I’ve been thinking about this blog for the last 6 months.
Not because I didn’t know what to write.

Because starting a blog means being visible.
And visible people become easy targets for judgment.

I’m also changing my personal username here to @elpavlo

In some competitors’ stories - I’m a hacker, a criminal,
and probably a movie villain.

In real life, I’ve been building products for many years.

This channel is not about motivation.
Not about success porn.

It’s about business, pressure, bad decisions, and fixing them.

Big thanks to the people who pushed me to finally start 🫶
Of course, thanks to the OnlyMonster team.

And a very special thank you to a business competitor
who accidentally did a great job motivating me.

No noise.
Just work.

The name of this blog is Not Safe for Business.

Not because it’s funny.
Not because it’s edgy.

But because real business is uncomfortable.

It’s pressure.
It’s risk.
It’s decisions that can ruin your sleep.

If you want safe stories,
polite lessons,
and motivational quotes
— you’re in the wrong place.

This is how real products are built.

Not safe.
Not pretty.
But real.

I started building my first websites more than 20 years ago.
I was 14.

No startup mindset.
No big plans.
Just curiosity, a computer, and very bad internet.

I studied marketing at university.
Building things is one skill.
Understanding how they grow is another.

I made my first million in my twenties.
E-commerce, large communities in social networks, IT outsourcing, early crypto projects and mining, etc

Since then, I’ve built dozens of websites
and software products of different complexity.

Product and marketing shaped how I think and work.

Then life hit, 6 years ago

Everything I had was wiped out.
Business gone.
Control gone.
Certainty gone.

I didn’t fail.
That version of me stopped existing.

I’ll talk about it when the time is right.

Three years ago, I got the idea for OnlyMonster

Not a pitch
Not a startup dream

A business task.

The goal was simple
Build something from zero
No investors
No initial capital
No big team

All investments were under $1,000
Basic servers
Domains
Minimum setup

Back then, all current competitors already existed
Today, most of them are gone
Simply wiped out from the market…

Today I lost $260,000 on a gold drop

I had an experienced trader
At some point he lost control
The balance went to zero

So what

That’s the human factor

There is always a human factor
In trading
In business
In investments

Even with AI and robots around
Mistakes will still happen
Because systems are built by people

Investing is not about being right every time
It’s about surviving mistakes

Perfect strategies don’t exist
Only risk management does

Today I turn 35

And today I clearly realize one thing
Money means nothing by itself

What really matters are people around you
Those you can trust
Those who are not in your life just to get something from you
But simply because they are there
And will show up when it matters

And family
There is nothing more valuable than seeing your loved ones smile
In those moments you understand what all of this is actually for

Grateful for everyone who is part of my life
Moving forward

A few hours ago we crashed a Formula 1 car

Damage is over $300,000 🤯

Speed is addictive

My grandmother used to say
Move fast slowly
Move fast slowly

When you go too fast
You lose focus
And start playing with fate

There was a time when I was managing 14 projects at once
I thought speed was strength

Life slowed me down later

Today at OnlyMonster I prefer not to rush

We have dozens of integrations and collaborations in line
We could push a lot of impressive things very quickly

But focus wins

Doing fewer things better wins

P.S. I wasn’t the one driving
And I’m not allowed to post photos 🤷🏼‍♂️

Last week a military drone hit the apartment next door to one of our designers.
She's based in Ukraine.

She took one day off.
Then came back to work.

The same week, one of our engineers
was stopped on the street in Kyiv
and taken to the front.

He's still there.
We can't get him back.

These are not stories about resilience. This is just Tuesday for my team.

We started three years ago - two people. Today we're 74.
Four dev teams, no juniors,
almost no mids.
No one who needs to be pushed.

I don't motivate people.
I work 12 hours a day, every day.
I answer fast. I show up.
That's it.

When your team works under blackouts,
under rockets, under real fear -
the least you can do
is never let them see you disappear.

They don't need inspiration.
They need to know the person leading them is still standing.

I'm proud of these people
more than anything I've built. 🫶

ChatGPT is becoming a search bar.
Nothing wrong with that.
But it's not where I do real work anymore.

