Aleksander Stós — Entrepreneur, CTO & Co-Founder at The Digital Bunch

We started expanding into Saudi Arabia in 2025 and quickly realized how hard it is for foreign companies to figure out business there. So we built what we wished existed: a launchpad for startups and companies entering the Saudi market.

People helped us when we were figuring things out. This is how we return the favor.

We started in 2021 with a handful of people doing simple websites and 3D visualization renders. Five years later we're 50+ people across Warsaw, Riyadh, and Sydney, $2M ARR growing 23% year-over-year, and still spawning new ventures.

What surprised me most was how much of running a tech company has nothing to do with code. I had to learn content production, build out a 3D studio from scratch — render pipelines, hardware specs, remote workflows — and figure out everything from sales to hiring to keeping the lights on. As the technical co-founder, my instinct was to build. The real lesson was knowing when to buy, when to outsource, and when to kill something that isn't working.

We evolved from "tell us what to build" to "let's figure out if you should build this at all." Most clients show up thinking they know what they need. A few workshops later, it's usually something different. That shift — from execution to strategy — changed how we operate entirely.

We also tried building our own product, Your Next Home, for the Saudi market. Did the development, went to conferences, ran marketing. It hasn't worked yet. Still figuring out why. That's the part nobody warns you about: doing everything right on paper and still not getting traction.

My co-founder Dagmara and I rarely agree on things, which is exactly what makes it work. Two different perspectives, constant feedback loops, and a result that's usually better than either of us would reach alone.

I approached them at an AngularJS course during my second month of CS studies. They probably wondered why some kid was even talking to them. I bombed the interview because I was stressed out of my mind, but Tomek (CTO) and Marcin (COO) gave me a chance anyway. Free internship, no salary.

Three months later I got my first real paycheck. For four years I was the youngest person in the company, which became a running joke. This was a serious outfit — U.S. founders, enterprise clients — and it's where my whole run of working with American companies started.

I jumped across stacks constantly. JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Node.js, Electron, Python, high concurrency. 50+ projects total — a $1B+ insurance startup that later acquired SwingDev, a subscription platform handling ~35k concurrent users, shipping logistics, enterprise sites. Met incredibly skilled people who showed me what engineering actually looks like when it's done well.

The biggest takeaway wasn't technical. It was watching how smart people think about products — questioning the brief, pushing back on assumptions, treating every project as a problem to understand before a thing to build. That stuck.

Three months of free internship right after high school to test if professional programming was really for me. It was. The people there showed me what actual development looks like beyond bedroom hacking. University lectures felt painfully slow after that, but I moved to Warsaw for CS studies anyway. Couldn't wait to get started.

Age 13, barely speaking English, writing scripts, building quests, and trying to sell things to people online. Ran private game servers from a home PC with thousands of active players.

My mom kept turning off the computer at night, which meant players lost access. So I had to figure out remote hosting and how to actually sell services. Got hacked at some point. That was painful. But every broken thing taught me something.

C++ game engines, Lua scripts, JavaScript, first websites. All self-taught, all by googling things I barely understood. That's where it started.