Not Safe For Business by Pavlo Kharmanskyi

Right now AI is good and bad for business at the same time. In many companies I see progress and regress side by side. And every leader I talk to who is really using AI is in panic. Total panic. An agency with 100 creators, a team of 5, a software company, doesn't matter. The headache is the same size.

At my company, OnlyMonster, we built our processes almost to perfection. Straight out of the Scrum book, proper teams, HR processes I couldn't make better, fast and clean development. That was 6 months ago, and we spent a long time and a lot of pain getting there.

Today it all has to go. Throw it out and build it again.

It doesn't work anymore.

Your teams aren't as efficient as before. What can I say, you aren't as efficient as before either. It used to be you gave a plan, a task, a hypothesis, and came back in a month to check the results. Today you plan in the morning and need results by evening. Next day at the latest. Everything else is garbage that gets in the way.

So think about it. You have an idea, something you need to build. What's stopping you from doing it today?

Yes, you could do it yourself. But if you already have a running business and teams, forget it, you can't do everything.

So what's stopping you? Find what it is and throw it out. Sometimes it's a person. Then maybe you have to let that person go.

But all this has a side effect. Leaders panic. I do too. I can get going hard in the morning and then find myself in the middle of the day lying on the floor, frozen, not knowing what to grab first. And that's with my monitors covered in sticky notes full of tasks.

Those who learn to own and run their processes in a new way will win.

My team put together a website for me - kharmanskyi.com

It has the story of what I've built over the last 20 years. Before OnlyMonster there was a jewelry store, a wall art business, a network of VK communities that passed 10 million followers, a crypto trading terminal, an NFT marketplace. Some of these I sold, some I closed. I never wrote about most of them anywhere.

I'm not someone who likes to talk about himself. But partners keep asking about my background, and there was no single place to send them. So now there is.

If you want to work with me on something, there is a form on the site and it comes straight to me.

I'm genuinely inspired by where vibecoding is going.
Hundreds of agencies are already building their own tools on top of the OnlyMonster API.

What I see most:
Custom CRMs to run sales teams Internal accounting systems for the agency Content auto-upload tools AI chatbot setups Chat analysis and QA Tons of Telegram bots

We can ship features forever and still never cover every request. So stop waiting for our roadmap. You can build almost anything you need yourself, right now.
Also, ChatSpace opens in regular Chrome. Which means you can build Chrome extensions on top of it. Full browser access + ChatSpace + our API. That's basically unlimited.

THERE IS NO CRM ON THE MARKET TODAY GIVING YOU THIS OPTION!!!

2 hours of vibecoding today equal +20% revenue tomorrow. That's the whole math.
Stop being lazy and open Claude Code. Nobody is going to build your business for you. Your competitor already shipped three tools while you were reading this, so get off your ass and go build something.

In my free time I build my own small projects. And I love it - there's something about doing everything yourself, from the idea to seeing it work. It's how I learn, and it's what I've always done.

I'm a product builder, not an engineer. So if you've ever built with an AI coding agent, you know the problem. It does the work, then explains it like you already read the code. Half the time you can't even tell if it finished.

So I built a fix for myself. It's called Open Steps.

A free skill pack for coding agents like Claude Code. It makes the agent talk like a human - straight answers on what's done, steps you can follow, a real check on what the last session claimed it did.

Right now it's six skills. But I want this to grow, with the community building on it too - your own skills, your own ideas.

I use it every day. Now it's open for everyone else who builds without being an engineer.

Go star the repo and try it out:
opensteps.ai
github.com/kharmanskyi/open-steps

If you make a real contribution and you've got a solid, reputable GitHub profile, message me. I'll pay well for the ones that genuinely push the project forward - to help it grow into something bigger.

Nowadays you don't need to be an engineer to build. You just need the right tools.

This month we launched Mimic 🥳

Why the name? Because a mimic is a monster that becomes whatever you shape it into. That's the whole idea. Mimic isn't our AI dropped on top of your business. It's an assistant you build yourself.

Over 100 parameters. Your own persona, your own tone of voice, your own rules for who it talks to and how.

And we're not here to replace the creator or their assistant. We're here to make sure every fan gets attention. At scale, someone always gets ignored - Mimic is how you stop that from happening.

Right now Mimic can already handle real conversations. You filter fans by whatever criteria you want, pick who Mimic talks to, and set up things like a welcome chain - it reaches out to a new fan and keeps the conversation going. Soon everyone will be able to build their own tactics, their own strategies, their own mimics from scratch.

The best AI doesn't replace you. It becomes you.

Big thanks to the team that built Mimic - and to everyone from other teams who jumped in to help. I put this team together a long time ago. I interviewed almost everyone on it myself, and I'm proud of what they've built.

And there's more coming. A new AI translator update is almost ready. You'll be able to connect your own API keys from any provider, write your own prompts and instructions, and translate in any language you want - both incoming and outgoing messages. After that we're updating suggestions, fan personas, and more.

Same idea every time. AI that's yours, not ours.

And it goes further than our own features. A lot of teams and agencies have built their own AI flows on top of OnlyMonster - external developers using our API to run their own custom AI solutions. That works only on OnlyMonster. Nobody else in this market gives you that.

Now a small spoiler. Tomorrow is a big day.

For over half a year, a third of our team has been building something new. It's called Chatspace - a completely new way to talk to fans. New interface, new experience, on web and on your phone. This wasn't a few months of work. It's where we've been heading for a long time, and now we're almost there.

Tomorrow we start the first closed beta.

A whole new time for OnlyMonster. And it starts tomorrow.

A while back I told you I was booking a longevity retreat. I finally did it.

First real vacation of my life. A wellness hotel in Europe. IV drips, shots, physiotherapy, detox - the full biohacking menu. Every hour of every day was booked with something.

But the real experiment was simpler. For the first time ever, I deleted Slack and every work chat off my phone.

The first days my head wouldn't shut off. Then it started to slow down.

By the fifth day, I slept almost 9 hours. That hasn't happened in years.

The last 6 months had been quite stressful, and this reset was exactly what I needed.

I didn't reply to lawyers. I didn't read the emails our enemies kept sending. Still haven't. It's not even interesting anymore.

If you've been running non-stop for months, I strongly recommend doing something like this. Fully offline. No exceptions.

You don't realize how tired you are until you stop.

Now I'm back.

This week Kyiv got hit hard. Some of my team had a rough few days. And still - everyone's performing, focused, motivated. I'm proud of them.

Alex, my co-founder, has been doing a great job as CEO, even without much input from me. He brought fresh ideas and new ways of working to the team.

On the product side, we're cooking a lot right now. The team optimized a ton, and it was great to come back and test the new features this week - new AI, new analytics, new API, even a new Chatspace. We've been building all of this since last year, and we're rolling it out to everyone within the next few weeks.

P.S. flew first class. paid with miles 😬

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 🫶

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 🤷🏼‍♂️

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