Browse.City was a large platform launched in 2015 as a blend of personal sites, business tools, classifieds, and local discovery features. Despite strong technology and two years of development, the project ultimately failed — becoming one of the most defining milestones in my career.
In early 2015, I gathered everything I had learned over the years and began building a new large-scale system: Browse.City.
It wasn’t a direct successor to Lugansk.Ru, but parts of its DNA were undeniably there.
If anything, the project was a blend of:
the ecosystem logic I had been developing across personal and commercial sites,
and certain architectural ideas from Lugansk,
but reshaped into something more universal, less political, and more open-ended.
Throwing away Lugansk’s codebase would have been wrong.
Reusing it “as is” was impossible.
So Browse.City became the place where I rewrote that experience into something new.
For nearly two years, I developed it alongside client work — steadily, patiently, and fully independently.
The platform allowed people to:
post local classifieds
showcase businesses
announce discounts and garage sales
publish events
list jobs
and create mini “micro-sites” within the business showcases
Six separate sections, each different by nature, but all part of one unified system.
Browse.City became a training ground for technologies I hadn’t touched before:
SMS notifications
two-factor authentication
refined responsive design
early attempts at platform-level modularity
streamlined posting and moderation pipelines
Technically, it was strong — possibly the most advanced system I had built up to that moment.
I completed development around midsummer.
By the end of the year, I understood something painful:
The project was failing.
I tried to push it.
I tried to promote it.
I tried to find its audience.
But it was sitting awkwardly between two worlds:
too complex for a simple classifieds platform
too broad and undefined to become a true social ecosystem
Mini-sites didn’t attract enough people.
Advertising space remained empty.
Traffic grew too slowly.
It simply did not take off.
And the responsibility was mine alone.
Maybe I quit too early.
Maybe it wasn’t the right time.
Maybe it was never meant to work.
What I do know is this:
👉 It became my biggest personal failure up to that moment.
And sometimes that happens.
Browse.City was not abandoned — it was closed by choice.
The platform felt incomplete.
I felt incomplete.
I didn’t want to return to building small client projects just to fill the gap.
So I made a decision:
It was time to work inside an actual platform company.
To learn how large systems live, scale, break, and evolve — from the inside.
I started a Twitter account.
Registered my personal domain.
And stepped into the industry I had never considered before:
👉 the dating world.
It became an atomic-level experience —
massive traffic, unimaginable data volumes, unconventional marketing logic, and techniques that the “normal internet” simply does not use.
But that is a story for the next milestone.
Even though Browse.City never became what I hoped, it marked a pivotal moment:
👉 It changed the entire direction of my life and my career.
A platform that was technically strong but conceptually mismatched —
a project at the crossroads —
a reminder that sometimes the only path forward is through a very real failure.
Browse.City was, in many ways, stillborn.
But its impact was enormous.
It pushed me into the world that eventually led to QRaway.
Sometimes the projects that die are the ones that push us hardest.
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