Balkan Spectator did not start with a big business plan, a newsroom or a team of journalists.
It started as a Telegram channel.
The idea was simple: create a place where people could follow what was happening in the Balkans in English, quickly and without having to search through dozens of local news websites every day.
At the beginning, Balkan Spectator was a very small project.
I was following the region, finding interesting stories and posting the ones that I thought deserved more attention.
Some were major political developments. Others were military announcements, diplomatic disputes, elections or stories that were important inside one Balkan country but barely mentioned outside it.
Little by little, people started joining.
Finding the Balkan Spectator style
In the early days, the main goal was simply to share interesting news.
But over time, Balkan Spectator started developing its own way of covering the region.
Posts became shorter and easier to read. Flags made it possible to understand immediately which countries were involved. Headlines became clearer.
More importantly, the channel gradually moved from simply sharing news to trying to explain what was behind it.
A story about Serbia and Kosovo was rarely only about Serbia and Kosovo.
A defence agreement between two countries could tell us something about NATO, Russia or the changing security situation in Europe.
An election could affect relations between several neighbouring countries.
That was when the idea behind Balkan Spectator really began to take shape.
It was not just about collecting Balkan news.
It was about following the region as a whole.
A growing community
For a long time, growth was gradual.
Every new subscriber mattered because Balkan Spectator was still a relatively small project competing for attention with much larger news outlets and channels.
Then the audience began to grow faster.
More people started sharing posts, forwarding stories and discovering the channel through other communities interested in geopolitics, defence and European affairs.
Balkan Spectator passed one milestone and then another.
What had started as a small Telegram channel became a community of thousands of readers from different countries following the Balkans every day.
That growth also changed the way I looked at the project.
There was clearly an audience interested in understanding this region better.
And Balkan Spectator could become much more than the channel I had originally imagined.
Covering more, without losing the original idea
As the channel grew, the coverage grew with it.
Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia remained central parts of Balkan Spectator, but the project increasingly followed the wider region: Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Croatia, Slovenia and Greece.
Defence became an increasingly important part of the coverage.
So did diplomacy, energy, EU enlargement, relations with Russia and China and the growing military and political competition around Southeast Europe.
But I have always wanted to keep the basic format simple.
You should be able to open Balkan Spectator, read a post in less than a minute and understand what happened.
And when a story needs more explanation, we should provide enough context to understand why it matters.
Building something bigger
Eventually, I started thinking about what Balkan Spectator could become beyond Telegram.
Telegram is excellent for following events as they happen, but news moves quickly. A story published today can disappear under dozens of new posts within a few days.
That is one of the reasons this website was created.
The website allows Balkan Spectator to organise its coverage, keep important stories accessible and start building a more permanent record of what is happening across the region.
It is also part of a wider ambition for the project.
There are many things I still want to experiment with: better ways of following long-running stories, maps, regional data, historical context and new tools that make Balkan affairs easier to understand.
Balkan Spectator is still very much a project in development.
And I actually like that.
From a channel to a project
Looking back, the most interesting part of Balkan Spectator's journey is that there was never one moment when it suddenly became what it is today.
It happened gradually.
One post became a hundred.
A few readers became hundreds, and hundreds became thousands.
A simple Telegram channel developed its own style, its own audience and eventually its own website.
And along the way, my ambition for Balkan Spectator grew too.
The goal now is to keep improving without losing what made the project work in the first place:
find the stories that matter, explain them clearly and help more people understand the Balkans.
There is still a lot to build.
And that is probably the most exciting part.