Discipline, Systems, and AI: The Grind Behind Luxara

Ever wondered how entrepreneurs manage to build thriving businesses while juggling demanding day jobs and family responsibilities? Vladlen Stark pulls back the curtain on his journey creating Luxara in this candid episode of The Immigrant Hustle podcast.

"The only way this is possible is through relentless discipline, strategic sacrifice, and leveraging an incredible stack of AI tools that act as my digital team," he reveals. Drawing from his background in competitive sports and bodybuilding, he shares how these experiences forged the mental resilience needed for entrepreneurship.

"Building a business is a journey of a thousand small steps," he emphasizes. "It's about showing up day after day, consistently, especially on those days when you're tired."

Whether you're contemplating your first side hustle or scaling an existing venture, this episode delivers actionable insights to transform entrepreneurial vision into reality. Ready to build your dream with the power of AI? Listen now and discover how to make the impossible possible.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to The Immigrant Hustle
• 1:37 Founder Struggles and Building Momentum
• 4:05 Learning Discipline Through Sports
• 8:34 System for Work-Life-Startup Balance
• 14:03 Six Essential AI Tools
• 23:42 Advice for Starting Your Hustle
• 26:51 The Journey of a Thousand Steps

Transcript

Vladlen Stark: 0:00

Welcome back to The Immigrant Hustle. My name is Vladlen Stark, and I am your host. If you're tuning in for the first time, The Immigrant Hustle is an unfiltered CEO's playbook on how to build a business with AI. In this show, I'm pulling back the curtain on my journey. It's about the grind, the challenges, and the incredible moments of discovery that come when you're building something from scratch. It's about the hustle. Last week we got into the why behind Luxara. Today we're going to talk about the how. The number one question I get is, how do you possibly have time to build a business while working a demanding corporate job and balancing a family life with two little kids? The answer, I really don't. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The only way this is possible is through relentless discipline, strategic sacrifice, and leveraging an incredible stack of AI tools that Today, I'm going to share my exact playbook. As I promised to my listeners, I always will give you an unfiltered story and the truth behind the journey, and it's not always going to be rainbows and unicorns. Just a handful of weeks ago, I had one of those days that every founder dreads. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. I managed to squeeze in a coffee over my lunch hour with a lawyer and I was given a rough quote of a cool $250,000 U.S. to do the legal work for the foundation of Luxara in the U.S., Later that day, I got a really weird text from one of my key advisors. And later that advisor ended up totally ghosting me. And to add to all of that, it was a regular old stressful day at my corporate job. And by the time I got home, I was totally defeated. I just wanted to curl up on the couch and disappear. Problem is, that's not how life works when you have a family. The kids needed dinner, they needed baths, they needed their stories. By the time they were asleep around 7.30, I had nothing left in the tank. Going through days like that gives me an incredible sense of respect for entrepreneurs out there. I've always admired them from the distance, but now I have a specialist level of appreciation of just how hard it is and how much work it takes to bring a vision to reality. So how do you push through a moment like that? What could possibly turn my day around? The answer is one small concrete action. I sat down, I opened the Lovable and the Luxara portal, and I made a couple little changes. It wasn't a big win. But it was a real one. And that's the secret that nobody tells you. Momentum comes from series of small wins relentlessly stacked on one another over time, especially on the days when you feel like quitting. Now, that discipline doesn't just come from nowhere. Some people assume that I've always been like that. Maybe there's some truth to it, but I don't think so. I think it's learned, and I think it's something that you can learn as well. One of the first experiences in Canadian high school that I remember was about me trying out for the football team. In my first year, I started school late. It was almost the end of September by the time I got going, and I had already missed the tryouts. And honestly, that was probably for the best And I think it saved me some humiliation in the end. My high school football team was a powerhouse back then in the city and in the province. And it was actually one of the reasons why I flunked my ESL test to get into the ESL program at CCH. But that's a story for another time. I played competitive tennis since I was about six years old. I was somewhere about 110 pounds soaking wet. And I wish this was an exaggeration, but that was my actual stature at the time. So when I went and I talked to my coaches about joining the team the following year, the guys almost fell out of the chairs. Now, They were truly some of the greatest coaches that I've had in my life. So they didn't just dismiss me when they got over their laughter. They did take me seriously. They gave me this little booklet. It was a printed program of workouts and they showed me to the school gym and they told me to put on some weight. I needed to be bigger. I needed to be stronger if I wanted to play. So that's what I did. The short version of a very long story was that I'd be at that school gym every day after class. I would miss my school bus and I'd work out and I would have to take public transit after on a very long ride, but I was determined and I was committed. So about a year later, the following fall, I showed up weighing in at 155 pounds. That was only the start of my fitness journey and eventually I got into more serious lifting and ultimately competing in physique bodybuilding. For years of working demanding jobs, I would sometimes wake up at five in the morning, do my cardio session, go to work, come home, quick meal, back to the gym for a weight session. And