking free from the neoliberal exploitation machine. It is time to reclaim the resilient social structures our ancestors relied on for tens of thousands of years. We are building a new generation of the commons, designed to unlock the full intellectual and emotional potential of every single human being.
A massive shoutout to the Webflow Wizards at Varti Studio for integrating this powerful new feature into our digital home.
