Getting started

“A little scared — it shows all over me, But I've never been this happy, never been this free.” - Jenő Menyhárt / Európa Kiadó

Start Here — Or: How a Budapest Underpass Regular Became an Online Marketer (Spoiler: not overnight.)

The story starts in 1986.

Well — technically it starts earlier, but 1986 is when it became official. That's the year someone finally sat me down and explained, with the kind of bureaucratic formality only the Hungarian state could muster, that the people I'd been living with were foster parents. That I had no idea who my real parents were. And that this was, apparently, fine.

It was not fine.

I'd suspected something was off for a while — call it intuition, call it the fact that I felt about as welcome in that household as a wasp at a picnic. So when the paperwork confirmed it, I made a decision with the breathtaking confidence only a teenage boy with no assets, no plan and no address can muster:

I would take on the world.

The world, as it turned out, was not particularly intimidated.

My conquest of the world began in Budapest. Specifically, in the underpasses, train stations, and the remarkably lively social scene that forms around people who also have nowhere to go.

I fit in immediately.

For the next ten years, this was my life. Stairwell to stairwell. Concert to concert. Station to station. I met an extraordinary number of people — philosophers, criminals, musicians, and people who were somehow all three at once. Most of them, I'm sorry to say, are no longer with us.

The ones who are — we've drifted apart. Funny how that happens.

There was one interruption to this lifestyle. The authorities — in their wisdom — decided that a year of mandatory border service might encourage me to, as they diplomatically put it, come to my senses.

I served near the Romanian border.

I will let the following fact speak for itself: at some point during my service, someone had taken the standard yellow warning sign — the one that reads "Caution: 380 Volts — Danger to Life" — and replaced the text with a handwritten update:

"Caution: B. Jenő — Danger to Life"

I maintain, to this day, that this was an exaggeration. I never hurt anyone who didn't make a compelling case for it first. But reputations, once established, tend to be stubborn things.

My superiors aged visibly. I chose to view this as my contribution to their character development.

So. Ten years. Budapest. Underpasses.

How does that person end up writing a blog about affiliate marketing from a small house in Austria?

That, dear reader, is exactly what this blog is about.

Not just the destination — but every restart along the way. Every time I had to rebuild from zero. Or from considerably less than zero. There were a few of those.

I'm writing this because somewhere out there, someone is standing in a place where they can't see a way forward. I know that place well. I've had a long-term lease on it.

There is always a way out. It doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes you have to squint.

But it's there.

Stick around — I'll show you mine.

— Eugene B.

"Life lies ahead of me. I can't see a thing." — Unknown modern philosopher