I’ll tell you the truth, because I don’t know how to open this any other way.
A team from my country came back from two goals down and won it in the final minute. The first thing half the world did was call it rigged.
That happens every time they win.
I. The First Thing Half the World Did Was Call It Rigged
For a long time I heard that as an insult. Now I hear it as a tax.
When you come from a place that refuses to lose, the world does not clap for you first. It wants to watch you fall. And when you win anyway, it goes looking for the reason it did not really count, the little footnote, the asterisk it can put next to your name. He got lucky. He knew the right person. The timing was easy.
Maybe you know the sound. If you have ever won anything in a room that expected you to lose, a deal, a job in another country, a habit you finally broke, you have heard your own version of it.
I am from that place. So this is me, betting on myself out loud, on a channel, and growing it on purpose until it is too big to wave away. And the day it works, somebody is going to call that rigged too.
Good.
If you would rather watch this, I turned it into the first episode of a series I am going to keep making:
II. The Dig Is the Receipt
When things actually started going well for me, moving abroad on my own, closing deals people said I had no business closing, I kept hitting the same wall. The better it went, the more everyone around me needed a reason it did not really count.
It used to eat at me.
Then one day it flipped, because I realized the people digging for the reason you don’t count are telling you something. They do not do that to the person who is losing.
I want you to hold that the next time it happens to you, because it will. Someone close to you will explain your win back to you as luck. When it happens, read it for what it is. They are telling you the win is real.
The dig is the receipt. Nobody comes looking for the reason you don’t count when you are the one losing.
III. The Part Nobody Signs Up For
The second you say out loud that you are going for it, people come for you. You already know this. It is probably the exact reason you have not said your thing out loud yet.
I used to fold. One comment, one “who does this guy think he is,” and I would quietly take the post down.
That is over. It took months, but the criticism ran out of places to land. If someone is annoyed enough to type it, it usually means I said something real, and real is the whole reason I am here.
I come from a country that plays better the more the world wants it to lose. I decided to run my own life on that setting. And it is a setting, not a birthright. You can turn it on tomorrow.
IV. Betting on Myself, Out Loud
So here is the bet, and you can check every number I give you.
Right now about fifteen thousand people follow me across all my platforms. I built most of that in a year, almost by accident, because for five years systems were my entire edge, I am the database guy, and I still never once ran my own audience like it mattered.
That is done. The goal, out loud: a hundred thousand across everything. And I will report the real number every episode, even the embarrassing ones.
I want to be clear about why the number is public. When it moves, it proves something for both of us. If a guy from Buenos Aires with a database, a camera, and no famous last name can grow this in the open, the story that says you need to be chosen first loses power for you too. I am trying to be the example I could not find when I started, and you get to check my math the whole way.
Every coach I ever paid told me the same thing. Pick one platform. Go all in on LinkedIn, or TikTok, or YouTube. I am not doing it. If I am going to put in the work anyway, I want every single person who could find me to get the chance, because I genuinely do not know where my people are sitting, and neither do you about yours.
And about small numbers. People love to laugh at a video with two hundred views. Two hundred people is a lot. You would sweat presenting to twenty people at work. This is that room, ten times over, every single day.
A hundred views is a room full of people. Stop laughing at the room.
V. So I Built the Machine
One person cannot post to every platform every day and still go live an actual life. So I did the only move I had. I built the machine.
It lives in my terminal. I run it with Claude, off about fifty thousand of my own photos and clips, and it ships to all of it, every day. It drafts, my phone buzzes, I say go, or I say no.
While I write this, that same system is doing real work in the background. It stitched a birthday film for my dad out of that fifty-thousand-clip library, hunting down the exact seconds where his real voice is on tape. It took a football match and shipped a reaction to every platform I am on, in the time it takes most people to write one caption. A newsletter goes out on its own schedule whether I am at a keyboard or at a dinner table.
One person, and the work compounds while I go live my actual life. And I keep the inside of it public on purpose, so you can watch the pieces come together and take the ones you need. That is what this series is for.
VI. I’m Building This for Me (And That’s Why It’s for You)
I will be honest about why I am really doing this.
I started months ago telling myself it was strategy, and I am only now admitting the truth, that I am building this for me, not for a niche and not for a brand.
And the strange thing I keep noticing is that the more I build it purely for myself, the more it seems to land with people who are trying to become themselves too. The same way I am still becoming myself. If that word, becoming, means anything to you, this series is yours as much as mine. I am a few steps into the same road you are on, leaving the map out in the open.
And the thing that took me longest to trust is that this only works when it feels like play. The moment it turns into homework, into something I have to grind through and suffer for, the work gets worse. So I stopped forcing it. I do not chase the wrong rooms or the wrong people anymore, I move with the ones whose energy actually fits mine, and I let the timing be right instead of pushing against it. The right connection tends to show up right when you stop forcing the wrong one. That is not me being soft about it, it is just the most reliable way I have watched the world work. If the thing you are building has started to feel like homework, that is a signal worth trusting.
So the quest is simple and it is public. Fifteen thousand to a hundred thousand, across everything, and I will show you the real number every time.
Subscribe if you want to check my math.
A new episode every Friday, and this letter is the written version.
VII. We Come From a Land of Winners
The day this starts working, somebody is going to call it lucky, or rigged, or fake.
Good. That is the receipt. It means it is working.
And when they say it about yours, because if you build anything real they eventually will, I hope you hear it the way I learned to hear it. Applause with bad manners.
So here is me, betting out loud, reporting the real number, building the thing for myself and handing it to you at the same time.
Thank you for reading, human. I will see you next episode, back inside my universe.
Welcome to the Lobby. We come from a land of winners.
And I mean we.
Ivan