This is the first post, the start of my new blog. I’ve created personal blogs in the past. All of them failed because I abandoned them.

My articles in the past tried to teach, share code snippets I had invented, or tell stories trying to motivate people.

This time is different. I’m not going to teach or try to motivate anyone. This is just me sharing my journey to financial freedom.

Where am I now

I am literally on the last night of a vacation trip with my family in Syros. Thinking about where I want to go, dreaming about how to do it. Reading about other people’s stories gave me the courage to give it a go.

Speaking about work, I am a co-founder at metabook, Greece’s #1 preloved book marketplace. I bootstrapped the company in 2017 as a part-time project, working in the afternoons. Nine years later, the company is a team of 7 people.

As a software engineer it was part of the job to know how to work with computers. You push buttons, run the code, and it either works or you retry until it does.

Working with humans is another story. I was never taught how to communicate in a working environment, how to organize the work to be done, how to plan, how to set boundaries, how to prioritize, how to deal with scammer attacks and security issues. All these things I had to learn by trying and failing. Again and again.

Marketplaces are complex systems. And they are expensive to run, especially when doing C2C transactions, meaning the seller and the buyer are both non-business individuals. metabook has over 300k registered users and receives about 50 to 80 new customer tickets daily. Email only; phone calls are not supported. Our team consists of 2 customer support agents, 2 senior developers, 1 senior designer, and 2 co-founders, and a lot of AI tokens.

Shipping features and solutions to users’ problems was my main motivation when I started the company. The features were poorly designed but they helped our customers. However, as the user base grew, the complexity of the machine grew with it. The codebase is now more than 500,000 lines of code. Working on new features requires ensuring you’re solving the right problem, solving it with the right approach, and designing it so that it causes no questions when users face the new UI. The feature should speak for itself. Simple and easy.