I would do that five, six times a week. The meal prep alone is like a part-time job, endlessly weighing chicken and broccoli or whatever the celebrities on TV tell you. is the diet to get in a jacked shape. But it's really isolating. It's misunderstood by most. It's impossible to maintain a fun social life when you're serious about it because you can't just go out with friends and have drinks and have a nice dinner, especially as you get closer to a show. The psychological strain is quite immense. Especially in the months and weeks leading up to the show, you know there's no cheat days. You have to be on program. You have to be disciplined. And you're depleted. You're often depressed. And you just have to find energy and drive to push through with that single goal in mind. Those experiences over the years really forged this discipline that I draw on every single day. Now, all of this said, I think no matter how much discipline you have, without the system, you really risk a burnout. So let me share with you my system. First is something called calendar blocking. It's the idea that from nine to five, I have my NGL calendar block, and that time is dedicated to NGL and nothing else. And there is this mental firewall that I have to maintain. Then in the evening, between about seven to 11, sometimes a little bit later, depending on bedtimes, that's my Luxara time block. And in that time block, Everything else becomes secondary. Now, when I lay it out like that, you quickly realize that it takes a special kind of crazy to do what I'm doing. But that's the hustle. The second tool is something called time boxing. So inside of each of my evening blocks, I have these 15 to 60 minute sprints that I schedule for a particular topic. And then after that sprint is done, I reset and move on to the next thing. And that really allows me to just stay on focus. I go down a bunch of rabbit holes and make sure that no matter what, I at least make some progress. Even if I don't get it done, I get some progress towards a specific task for that day and for that evening and for that time block. The third concept is deep work and rest. I try to dedicate one weekend day to heavy cognitive tasks, working on something that requires a lot of time and attention, whether that's reviewing something on a legal or compliance side for Luxara or working on a marketing deck or marketing presentation that I need to get ready for. And more often than not, lately, it's been on recording the podcast. The second day, I always dedicate to rest and family. I do my best not to look at anything Luxor related and to really just focus on the family spending good quality time with my kids and my wife and try to fill it with activities and experiences. Now, if you have little kids, toddlers or preschoolers or early school, you'll know that it's pretty much impossible to set out an entire weekend for anything. So it often becomes sort of half day rest, half day rest instead of two dedicated days, but do whatever works. Bottom line, you need to find time for yourself to rest, to work out, to eat well and really recharge because tired founders make tired decisions and that never bodes well for your business. The fourth and final pillar of my system is trying to find time in unlikely places. And what I mean there is there's a lot of dead time in your day, whether that's commutes, time between meetings, lunch hour, doom scrolling, whatever it might be. So I try to maximize my down times and really transform them into something productive. So any of you living in a big city like Calgary, my commute to work, if I were to do it on the weekend, is 15 minutes door to door. On weekday, with the kid drop off on the way and the beautiful traffic in the midst of construction, it can take up to an hour one way, which is kind of crazy. But that's a lot of dead time. And I try to talk to my kids when when they're in the car and interact with them on the way. But the drop-offs are pretty close to my house. So the majority of my commute is just me in the car. And historically, I would listen to podcasts or to audio books. But now with the advancements in the AI technology, AI is now multimodal. So what I'm able to do now is I'm able to actually have conversations with either Gemini or ChatGPT as my assistant in real time. So for example, the other day I was driving and I had Gem and I do an interview of me as if it wasn't a journalist. And it would ask me a series of questions about my experiences and about the topic for the episode four of the podcast that's coming up in a couple of weeks. And we sort of went back and forth and had a conversation. And by the end of my commute, by the time I arrived to work, I already had a dozen pages of notes and of conversations that I can now use that same AI to transform into a script and then eventually into the podcast that's coming in a couple weeks. So we've talked about the discipline. We've talked about the system. Now let's talk a little bit about the tools, because even with all the disciplines and all the systems, the amount of work is still immense and you need your tools to get through that work. So in my case, a toolkit of six tools that I use every single day, and I'll go through each one and give you a little bit of a context for how I use them. And then the following episode, episode three of the podcast will focus on really sort of deep diving into use cases of each one of the tools and how they fit into my business and how they could fit into your business or your personal life. A quick disclaimer before I get started is that I am not affiliated or sponsored by any of the tools that I'm about to mention, at least not yet. If you're watching or listening, I'm here, I'm ready. I am in fact a paying customer for all these tools and for most of them I'm actually paying for the top tier at least of the consumer grade. So first and foremost, and unsurprisingly, ChatGPT is the number one on the list. And I've used it predominantly for research, especially when it comes to technical research. A lot of the things to do with Luxara are highly, highly technical and that navigate the space of securities issuance of international law tax law. So Chad GPT has really been very powerful and really excellent in allowing me to do the