Max Orucov is an entrepreneur and digital product builder, and the founder of OnlyMaxon, a studio that builds websites and apps for clients. Max also develops yOdin, a platform for international students, while studying computer science at Vistula Academy. His story is about starting early, taking risks, originality and building under his own name.
I started working at 15. Not because anyone forced me, but because it became clear fairly quickly that I could not sit around and wait for life to begin on its own. That was also when I understood the main thing about myself — a quiet life is not for me. Risk is my fuel. When everything is stable and predictable, I start to feel dead.
One of my first projects was my own online game — Mafia. At the same time, I organized game nights and tournaments: I gathered people, ran tables and kept control of the room. It gave me something university does not teach — the ability to read a person in a minute. Who is bluffing, who is angry, who has already made a decision but has not said it yet. I always found myself at the center of attention and learned how to use it. Later, I discovered that product work is exactly the same: you can write any code, but if you do not understand the person you are writing it for, you are writing into a void.
Now I have my own studio — OnlyMaxon. There are four of us. We build websites and apps for clients; we came up with and released our own merchandise and distribute it. The studio has its own website — onlymaxon.com. The name is mine, and that is a matter of principle: I did not want to hide behind an impersonal brand. The people who work with me know what kind of person I am, and they know exactly who they are dealing with.
Besides client work, I run my own projects. yOdin is a platform for international students, built around the combination “where are you from” × “where are you now”: an Azerbaijani in Warsaw and a Turk in Berlin have different problems and different answers, and that knowledge should accumulate instead of dying in Telegram chats after two days. I am not developing it alone, but together with universities — I work with them directly, because reaching students through a university’s official channels is incomparably more honest and effective than pushing ads from the outside. There is also birklik.az, a short-term rental marketplace in Azerbaijan that recently sold its first ad. At the same time, I study computer science at Vistula Academy.
I absolutely do not care what outsiders think of me. I believe charisma, character and the way you communicate should be your own, not assembled from other people’s. Unoriginal people are of no use to anyone today — there are too many of them, they are interchangeable, and they are forgotten in a day. Yes, I am a narcissist, and I am proud of it. No more and no less.
For all that, I am a serious overthinker. I reconsider a decision ten times and always look for hidden risks — sometimes it saves a project, and sometimes I just slow down where I should have launched long ago. My second problem is that I take on too much at once: the studio, my own products, university. Something inevitably suffers, and honestly, I still have not learned how to properly choose what to let go of.
My goal is to be memorable. Not the richest and not the most correct, but someone you would never confuse with somebody else. I want yOdin to work not at one university but at dozens, and for birklik to grow from a project into a business. And the second, more important goal: I want to help people who have nothing. It is my dream, and I want to reach a point when I can do it for real, not just talk about it.
There is no room left in the world for copies. Do your own thing, with your own face and under your own name — even if it is scary, even if it is early, even if everyone around you is doing the opposite.