Rus Hughes

I’m Rus Hughes, a bootstrapped entrepreneur from the UK, living in Valencia, building businesses, tools and systems around freedom, health, responsibility and the occasional bit of technical overkill.

I’ve been writing here since 2008. The archive is messy in places, but that’s kind of the point - it’s a real record, not a polished personal brand that appeared last week with a funnel attached. I founded Intelligent Labs roughly 14 years ago. We’ve served over 1,000,000 customers, done over $30,000,000 in lifetime revenue, and we’re building toward an 8-figure revenue year. I also built tools.rus.io, run Valencia Entrepreneurs, launched Amazooka to a 6-figure exit, and shipped a bunch of other experiments along the way.

Some worked. Some really didn’t.

That’s kind of the point of experiments!

About has the fuller version if you want it, whilst the posts go back to 2008 if you’re feeling brave.

Things I’m Building

Intelligent Labs is the main one. Practitioner-grade supplements, roughly 14 years in, over a million customers, practitioner and wholesale platform. This is what I spend most of my time on and honestly the thing I’m most proud of building.

tools.rus.io is a growing collection of small browser tools I wanted to exist. No accounts, no paywalls, no ad nonsense. Just useful things that do one job properly.

Valencia Entrepreneurs has 6,000+ Meetup members, 500+ active on WhatsApp and Telegram, and we run 100+ events a year. It’s one of those things that started small and quietly grew in to something pretty significant without anyone really planning it that way.

I also built hugo-travel-map, an open source Hugo module for self-hosting a travel map. 52 countries and counting. The Mongol Rally was definitely one of the best and stupidest things I’ve ever done.

Selected Writing

Not just the newest stuff - posts that actually say something about how I think:

Falling Forwards: From A Drunken 2am Flight Booking To Running A SaaS In Vietnam - Health, business, and what happens when you rebuild everything from scratch. Lots of detail in this one.
Financial Responsibility - Freedom starts with not owing anyone anything. Simple idea, took me a while to actually live it.
Launching tools.rus.io - Why I built a collection of small tools and what I want them to become.
Gratitude 2022 - End of year reflection. The kind of post that’d feel weird to write every month but works once a year.
Why I Bought A Rolex Starbucks - Part watch review, part personal milestone, part reminder not to take yourself too seriously. It’s a pretty watch though!

Elsewhere

I’m around on GitHub, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Mastodon.

Get in touch if you want to. I read everything, even if I don’t always reply quickly!

The Return Of MiniDisc, Mindfulness, And Why I Ported A Foobar2000 DSP To macOS

Updated May 28, 2026 May 28, 2026 by Rus Hughes

Digging my old Sony MZ-R909 out of a drawer led to a MiniDisc revival, a macOS port of foo_dsp_silence for foobar2000, and a reminder that too much choice is slowly ruining how we experience music.

Falling Forwards: From A Drunken 2am Flight Booking To Running A SaaS In Vietnam

Updated May 23, 2026 May 23, 2026 by Rus Hughes

Fourteen years of failed side projects, ballooning to 90kg, a Phuket type 2 diabetes diagnosis, and four months in Barcelona that finally stuck.

Launching hugo-travel-map

Updated May 11, 2026 May 11, 2026 by Rus Hughes

I’ve got over 40 WordPress sites. Whilst I love what WordPress did for the web, the last few years have been a slow grind of plugin upgrades, security patches and the occasional 3am email telling me another one got popped anyway. Automated updates, hardened configs, the lot - and still, every couple of years one of them would get hacked. Given 90% of my content is genuinely static, I finally got fed up and started moving everything off. The WooCommerce stuff went to Shopify so I never have to think about it again. The blogs and content sites are going to Hugo, Astro, or in a couple of cases my own Laravel platform.

Launching tools.rus.io

Updated April 30, 2026 April 30, 2026 by Rus Hughes

I keep needing the same small jobs done on my laptop. Percentage of a number. Days between two dates. Pretty-print some JSON. Turn a markdown file into a PDF without opening three different apps.

