bluume

# Badmahn: The Empire Builder ## Part One: The Escape Badmahn was thirty-two years old when he decided that the decade of office work had to end. Ten years as a web architect—building systems, solving complex problems, climbing the corporate ladder in ways that made sense on paper but left him hollow. He was Siberian Russian, born near Lake Baikal, the kind of person who understands sacrifice and patience through geography alone. By 2024, something broke. Not dramatically. Just a quiet recognition that building other people's empires wasn't the same as building your own. He retreated to Vietnam. Not to party. Not to escape consequences or hide. But to recuperate. To think. To strip away the noise and figure out what freedom actually meant. Vietnam was cheap enough that he could survive on almost nothing. It was anonymous enough that he could disappear into himself. It was far enough from everything he'd built and failed to build that he could start from zero without the weight of expectation. The year of rest turned into the foundation of something real. ## Part Two: The Dual Vision By 2025, Badmahn had articulated a vision that surprised him in its clarity. Not one business. Two. And they were different enough to seem unrelated, yet unified by a single principle: he was building things he believed in, using skills he'd actually mastered. **TuniverStudio** emerged first. Web architecture had evolved. He'd spent a decade learning how systems work, how data flows, how to make complex things feel simple. The world was drowning in AI now, and everyone wanted solutions but nobody knew how to actually build them properly. He started building AI copilots—sophisticated conversational agents that understood data models, that could translate natural language into actionable insights, that had guardrails for regulated datasets. This wasn't WordPress websites. This was enterprise-grade work for a market that was just beginning to understand it needed these solutions. By early 2025, he'd landed his first real client. Five thousand dollars in the first year. Not much to most people. Everything to someone operating at $600-700 per month. **Znahar Extracts** came from a different place entirely. Three years of taking supplements had taught him something most people never learn: the difference between marketing and reality. He started creating his own. Lions mane for neuroplasticity. Schisandra for focus and cognitive clarity. Chaga, rhodiola, cordyceps, reishi—functional mushrooms and adaptogens sourced locally, crafted carefully, tested on himself before anyone else touched them. He wasn't selling yet. But his friend was testing the lions mane tincture. And Badmahn was daily-driving both his lions mane and schisandra, watching how his own focus and mental clarity transformed in ways he couldn't fully articulate but could absolutely feel. The carbon footprint of his own life was improving—less reliance on other people's premade supplements, more autonomy in his own biology. This mattered to him in a way that felt deeply true. ## Part Three: The Content Reckoning For months, Badmahn resisted what every successful builder eventually learns: you have to show your work. He was a builder, not a performer. Showing work felt like ego or desperation or both. But by mid-2025, something shifted. He wasn't building in silence anymore. He was building in public. A DOTA 2 analytics demo—a hunch that esports organizations would pay serious money for streamlined team analytics. A petshop AI chatbot for his Vietnamese friend's store—a free demo that became social content, proof of concept, audience building all at once. He was generating content not from vanity but from necessity. The only way to build a proper funnel, he'd discovered, was to show people what you could actually do. TikTok. Shopee. Instagram. The platforms he'd spent years dismissing. Now they were the funnel. ## Part Four: The Geographic Question Somewhere in this journey, Badmahn started thinking about where he wanted to live. He'd been to Finland. The women there intrigued him—direct, independent, not performing for anyone. He'd been to Bali and Bangkok. The casual sexual culture appealed to him in ways that felt honest—people finding each other without pretense, everyone happy, no one pretending it meant more than it did. But by thirty-two, the appeal of Southeast Asia as a permanent home had faded. The rats were real. The intellectual depth was limited. The people around him were often younger, less formed, less *serious* about building anything real. Portugal started calling to him. The weather was genuinely mild year-round—that autumn-like comfort that never broke. The sexual culture was open without being seedy. Most importantly, there were educated people there. Lisbon had become a hub for serious builders, remote workers with substance, people who weren't just running from something but running toward something. Scandinavia too—Stockholm, Copenhagen—represented something different. The sexual liberation was real. The intellectual culture was serious. The weather was rough, but only half the year. The other half was golden. Mexico City whispered as a possibility: sophisticated, cosmopolitan, liberated in its own way, entrepreneur-friendly. But these were problems to solve