Readlink started long before I had the idea for it. Until I was 19, I wasn’t a reader at all — my world was sport, mostly football. Then I landed my first internship. It taught me a lot, but it made one thing very clear: I didn’t want to spend my life in a job I didn’t love, earning little. On a break one day I typed something naive into Google — “how to be rich?” — and ended up on a blog recommending Rich Dad Poor Dad. Something about it felt like a hidden truth about money I’d never been taught.

I noted the title in my notes app on my iPhone 4, rushed to the library after work, ordered it, and a couple of days later started reading. I was hooked. I’d studied accounting before, but Kiyosaki made me see it from a completely new angle — not numbers in a balance sheet, but why those numbers connect to wealth. From there I kept going, spending most of what I earned on books. Today I’ve read more than 200 — psychology, technology, marketing, science, anything that caught my curiosity.

I tracked everything I read inside my notes app. But the more I read, the more that system fell apart — cluttered, fragile, impossible to revisit. My frustration slowly turned into a vision for a dedicated app, which (ironically) I also mapped out inside those same notes. When I finally looked at what already existed, nothing felt right for how I actually read. So I decided to build it.

At the time I was already working on another venture, Guardigo, trying to raise money to hire an agency to build the MVP. I had an investor ready to put in around $25k — but only if I could bring others in too. Raising was hard without credibility or a track record to point to. I’d also been quietly protecting my ideas, afraid someone would steal them if I put them out. Eventually I decided to do the opposite: take one idea, the books app, and move it forward — theft risk and all.

My first move was posting on Reddit looking for a developer. A lot of the replies weren’t positive at all — plenty were dismissive, some openly mocking:

“Market is already flooded — what country are you in that you think it will work?”

“I think I’ll build it myself 😂”

“And why should I believe in you to get the app out there / making money?”

“Are there people who actually believe this shit 💩?”

But beneath the noise, a couple of agencies and a handful of developers were genuinely interested. Evaluating them was harder than I expected; in the end I weighed responsiveness and real interest as much as anything else. I narrowed it down to three, and through the back-and-forth chose the one who showed the most interest and the clearest long-term vision.

Aligning on the agreement took some careful exchanges — and in hindsight, that part mattered enormously. We made expectations, ownership, and responsibilities explicit from the start, while staying flexible. What makes the partnership work is that we bring opposite but complementary strengths to the table. I kept my word and let him own the technical side: when he proposed tools, I listened and let him decide on the technical level — though as founder I always weigh each choice against the whole project, not just the architecture. Twice a tool didn’t work out, and letting him own the correction is exactly what made the switch go smoothly.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that you only really know if a partnership works at the point of maximum tension. Disagreement is normal; high stakes can break a relationship if you let them. So I’ve come to invest in the relationship as much as I invest in the business.

The hardest moments — when you’re tired, when you’re launching — are exactly when openness matters most. As a leader, you don’t just leave room for people to share how they feel; you actively build a culture where that’s safe. The worst places I’ve seen are the ones where pressure keeps building with nowhere healthy for it to go. If you want to learn to lead this way — treating the relationship as seriously as the results — the book I’d point you to is Trillion Dollar Coach; it’s exactly about this kind of leadership.