The switch happened accidentally.
I was analyzing my health data -
complex, detailed, a lot of context.
ChatGPT lost the thread by message five.
Forgot what I said in message one.

That's when I tried Claude.

Last month I was rebuilding OnlyMonster's billing system.
Loaded every requirement, every constraint, every edge case.
Asked Claude to write detailed prompts for Figma.

First attempt. 80% done. Correctly.

With ChatGPT that same task
would take five or six tries -
and by attempt six,
it no longer remembers what attempt one was supposed to preserve.
This is the actual difference.
Not speed. Not interface.
Memory. Context. Thinking.

My workflow now:
Perplexity for deep research and facts.
Everything goes into Claude.
Projects with instructions attached.
Almost my entire operation lives there.
90% of our company uses AI daily.
We pay for every tool, no restrictions.
But I personally moved everything to Claude -
and I'm not going back.

Use ChatGPT for quick answers.
Use Claude when it actually matters.

Your customers don't buy your product.
They hire it to do a job.

That one sentence changed how I think about OnlyMonster.

There's a framework called Jobs-to-be-Done.
The idea is simple:
people don't want your features.
They want a specific outcome.
And if you don't know what outcome -
you're building blind.

Classic example:
people don't buy a drill.
they buy a hole in the wall.
they don't even want the hole -
they want the shelf up.
they don't want the shelf -
they want the room to feel like home.

Every level deeper = new product decisions.

I have a business coach.
Not on my team - external.
He built and ran a Unicorn.
300+ people under management.

His advice: before you plan the next year -
map your market properly.
SWOT. JTBD. Full competitor picture.

So last month I sat down with my new CMO
and we did exactly that. Together.
Almost a month of work.
10+ iterations. Google Sheets with detailed analysis
on every competitor(10 of them), every channel, every gap.

What we found:

The competition in our space is strong.
But it's concentrated in completely different places
than we thought.

Entire segments of the market -
nobody is building for them.
Entire channels - nobody is using them.

I now know exactly where to aim for the next 12 months.
Not a feeling. Not intuition.
A document with data behind every decision.

If you run a business and haven't done this -
you're making strategy on assumptions.
That's an expensive way to learn.

It’s Sunday. Almost midnight.

My team has been coding all day.

We just closed a series of vulnerabilities.

Here’s what happened: attackers used social engineering - getting hired into our clients’ teams, then exploiting software vulnerabilities to escalate their own privileges within the system. We stay on top of everything - monitoring, reacting, closing gaps fast.

Yesterday they tried again. We saw it. They got nowhere.

Some people might think we ignore these things. We don’t. For the past four months - every single time something happens, we react, we fix it, we close the gap.

This is not a one-day battle. They push. We defend. Every time.

Today one of our own clients flagged another vulnerability. We paid them for it and we’re closing it right now. That’s the kind of relationship we want - if you find something, tell us. We pay for it. No questions asked.

Four months of non-stop pressure. Lawsuits. Cyberattacks. Black PR. Spam to our clients. Scammers. Emotional and financial pressure. Everything at once. I think someone believed we’d break easily.

We started almost three years ago. No investors. No outside capital. Every dollar earned goes back into the product. Today we’re in the top 2 in our market (out of 10+)

We didn’t get here by being fragile.

This is part of growing up as a company. Every serious product goes through this. You don’t get attacked if nobody cares about you.

One more thing - and this applies to every business, not just ours. Classic hacking is nearly dead. Almost 100% of attacks today start with social engineering - someone earns your trust first, gets inside, then looks for a vulnerability to exploit. Without that first step, most vulnerabilities are unreachable.

The weakest point is never the software. It’s the people around it.

Be careful who you talk to. Be careful who you hire. Be careful who you trust.

To my team working tonight - I see you, and I’m proud of you.

About a year ago, a blogger named Aysel asked me for $5,000 a month. "Consulting and support" she called it. The pitch came with a threat - if I don't pay, she signs with Infloww and promotes them instead.

I said no.

It was too much money for something I didn't see value in.

Fast forward to today. We had a security incident. Every blogger in the community supported us. Every single one - except Aysel and one small Infloww affiliate.

She saw blood in the water and went full promo mode for Infloww. "Objective reviews" with referral links hidden inside the text.