later. Right now, the constraint wasn't geography. It was revenue. ## Part Five: The Mathematics of Patience Badmahn had done the math. At his current burn rate—$600-700 per month—he could operate for years without needing to hit significant revenue targets. Most founders burn out because they run out of money. He'd eliminated that pressure through ruthless expense optimization and geographic arbitrage. This was his real competitive advantage. Not intelligence or skill, though he had both. But patience. Humility. The understanding that building an empire wasn't a sprint where you gasped and collapsed. It was a marathon where you moved steadily and the finish line eventually appeared. TuniverStudio needed 6-12 months to hit consistent $5k/month with proper positioning and sales. The AI copilot market was hot. His skills were real. The demand was there. Znahar was the wild card. He hadn't started selling yet. But the math was intoxicating: if he could move just 100-200 bottles per month on Shopee at 500k VND (~$20) each, that was $2-4k/month from a product he genuinely believed in. Five hundred bottles? That was $10k/month. Vietnam had 100 million people. The market penetration didn't need to be large. Just real. By his calculation, 12-18 months would put him at $10-25k per month combined. The numbers that would open every door. The numbers that made visa applications irrelevant. The numbers that turned location into a choice rather than a constraint. ## Part Six: The Tinctures Heisenberg There was a moment when Badmahn mentioned his real goal in a way that was half-joking and completely serious: he wanted to be the tinctures Heisenberg. Walter White made thirty-five thousand a week at his peak. But Walter was dealing in destruction—illegal, violent, corrosive to everything it touched. The point of Breaking Bad was that you couldn't sustain that without losing your soul. Badmahn was playing a different game entirely. Legal. Legitimate. Sustainable. A product that actually worked, sourced locally, crafted carefully, tested on himself. No prison risk. No death risk. No moral erosion. The real play wasn't hitting $35k per week through desperation or crime. It was building a sustainable operation over 3-5 years. Year one: establish supply chains, get testimonials, build brand. Year two: scale marketing, hit $10-20k/month. Year three through five: expand product lines, build distribution networks, hit $50-100k/month or more. That was the empire worth building. ## Part Seven: The Unspoken Truth What Badmahn understood, though he didn't say it explicitly, was that he was playing with an advantage most people never had: he'd already done the corporate thing. He'd built expertise. He'd learned what didn't work. He'd spent his twenties and thirties acquiring skills that were now worth real money in a market that was just beginning to understand its own needs. The year of recuperation in Vietnam wasn't weakness. It was strategic clarity. He'd stopped performing ambition and started building it. He'd stopped chasing status and started building systems. He'd stopped asking permission and started executing. The combination of low burn rate, high-value skills, legitimate products, and patient humility was rare. Most people quit too early because they run out of money or desperation or both. Badmahn had eliminated desperation through geographic arbitrage and eliminated money pressure through expense discipline. He was playing a game where time was on his side. ## Part Eight: The Next Eighteen Months The outline was clear, though Badmahn wouldn't have called it a master plan. It sounded too dramatic. **Immediate (Next 3 months):** Scale content generation for both TuniverStudio and Znahar. Launch Shopee store for schisandra and lions mane extracts. Get first 50-100 customers for Znahar. Land one more substantial client for TuniverStudio. Keep daily building consistent. **Medium term (Months 3-12):** Hit $3-5k/month consistent from TuniverStudio. Scale Znahar to 200-300 bottles per month ($4-6k/month). Build real audience on social platforms. Create case studies and proof of concept for both businesses. **Long term (12-18 months):** Combined revenue of $10-25k/month. Visa applications become irrelevant. Geographic choice becomes real. Decide between Lisbon for stability, Stockholm for summers, Mexico City for culture, or some rotation between all three. Then the empire building would begin in earnest. ## Epilogue: The Patient Siberian Badmahn was Siberian. He understood winters—long, dark, brutal, but finite. He understood survival through patience. He understood that you didn't conquer Siberia through heroic bursts of effort. You conquered it through steady, humble, consistent presence. He'd spent ten years building for other people. He'd spent a year recuperating. Now he was building for himself, in a way that felt aligned with what he actually believed in. The journey to Portugal or Stockholm could wait. The vision of being the tinctures Heisenberg could wait. The sexual liberation and educated social circles and European access could all wait. Right now, the only thing that mattered was moving from $5k to $10k to $25k. Everything else would follow inevitably. He was patient. He was humble. And he was absolutely certain that this was inevitable.