CTO | Co-Founder | Product Builder | Champion for Digital Creators

With 15+ years in software development and over a decade leading projects and teams, I’ve built everything from custom platforms to large-scale SaaS products - but nothing drives me more these days than helping creators turn their ideas and following into income.

That’s why I co-founded Skillplate - a one-stop platform designed to help the next billion digital creators build, sell, and scale online products with ease. Whether it’s courses, communities, downloads, or bundles, Skillplate makes the business side simple, so creators can focus on creating.

Before Skillplate, I co-founded Masters Academy (an online academy for digital marketing & entrepreneurship) and Startup Masters (a full-service digital agency). Across all three, I’ve stayed hands-on as CTO - building products, leading teams, and solving real-world problems with tech.

I believe in big dreams, consistency, and not giving up - and that the future belongs to the makers, teachers, and creators of the world. My goal is to give them the tools to build a sustainable, independent online business.

Outside of work, I’m a proud father of two boys, an occasional speaker at tech events, a volunteer, and someone who genuinely believes that technology, automation, and AI can (and should) be used to make life better - not just more efficient.

Always building. Always creating. Always believing in what’s possible.

📆 A quick recap of 2025! The good, the bad and the ugly 📈 

POST #74 - Monday 👷‍♂️ BUILDING Skillplate IN PUBLIC

I've been away from all social media for 1 month. I really needed the detox and it worked wonders for me! Sitting today with my coffee I wanted to share my 2025. 🧘 

2025 was one of the hardest, most frustrating and demanding years in my career. At the same time it was the year where I made the most progress ‼️ 

Funny how those things often go hand in hand. 🤭 

Hardships:
😩 Had to give up on a lot of stuff I was doing in parallel
I've always enjoyed helping people, causes and giving back. I still do but I realised that I couldn't do all of that in a meaningful way while at the same creating a billion dollar company. I scrapped probably 90% of all things that are not Skillplate. The hardest thing for me this year but I realised that not doing that would mean that what Skillplate is right now would still be a dream, just out of my reach.

😠 A ton of hard conversations
I've always been the mediator and problem solver. The person you'd call to bridge the gaps in people's relationships, figure out a solution for each and every problem - both career and personal. I never wanted this but I've been good at this since I was a kid. I still am and do all of that but no longer at my expense. What surprised me is that giving up control actually made things better, smoother and gave me a piece of mind that I hadn't had for years. This required a bunch of conversation that I'd been postponing. Some for years!

😧 Giving up control
I've developed a mind switch. I don't know how (probably everything was leading up to this) but nowadays I can very quickly figure out what is outside of my control and I simply and truly DO NOT WORRY about it and I don't stress about it. I'd say that this is the biggest achievement of 2025 for me personally.


Wins:
🛠️ We managed to launch our website builder - Still not perfect (probably never will be) but it was something that drained the life and will out of me

💪 Surpassed 2,000 clients

😮 Surpassed 80,000 users with around 8,000 daily active users

💲 Generated around $350,000 in revenue

🌎 Gave the world a taste of Skillplate and our mission and people LOVED IT

🤞 Developed a clear plan to move forward and we've started executing it (more on that later)

❗ And my biggest win of the year/decade - I know WHAT I want to do, WHY I want to do it, HOW I want to do it and the PEOPLE I want to do it with. I think 
that this is one of the things that most entrepreneurs struggle with. 

Not lack of vision - lack of a clear path. 🛣️ 
Not lack of motivation - lack of purpose. 🧐 
Not lack of focus - questioning. 🫤 

I learned that being a founder is hard and that's the whole point! The harder it gets usually means that you're on the right track.

I needed some time to focus on myself, my family and on the way I want to move forward.

Now I can't wait for 2026! 🥳 
Hope you have the best year so far!

I'm back!

Simeon Prusiyski

🥳 I solved your Stripe BGN currency issues - no need to thank me 🇧🇬 ❗ 

POST #75 - Friday 👷‍♂️ BUILDING Skillplate IN PUBLIC

📅 2026 started with an error on the 1st of January at 2am. And an error with the payments. We already had switched all our Bulgarian clients to Euro on the 15th of December. Took us 1 hour of development & less than 2 minutes to deploy and migrate over 300 Bulgarian clients. No errors, no issues. 💪 

However, Stripe (which we use to process our client's payments) decided to miss a simple thing. They updated everything from BGN to EUR without the Customer object. 🤯

Long story short this meant:

ALL Stripe customers, created before January 1st 2026 that had a BGN currency we 'frozen' - you could not make any edits whatsoever both via their API and even inside of their Web Interface:
1. Want to change the customer's name - sorry, "The bgn currency is not supported on this account" error 😧 
2. Want to change their default payment method - sorry. Same error 😧 
3. Want to pause their subscription - sorry. Same error 😧 
4. ... and a lot more of those throughout their services

Since we do not rely on Stripe to manage our subscriptions and customers, this did not affect us or our customers that much. 97%+ of customers and payments were uninterrupted. 🤘 

HOWEVER, this error meant that 100,000+ BGN 🇧🇬 accounts were basically dead. 😵
You could not do anything with them. What Stripe used to suggest is just duplicate all of your customers, loosing all history for their payments, having double the customers in your account and just go with that. 😶 

I couldn't believe that this was the suggested way to move forward. Oh, and by the way, the only meaningful way to duplicate customers was using the API or their tools which would duplicate the customers with BGN currency again (if it worked at all) so you'd end up right where you started....

Long story short after:
✅ 20+ emails
✅ 5 different support people
✅ 3 phone calls
✅ 14 screenshots
✅ 2 videos
✅ ... and 10 days

They fixed this and we, and everyone else, could continue using the customers they'd accumulated throughout the years of using Stripe. Being able to update them, add default payment methods, etc. 🥳 

My first win for 2026!!!

Many Thanks to the Stripe support and mainly Chuck who took this seriously, communicated with their tech team and managed to get this resolved!

Oh, and this got us 3 new clients who were forced to migrate their subscriptions from other platforms.

So, starting with a bang! No need to thank me 😆

taplio

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