technical research, especially through its agent and deep research functionality that gives you these really nicely cited reports when you ask it correctly. The next tool in the toolkit is Gemini. I prefer Gemini for creative work. So that's writing scripts, provide any creative copies for the marketing materials or for videos or crafting stories and even crafting narratives for our particular campaigns or the marketing decks that we're It's been really nice and powerful at the pro level. And I believe actually a lot of it is accessible for free. So I'd encourage you to try it out. The next tool is Higgs field. Higgs field was a real blessing that came at the darkest moment, if you will, because I had tried probably 15 or 16 different tools for image generation. before I landed on Higgsfield. And mind you, Higgsfield is a platform that allows you to use different tools underneath, but in particular, Higgsfield Soul is the one where I found real consistency in character between different images, and it really allowed me to then create those consistent personas for Luxara and Aura, who are the two characters AI avatars that we have at Luxara that are consumer facing. The next tool is VeO3. Unsurprisingly, VeO3 has been the most powerful tool in creating the video content for the website, for our YouTube videos. And it is quite expensive. And I think in the last few months, even since I started using VeO3, there are a few tools on the market now that might be a little bit more accessible. So I'm look into changing that out. But at this stage in September 2025, VeO3 is still my preferred tool for video generation, especially when it comes to generating something that's consistent. The next bit is probably the number one tool, aside from the LLMs in the entire toolkit, that really made everything possible for Luxara, and that is lovable.dev. Lovable not only allowed me to build a beautiful website for Luxara, it also... allowed me to really refine a lot of the ideas and a lot of the content as I went along and I mean the idea behind lovable is that it's a vibe coding app or web portal type tool but what happens I don't know if that's intentional or not as you are creating things and prompting things in the tool you inadvertently have some really cool conversations and really look at it from a different And in my case, it was exceptionally powerful to look at something from a consumer perspective and to really sort of question, does this make sense? If I'm the customer looking at your product for the first time, do I understand it? Do I understand your brand? Do I understand your vision? Do I understand your visuals and your characters and whatever else it might be? So it really provided this nice little feedback loop that I wouldn't otherwise have. have because again it's just me sitting here looking at something and coding back and forth right so that was a really powerful experience for me throughout and now that I'm looking at expanding Luxara into the Canadian market and building out the Canadian side of the platform and the portal I think I'll go through another set of learnings and discoveries which I find extremely valuable The last tool in the stack is the one that, mind you, I'll admit I'm underutilizing right now, I think. It's something called Notion. Notion is really supposed to be the central operating hub for everything with Luxara. Everything from the team to business plan to content calendar to databases of properties to next steps in the podcast to taking ideas and notes for meetings and so on and so forth it's a really powerful platform that i'm still learning and still trying to utilize at a deeper level the cool thing about it is just like many other platforms out there a lot of them will give you promotions or offers when you first join or when you join as a business and in case of notion i applied for and got a three months free subscription of a team to of Notion, which then allows me to add other people to collaborate on the project. And even though I don't have any staff at this point in time, I do have advisors and I do have people who have helped out along the way. And it's a really neat tool to just grant someone access and have them be able to access the most up to date business plan or the most up to date financial projections or the most up to date marketing deck or whatever that might be. So it's been a really cool experience and really The only reason I'm mentioning this is that if you are starting to build something and you are signing up for things, just always look out for these grants or freebies that you can get because I found them to be quite abundant, to be quite honest. I also want to give a little shout out though I don't use the AI aspect of it but Canva has been a real game changer for the graphic design of a lot of our assets especially the marketing decks and also another tool called Gamma that's been also amazing in preparing presentations and a lot of our white papers. It might seem a bit overwhelming to be honest I mean I just named off different tools all of which take time to learn and master and I'm not going to pretend like I'm the master of any of them but But the message here is this. You don't need fancy credentials from Harvard AI Certificate to get started with any of this. There is a ton of resources available out there, both from social media platforms like YouTube or Reddit or even Instagram that have a lot of content providers that provide a lot of education for free. And a lot of these tools are have a lot of resources available on their portals on their apps that also give you that training for free and even without formal training in any of these resources it really is just a matter of trial and error and continuing to practice in a particular tool and what you'll find is that prompt engineering isn't really rocket science i mean the perfect prompt and the rookie prompt are an ocean apart but you can follow a pretty simplistic structure and you will get some pretty good results and you'll improve over time. So what I would say is that just get started before you worry about the formal education component of it and just keep practicing and you'll get there or you'll get halfway there but you'll still be further ahead than you were five minutes ago.

