How does a startup begin? Sometimes in a café.

Some things start with a grand plan, a detailed business plan, and endless Excel spreadsheets. Zevio started differently — with an open lecture, a bold move, and a conversation at a Kraków café many years later.

I remember the first part of this story well. I was doing a postgraduate degree in digital marketing when I came across an open lecture by Grzegorz Błażewicz on marketing automation. Something clicked — after the lecture, I reached out and asked for a meeting. Grzegorz replied. And that's how our shared adventure building SALESmanago began.

After five intense years building the sales department at SALESmanago, I decided to go out on my own — I started building my own projects, while Grzegorz continued developing his. But we stayed in touch — occasional meetups, exchanging observations about the market, about what we were seeing, about where things were heading.

In 2025, during one of those meetups in Kraków, the conversation turned to payments. I'd had a particular problem on my mind for a while — all those monthly charges that each of us somehow manages: school lunches, the gym, after-school activities, online courses. You pay here, you pay there, and you have no single place where you know what you have, when it's due, and how much. On one side — chaos. On the other — enormous predictability and repetition.

Grzegorz, in turn, told me about Tygodnik Powszechny, a Polish weekly he'd become an investor in. The editorial team was wrestling at the time with a very real problem: managing their readers' subscriptions. A classic publishing headache.

And so — one thing leading to another — we started connecting these two threads. What if you could make sense of it all in one place? And what if you used something Poles already know and trust — BLIK? Specifically, a brand-new technology: BLIK Recurring.

We looked at the market and found that no platform existed that effectively solved this problem on both sides at once — managing a subscriber base on one end, and offering a simple, convenient, modern way to pay on the other.

That's how Zevio was born — a platform connecting subscribers with a tool for managing recurring revenue. For publishers, service businesses, schools, gyms — anyone who wants to move to a subscription model without building their own system from scratch.

I'll write a separate post about BLIK Recurring technology itself — it deserves its own spotlight. It's something genuinely innovative on a European scale.

For now — hi, I'm Marek. Zevio is just getting started, and I want to share this journey with you as it unfolds.