How a 19-year-old built a $1M business in 10 months by working in public

Mark, a 19-year-old from Kazakhstan, built a business generating $82,000 in its first month and crossed $1 million in revenue within 10 months. He did it not through luck or a revolutionary product, but by systematically applying a “work in public” strategy that turned his design agency into a viral content machine. On Starter Story, host Pat Walls walked through Mark’s exact playbook—how he went from zero to 10,000 followers fast, why he chose to document every step of building his business, and how that transparency became his primary client acquisition channel.

The core strategy: building in public as a growth engine

Mark’s central insight was that traditional marketing—cold outreach, ads, referrals—is slow and unreliable for a young founder with no network. Instead, he decided to “build in public”: he recorded and published his entire process of starting and growing a design agency, from client outreach to project delivery to revenue numbers. The content was raw, unpolished, and specific. He showed his screen, his mistakes, his wins, and his bank account.