The math is easy. Finding a page that just does the job without an email gate, autoplay, or half the viewport covered in ads for stuff i dont want is what wore me down.

So i built tools.rus.io.

Building Character, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Mimics the Process of Personal Growth

Updated August 11, 2023 August 11, 2023 by Rus Hughes

Just as the vibrant LEGO pieces come together to create magnificent structures, our life experiences, both significant and seemingly trivial, shape us, brick by brick. Each piece, each memory, each learning curve, intertwines to craft the intricate design of our character. Join me on this journey, as we draw parallels between the assembly of LEGO structures and our own personal growth.

Foundations – From Beginnings and Experiences

Like the foundation of any great LEGO structure, our character’s foundation is laid early in life. Our environment, the people we interact with, and the experiences we undergo, act as those foundational pieces, setting the stage for future growth.

Understanding and Embracing Your Value System: A Guide to Authentic Living

Updated August 10, 2023 August 10, 2023 by Rus Hughes

In a world filled with diverse personalities, various opinions, and incessant external influences, navigating through life’s myriad challenges and crossroads can be a daunting endeavor. One of the most profound tools we possess as individuals, often overlooked, is our value system. It’s the compass that guides our choices, influencing not just what we do, but how we feel about it.

What is a Value System?

At its core, a value system comprises the principles, ethics, and moral standards we hold dear. Think of it as your internal GPS, consistently guiding you towards actions and choices that resonate with your soul’s deepest truths. While the world around you fluctuates, these values remain your steadfast companions, helping you make decisions that feel right at a fundamental level.

Rich in Personality: Exploring the Traits of the Wealthy

Updated July 9, 2023 July 9, 2023 by Rus Hughes

I subscribe to Chamath Palihapitiya’s Substack What I Read This Week, it’s a weekly dose of a dozen or so interesting links, often related, that he recommends. This week’s newsletter featured a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology titled The rich are different: Unravelling the perceived and self-reported personality profiles of high-net-worth individuals.

I’m fascinated with personal development as my personality used to be abhorrent. Over the decades I’ve become someone I actually like, as well as a high-net-worth individual, so I was curious to see if there was a scientific correlation between who I have become internally and what I have achieved externally.

Why I Bought A Rolex Starbucks

Updated April 15, 2023 April 15, 2023 by Rus Hughes

Last year I bought a brand new, Rolex Starbucks.

i dont know if you guys have seen the meme of all the gurus saying everyone in america would make it if they just stopped buying starbucks coffee?

Moguls like Kevin O’Leary can be very judgemental about people’s coffee habits.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/04/kevin-oleary-wont-pay-2-point-50-for-coffee-instead-he-invests-it.html

Medical schools are advising students to save money by not buying Starbucks.

Gratitude 2022

Updated December 1, 2022 December 1, 2022 by Rus Hughes

When I journal I always fill out a gratitude template of 6 things I’m grateful for but reading Tynan’s recent gratitude blog post has inspired me to follow in his foot steps and write my own yearly gratitude post. I want to develop as a writer and content creator for personal development and to help better understand my own thoughts so hopefully I will see you this time next year as well!

Discovering The South Of Morocco

Updated November 30, 2022 November 30, 2022 by Rus Hughes

Spain’s starting to get cold and is losing it’s sunshine, also I want to get back to a never ending summer, so I decided to spend a month in Morocco to learn more about this beautiful country.

Surfing in Tamraght

Taghazout is the most famous surfing destination in Morocco, but it’s tiny, lost it’s hippy vibe and has more scammers than soul nowadays. Further down the coast is another town called Tamraght with more surf and yoga camps as well as proximity to the same beaches. I have stayed in a few places and recommend Maroc Surf Camp for basic accomodation, yoga and surf lessons or the Riu Palace if you want more of a luxury resort vibe. The Maroc Surf Camp guys were happy to collect me from the Riu and take me out for surf lessons when I was staying there.

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