My first money came from YouTube. I made cartoons for children, in English, for an audience in the US. Templates in After Effects assembled each video from a folder of pictures. The first month made $1,500.
2022
The war
In February 2022 I was still in those courses, in Kyiv, and stuck. The night before the war I sat down and finished six overdue assignments. Around six in the morning a friend called. It had started.
~ September 8, 2022
The tent
I landed in New York with a single $50 bill. I spent it on a tent at Walmart. The first night I slept under the Coney Island pier.
The tent was home for weeks. That is the same tent in the cart, packed. Every trip into the city meant packing absolutely everything. If I left any of it, it would be stolen.
Months later, the New York Times wrote about those weeks, in April 2023. Currents News filmed them later that month.
The inverter was eating the car, so I went looking for a laptop that sipped power. I found an HP OmniBook 5 with a Snapdragon X Plus and 32 GB of RAM for $650. ARM, like a phone. Linux did not run on it.
TagosBook is a 16-inch machine I am building around a NanoPi M6, from boards I design. The first board, a DSI to eDP bridge, worked on the first revision. That one is public: the design, the installer, and a listing.
Right now the laptop is a bench of boards held together by wires, and that's getting fragile. The next real step is one board that carries it all. That board will cost far more than the ones before it, and the first revision might not even boot.
Today I live at a friend's place. The people who funded the first boards, a friend and my father, can't keep doing it.
I do all of this alone: the boards, the code, the videos, this page, with AI tools working like a small team. I believe one person with modern tools can build a real hardware company, with no investors and no loans. Tagos Labs is my attempt to prove it.
I've never been good at selling myself. So instead of a pitch, I just show the work. Every design stays open for anyone to build, and every dollar goes to the next board and is logged in public.
