About the Author

Stas Kulesh has been a senior contractor, indie hacker, and studio operator since 2000, mostly outside the salaried lane, always shipping. On the contractor side he has delivered long-form engagements into LEGO, Mars, Facebook, Google, Duolingo and OpenGov, and spent a stretch embedded with the team at IBM building out the Carbon Design System.

He founded Sliday (sliday.com) in 2009 as a distributed design and development studio, and has run it continuously for seventeen years; the team is now more than twenty people across Europe and Asia, with a portfolio spanning SaaS, fintech, healthtech and consumer products.

In parallel he has launched more than a hundred indie products of his own, roughly ten per cent of which have turned into stable, passive-income lines that still run today. The largest of them is Karma (karmabot.chat), a B2B SaaS he took through Y Combinator’s Startup School and grew to roughly $750,000 in annual recurring revenue. He is currently Chief Product Officer and co-founder at Sky AI (usesky.ai), a B2B AI document-processing platform serving insurance, legal and healthcare clients.

His contracting record is unusual. He logged more than 5,000 hours at Toptal as a senior contractor and was named Designer of the Month at Gigster during his tenure there — both networks that screen heavily on demonstrated quality rather than credentials.

He spent almost twenty years in New Zealand — most of his adult life — and has also lived and worked in China, Chile, Scotland and Poland. He is now a Polish citizen based in Kraków with his family. He learned Polish because he was in Poland, and stayed because Poland is the best. He has blogged at staskulesh.com since the early 2000s, tried digital nomading in 2003 before it had a name, and kept a travel blog from 2007 onwards. He plays fretless bass, collects math rock records and writes in British English by stubborn preference.

The credentials matter to this book in one specific way: the methodology described here is something he watched assemble itself inside his own portfolio. He did not read about it; he ran it.