Vladlen Stark: 23:42

If you're trying to start your side hustle or your full-time hustle while you're still employed there's a couple of things that you should consider first and foremost i'd review your employment agreement if you have one for things like non-competes ip rights time and attention conflicts of interest so on and so forth just to make sure that as you're starting your hustle you're not in conflict with your current employer and you're not violating any of the contracts that you're under. Second, start small. Try to prove out your idea before you make any significant changes in your life. In my case, and in the case of Luxara, it was proving the concept with one villa, which we did, and then we moved on to the next and the next and the next. In your case, it could be a course, it could be a product, it could be a podcast, whatever it might be. Make sure you've proven the concept, and hopefully you're at a point where the business is actually generating some revenue at which point you can actually start making some serious decisions whether or not you want to start doing your hustle full-time next piece of advice is really budget your tool stack whatever tools that you think you might need i think it's very easy to overestimate and overspend especially early on with a lot of the different tools that are on the market you should really consider using the free versions of all of the different tools first and most of them do offer free tiers that are reasonably powerful. And if and only if you've reached the absolute limits of all the free tiers of various different software or tools that you're using, would I ever consider upgrading to that next paid tier, let alone anything at enterprise level. And finally, and most importantly, default to action. You You don't need to do something grand. You just need to do something. Even if it's right now. Take a moment. Hit pause. Go and make some progress. Come back and finish this when you're done. Okay, now that you're done and we're back here, some nights are going to feel like you're on a winning streak. Other nights, you're going to feel like you barely have a pulse. That's absolutely normal. That's absolutely human. It happens to all of us. The rule that I live by is show up in the way that the person you are tomorrow will respect. It doesn't need to be some grand victory, a big product launch, or an appearance on Bloomberg TV, or anything like that. It could really just be something small, a small change to your website, a couple of emails, a couple of phone calls. Building a business is a journey of a thousand steps. It's all about consistency, showing up day after day, and making small meaningful steps towards building something great. With the right mindset, with the right strategy, with the right tools, it's absolutely possible for everyone to do. Thank you for tuning in. Next week, we're going to look at all the tools that I mentioned and get into the specifics, the use cases that I have for my business, and hopefully some of the use cases that are transferable for your business and for your personal life. The best way to support the hustle is to share it with someone else who might be in the trenches building their dream right now. If this episode gave you an idea or motivation, I ask you that you pay that forward. Share it with someone you know, or better yet, share your own story. Lend somebody a helping hand. It could make all the difference in the world for that person. Let's keep building this community together. My name is Vladlen Stark. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.