Nostr and Bitcoin app studio, built from the students who came back for more.
Once upon a time,
there was a classroom.
It started with a phone call. I had been coding for over a decade when the university asked me to teach. I thought: if not me, who?
So I said yes. Built the course from scratch. Running the studio by day, teaching by night, not enough hours to prep everything. The theory I could write ahead. For the demos, I had to improvise. Every class I walked in without a plan, touched the keyboard, and built live with the students watching.
They loved it. Out of a hundred students in that first cohort, about twenty were exceptional. When the students voted for the best teacher at the faculty that year, I finished top three out of a hundred teachers. When the course ended, some of them came back asking for more. Then a client asked if we could scale up. I laughed. The timing was absurd. That was the moment it clicked.
I founded Appollo41 in 2016 and spent eight years trying to build a team. Seniors, mediors, juniors, different partners. None of it stuck. The culture never aligned. Then the students started coming to me on their own, and the pattern was obvious. The people who come to you already belong. The people you have to chase never quite do. On paper the gap looks small. In practice it is everything.
Three of those students are on our team today. More are on the way. They ship. They care. They keep going when the problem bites back. We are not here for the money. We are here because this is what we love, and because we found each other.
The apprenticeship
didn't stop at people.
The lesson from building the team carried straight over. The best teammates are not the ones you pick off a shelf. They are the ones you invest in, teach your way of working, and trust with more over time. AI agents are no different. A raw agent is a stranger. An onboarded one is a colleague.
So we onboard them. We write skills that teach an agent how we do a specific thing, the way we would walk a new developer through it. We give each one a long-term memory that carries across sessions, so it remembers our decisions, our codebase, and the way we like to work. Over time each agent builds a profile and a focus of its own, the same way a developer grows into a role.
The engineer is always in the lead. They shape the work, review every change, and own the result. The agent carries the work forward at speed. It does not get to decide what good looks like. This is not vibe coding. It is a senior engineer, working faster.
Working this way, we delivered a full year of roadmap in three months, on our own products and on our clients'. We have since started passing the method on to other teams. The ones who want it tend to find their way to us.
Why this matters
Strong Fundamentals
Every developer has a deep understanding of computer science and mobile platform internals, not just framework tutorials.
Genuine Passion
The team self-selected into this work. They build mobile apps because they love it, not because it was the first offer they got.
Long-Term Commitment
Low turnover, deep product knowledge, and a team that stays invested in your project over months and years.
The team
Aleksandar Ilic
Founder
Marko Kocic
Developer
Andrija Pantic
Developer
Aleksandar Kurcubic
Developer