From Fixing Printers on a Farm to Running the Most Automated Org on Earth

Think of ideas like buried treasure. Most maps are fake. Most X’s mark nothing.

But every once in a while, you spot a clue. A gem unearthed from NTE Pro. A framework sharpened through NTE Zero to One.

Follow the trail long enough and the dirt starts to fall away. You realize the treasure’s real. The chest is open. And inside? A company, alive and kicking.

It Exists.

John Rush grew up in the Caucasus mountains, the kind of childhood where “summer job” meant chopping wood with his granddad, fixing fences, and driving tourists around on horseback.

He had a big pack of siblings (“they’re still my best friends”) and learned early that if something broke, you figured out how to fix it yourself.

At 11, he found a different kind of work. “I started fixing printers and reinstalling Windows XP for neighbors for cash,” he says. Suddenly, he wasn’t just a farm kid, he was the local IT department with pocket money. 

On the farm, freedom came after the chores. In tech, freedom came after fixing someone’s printer.

By 15 he was coding tiny apps. By 18 he had a university assistant gig, tutoring on the side, and launching a simple tool to help classmates with school tasks. Not every experiment worked. One crypto project got him scammed. A few consumer apps flopped. But he didn’t see failure. He saw tuition.

Lesson 1: Pain Makes a Better MBA Than Harvard

His first big swing was Filmgrail, a platform for cinemas that went viral in Norway. Millions of people used it weekly to buy tickets. Seed round, then Series A. For a while, he was on the rocket ship.

Then came COVID. Growth at all costs. Sales hires, new verticals, cash burn. The whole thing collapsed. John sold his house to try and save it.

That pain left scars but also clarity: investors don’t save you. Users do. Profit > pitch decks.

Lesson 2: Forget the Diploma. Build the Loop.

John moved to Norway for a CS/AI/UX degree. He dropped out. “It felt pointless; I was already shipping side projects making cash,” he says.

Instead, he built his own curriculum: 10 Days of SwiftUI, some CodeWithChris demos, and late nights with AI copilots. His process was hilariously simple:

“Prompt → make plan in markdown → have Claude go → show Claude compiler errors until it works → test on device → repeat.”

Degrees are optional. Persistence and feedback loops aren’t.

Lesson 3: Constraints Are the Co-Founder You Didn’t Ask For

No money. No team. No routines. Just him in his Istanbul apartment, working 12-hour sprints from bed.

Constraints forced him to move fast. Landing pages spun up in a weekend. MVPs shipped in weeks. If a project didn’t hit 100 signups or 1,000 visits in under a year? He killed it.

By now, he’s built 24+ products, most of them sitting in what he calls his “graveyard of failed apps.” He doesn’t hide them. “I learned by doing crap jobs and failing fast,” he shrugs.

Constraints don’t kill you. They sharpen you.

Lesson 4: Fire the Team. Hire the Bots.

At 37, burnout nearly broke him, “neck pain, overweight, 20 years of grind.” He realized the real bottleneck wasn’t code. It was people.

“Humans are expensive, slow, unscalable. Full of drama,” he says. So he flipped the org chart. No managers, no meetings, everything async.

Marketing? Bots. SEO? Bots. Blog strategy, backlinks, ads, listings? Bots. He runs nearly a million-user, $3M ARR portfolio of tools with almost no staff.

Humans do the remarkable. Bots do the repeatable.

Lesson 5: Hype Dies. Word-of-Mouth Lives.

For someone who worked in product marketing, he admits the irony: “Marketing is hard and I say that as somebody working in marketing.”

He didn’t do a big Product Hunt splash. Didn’t pour money into ads. Instead, he built in public. Shared rough versions in small groups. A friend once told him, “This is good, you should take it further.” Five days later, a stranger paid him.

Even his failures, the crypto scam, the graveyard of apps became content.

Authenticity spreads faster than hype. Early users become your unpaid evangelists.

What He’s Building Next

🎛 SaaS OS — bundle all his tools into one hub: single subscription/LTD, inter-app interactions.
🤖 More AI agents — scaling his invisible workforce across projects.
🤝 Scale the alliance for bootstrappers — helping other indie builders launch and grow without VC strings.

What He Thinks Needs to Exist

🎓 Founder Academy (ages 3–35) — teach entrepreneurship like a sport: risk, skills, failure from day one.
🏡 Distributed Maker Villages — affordable housing + startup launchpads outside the traditional hubs.
🌍 Democratized entrepreneurship — tools and alliances so anyone, anywhere, can build without needing rich networks or Silicon Valley ZIP codes.

What You Can Learn From John Rush

🌱 Pain is tuition — scars teach faster than spreadsheets.
💻 You don’t need a degree — you need the prompt → error → fix → repeat loop.
🛠 Constraints are your co-founders — no resources force sharper products.
🤖 Fire the team, hire the bots — automate the chores, keep the vision.
📣 Share failures — word-of-mouth loves honesty more than hype.

He started by fixing printers in a mountain village. He lost a startup and even his house. He built a graveyard of failures. And then he automated himself into a one-man empire with nearly a million users.

Now he’s aiming higher: not unicorns, but a world of automated zebras, tiny, global, self-sustaining companies anyone can build.

Follow John Rush on X @johnrushx to watch him keep scaling the most automated org on earth.

John’s story is proof that you don’t need permission, credentials, or perfect timing, just scars, loops, and relentless shipping.

That’s the spirit we’re building inside NTE Pro, where thousands of startup sparks live, waiting for the right founder to grab them.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, NTE Zero to One is where we roll up our sleeves together and turn one of those sparks into something real.

Because the world doesn’t need more pitch decks, it needs more people like John, building anyway.