⚙️ Plan it all out in advance, so you're not putting out fires later

(post 2 of 3)

We're continuing Ivan Borisov's story.

The beginning is here → link to the first post

A quick recap: Ivan figured out how to bring in new people without advertising, built a solution powered by AI agents, and used it to create his Academy. It turned out great. But the audience interested in this proved to be a narrow one — and Ivan wanted to keep growing.

To step beyond that circle, Ivan built a product for a wider audience — the "Neuropunks" club, focused on the user-facing side of neural networks: how to create graphics and stylish video.

He envisioned the club as a large-scale project from the very start. And since that was the plan, he thought through everything inside it upfront, counting on the number of people being orders of magnitude bigger. That included accepting payments and everything tied to it.

Ivan realised this needed to be sorted out right away within the first few months. People came to him several times a week with questions: how to change a card, how to renew, how to pay with a foreign card. While there are only a few subscribers, that's a couple of messages a week. But Ivan understood: once there are thousands of them, it would turn into a stream of requests every single day. And handling it all by hand would become impossible.

Ivan tried closing out these questions through Tribute — he simply gave people a payment link. Unlike other solutions, Tribute handled exactly what was needed. So Ivan moved the whole club over to it.

And then it turned out that Tribute gave him even more than he'd expected. More on that in part three.