Entrepreneurial stories often begin with a brilliant idea or a carefully crafted business plan. The journey of today's hero, Stan, looks nothing like that, and we had so many questions across so many topics that we had to split his story into two parts!

In part one, we talked about his early career steps, the fears of a first-time entrepreneur, how Multilogin came to be, and his favorite music track.

Let's start from the very beginning. Tell us about your early professional path. What did you do before startups, and when did you realize you wanted to build your own products?

• My first job was as a restaurant greeter in Tallinn. I was paid €3.50 an hour to approach passersby and invite them in for a meal. Surprisingly, I loved it. That job taught me how to talk to strangers and showed me that people are generally far kinder than we tend to assume. It also gave me my first real insight into sales: logic helps, but emotion sells.

• After that I worked as a waiter, then as a bicycle rickshaw driver in Tallinn's old town. It was one of the best jobs of my life — busy summers, good money, and constant interaction with people. I was always struck by how much income such a simple concept could generate. That's when I first started thinking seriously about business and realizing that value isn't always tied to complexity.

Later I met future Eyes of Wonder founders. We'd talk about different internet business ideas, marketing, technology. Those conversations are ultimately what led to Multilogin, though it took time.

There's so much uncertainty at the start. Did you have fears or doubts before launching? If so, what were they, and how did you deal with them?

Of course I did.

When we were launching our first projects, there was almost no revenue and money was slowly running out. At one point, one of the co-founders even went back to a full-time job because he needed to support his family.

I knew very well that things might not work out. But I was certain of one thing: I would keep trying. Even if it meant living very modestly, I'd keep looking for the next opportunity and launching new projects.

I always believed that if you search long enough and consistently enough for a working model, something will eventually click.

Let's talk about the first product. How did the idea for Multilogin actually come about, was it spontaneous, or a deliberate step?

The idea came from our own need.

At the time we were testing different business models, looking for something we could turn into a sustainable business. One of our experiments was a LinkedIn service where users could pay for additional skill endorsements.

To run it, we had to create and manage a large number of LinkedIn accounts. That created a technical problem - how do you safely store and use that many accounts? Pavel (one of the founders) built a simple tool that let us run separate browser sessions for each account.

The endorsement service worked, but it didn't have much of a future. The account management tool, on the other hand, turned out to be far more interesting.

We decided to put it on the market. What followed was a funny moment: on the very first night after launch, we forgot to connect PayPal to the payment button. In the morning there were no sales but around twenty emails from people who wanted to buy and were letting us know payment wasn't working.

That's when we realized we'd hit a real market need, and growth followed from there. Multilogin eventually became a company of around 100 people, and later NodeMaven came along too.

What keeps you motivated now — what makes you stay in the game?

Scriptonite's track "Don't Relax." It captures my relationship with work pretty well.

More broadly, what motivates me is the act of moving forward itself. I see a lot of people reach a certain level and stop. I find it more interesting to keep developing and building something new.

Another big motivator is impact. Today NodeMaven helps thousands of users every month. Over the years, tens of thousands of people have used the product.

Knowing that something you built delivers real value, and would keep running even without your daily involvement, gives you a strong sense of purpose.

Stan's story is a reminder that the path to a successful product is rarely a straight line. Behind a first big result there are usually years of experimentation, dozens of tested hypotheses, and the willingness to keep going even when success is far from certain.

In part two, we'll talk about the lessons he's drawn from his journey, why he considers success a better teacher than failure, and which principles helped him scale first Multilogin and then NodeMaven.