The best part? She reviews our metrics dashboard and gets half of them wrong. Misreads what they track, misses context, doesn't understand how they connect. And somehow doesn't notice that we have over 100 metrics on the platform. More than any competitor. Not close. She doesn't mention our open API where you can build literally any metric you want. Nobody else in this market has that.

If this is the level of analysis behind a "review" - I'd seriously question the consulting that was worth $5K a month.

You can't fake competence forever.

Hard to notice features when you're writing for a referral commission, not for your audience. Some people couldn't sell themselves for $5K. So now they sell someone else for a percentage.

That's the whole story.

And since we're here - we're cooking a brand new dashboard right now. New account overview with aggregated metrics across OnlyFans and Fansly. 50+ metrics in one view.

She'll have fun reviewing that one.

Running a business will lie to you about your health. Results keep coming, the team is delivering, everything looks fine from the outside. So you assume you're fine too.

I turned 35 this year. My son is about to turn one. The past twelve months included a newborn, lawsuits, cyberattacks, black PR, and scaling a company through all of it.

I'm not even running day-to-day operations anymore. OnlyMonster has strong leaders managing everything. I stepped into an advisory role. And I still can't sleep before 3 AM.

Here's the funny part. I optimized almost everything. 4 strength sessions a week. 3 hours of cardio - cycling, rowing, running, swimming. Tracked nutrition - controlled fats, set protein and carb targets. Over 20+ supplements daily.

All of that means nothing on 4-5 hours of sleep.

You can train like an athlete, eat clean, take every supplement on the market - and still run yourself into the ground because your nervous system never turns off.

Stress doesn't care about your stack. It takes sleep last and gives it back first.

I'm booking into a longevity and biohacking retreat within the next few months. Full disconnect, full reset. Not because I'm broken - because I'd rather fix this before I am.

We chase money. We forget what we pay for it.

If you're building something intense right now and sleeping 4-5 hours - you're not grinding.
You're borrowing from yourself. And the interest rate is brutal.

Yesterday our card processing got blocked. Most likely through Infloww - the same way they got caught targeting our other processor.

Today our Instagram got terminated. No strikes, no warnings, no violations. Just gone. Three SMM managers, 4-5 million monthly reach, two years of work. Overnight.

Funny thing - none of our competitors had an Instagram even close to ours.

Last week we filed a counter-claim in the High Court of London against Infloww. We're asking the court to stop the attacks and to require Infloww to enable data export so their users can migrate freely.

All of this is unpleasant. But here's what changed.

A few months ago this would have sent us into war mode. Meetings, emotions, long nights of figuring out "how to fight back." Now the team takes it in, solves the problem, and keeps moving. Still sharp. Still ready. But no panic. No wasted energy.

I always thought long-term goals were everything. Especially financial ones. But the older I get and the more I go through - the more I realize the short-term tasks and the path itself matter more than abstract targets.

The destination doesn't carry you. The discipline does.

The more I use AI, the more I feel two things at once. Excitement and panic.

Excitement because the leverage is insane. Panic because I can't keep up with how fast it's moving. Every week there's something new and you're already behind on the thing from last week.

A few weeks ago my assistant and CMO ran 1-on-1s with everyone in our marketing team. The goal was simple - audit how people actually use AI in their daily work. We built our own scoring system across different categories of AI usage and efficiency.

The first results were bad. Most of the team was at 2-3 out of 10.

Two to three weeks later - almost everyone scored 7+. The shift was massive. People went from "I sometimes use ChatGPT" to genuinely integrating AI into their workflows. And they loved it.

Now we're rolling this out across the entire company. Every department. We pay for any AI tool our team requests. We coach, we audit, we push adoption hard.

Here's the part that made people uncomfortable. We introduced a rule: if someone on the team can fully cover another person's role - using AI or just by outperforming them - the one being replaced gets let go, and the one who stepped up gets a raise.

Two people have already been let go because of this.

Not because AI replaced them. Because a colleague who learned AI faster made them useless.

That's not a future scenario. That's last month.

If you're running a team and not actively pushing AI adoption - you're not saving anyone's job. You're falling behind and calling it stability.