Somewhere in the middle of my time in Tashkent, I got an idea with my team: build a bookshop a fully functional website, and instead of getting paid in cash, get paid in books — one for each teammate.
The First No
We pitched it to four teammates first, and they were in. Then we approached a bookshop with the idea. They rejected it. It stung, but rejection at that stage of a project is just information — it meant the pitch, the shop, or the timing wasn't right, not that the idea was dead.
The Second Yes
A friend pointed us toward another bookshop. We pitched the same idea, and they accepted. What we built for them was smaller in scope than our original ambition, but fully functional — everything a small bookshop actually needed, nothing bloated on top of it. In exchange, each of us walked away with the books we wanted.
Why This Is One of My Favorite Projects
There was no invoice, no client contract, no traditional stakes — just an idea we believed in, one rejection, one yes, and a genuinely energizing feeling of having pulled it off exactly as we'd imagined. It's a small project by scope, but it's the one that made the whole team feel like we could design our own kind of deal with the world instead of just waiting for one. That feeling is what pushed me toward wanting to build a team around doing meaningful work, not just paid work.