Whoever you are, whatever it's about. I'd love to hear from you. I miss this about the old internet.
I grew up in Hungary, which means I say what I think, for better or worse.
I started online in 2009 with Öt év - öt nyelv, a Hungarian blog about learning five languages in five years. I learned them, then life happened and I forgot most of them. The blog grew a 10,000-person email list, became a course business, and I still run it 17 years later. It's where my business strategy, analytics and systems instincts got built the honest way: on my own money. When I got tired of running launches, I built it a shadow newsletter that sells the courses on its own. The full case study is on this site, tech details included.
That list got me hired at fluentin3months.com, at the time the biggest language learning blog in the world. I spent about ten years there, ending as CTO, helping grow it to a million monthly readers. The business ran on SEO. SEO shifted, the business contracted, and eventually everyone got let go. For years I said I had no tidy lesson to wrap around that.
After that I worked with Brennan Dunn at RightMessage, where I led client delivery: strategizing and building email personalization systems for clients like Tiago Forte, Justin Moore and Justin Welsh. That's where I got obsessed with email as infrastructure, the plumbing a whole business quietly runs on.
Now I work directly with online businesses, coming in from outside to find what they can't see from inside, then owning the fix. What that actually looks like is on the work page, and the exact method is on the how I work page.
Off the clock
I do kyokushin karate, the kind without protective gear, with the best trainers I could ask for. Currently 4th kyu, with a few injuries to show for it. Kyokushin taught me a ton, above all that avoiding conflict is not a good life strategy. I can take a punch.
I've done two full Ironmans, because apparently I like suffering.
I'm colorblind. I make up for it with ears that can pick up London radio stations from Hungary.
My guilty pleasure game is Warhammer: Space Marine 2, which pulled me into the universe. I only dabble. For now.
My favourite whiskey is Writers' Tears Copper Pot.
I teach HTML and web development two days a week, because at heart I'm a teacher and I want to get out of my home office to meet actual people sometimes.
I use Arch Linux Kubuntu btw, which tells you roughly what you need to know about my relationship with defaults. I also run canicompostit.com, a programmatic SEO experiment about what you can and can't compost. It's exactly as niche as it sounds.
I've travelled a fair bit. These days I much prefer sitting in the garden with friends and family, sipping a beer while something delicious cooks on the barbecue.
The Why 'Authentic' Is the Next Thing We'll Game article is probably a better introduction to how I think than this page.
You got this far, so: korosi@balint.blog. Say hi.