Childhood
I was born in Sochi, Russia. For some time I lived in Gagra, Georgia. In 1992, my family and I moved to the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv.
What Is My Life Story?
I'm co-founder of TemplateMonster and Weblium,
mentor of international incubator. I'm passionate about web development and innovations in different spheres.
Education
I studied marketing at the university, which had just opened in the city and was among the first to finish it. In the third year of study, I was told that there are no more marketers there besides me. They offered either to enter the faculty of finance or to find another 10 students ready to learn marketing further. This was my very first marketing task.
I campaigned for students through the newspaper, student comedy club, and similar activities. Ultimately, I managed to find more people and become a marketer though I still consider myself a seller at heart.TemplateMonster
Instead of the office we had a typical two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise apartment building. We called ourselves a web design studio. Once, we found a partner from the USA who came to us and said: “Are you working with computers? I do sales. Let's work together.” Just like we were not computer geniuses, our partner didn’t know how to sell. We came to the decision that he would look for clients for us, whereas we will carry out the orders. It was in 2000.
In some time, he gave us the first order of $70,000. By comparison: you could then buy an apartment in Mykolaiv for $5,000.
The order was for the integration of a complex warehouse system. We thought we would complete it in three months. However, it took us eight months and brought only $2,000. But the main thing for us was not the final result, but the fact that we worked on a real order. We finished the project and decided to move on. The partner found orders from large companies, similar in size to General Electric. At this stage, our company, named TemplateMonster, realized that individual website development was too expensive for many customers.
One of the designers had an amazing performance and work pace. It turned out that he used his own hand-made library of drawing elements in Photoshop, which allowed him to create layouts very quickly. In 2002, we decided to try selling these templates as Photoshop files. We sold them to new businesses and those whose sites looked outdated.
Thus, TemplateMonster became self-sufficient. But the real growth began after we launched the affiliate program. In three years, we accumulated over 270 thousand affiliate partners around the world. As a result, when you typed “templates” or “web-templates” in Google, the first three pages were flooded by us and our affiliates. We created all the templates ourselves. In just 3 years, our business grew by 30 times. In 2007, the annual turnover of TemplateMonster amounted to $2-3 mln.
Besides, we signed a deal with Wordpress and became its official vendor. I went to Matt Mullenweg and we agreed on the terms of the deal. Yet, we had to stop the cooperation later when they decided to cooperate solely with the suppliers of templates under the GPL-license. For us, it was unacceptable because of the forced inheritance of licensing conditions for commercial photo banks, which we used.
Then we began to expand to other platforms, primarily open-source: Magento, Prestashop, ZenCart, OS Commerce, Joomla, etc., and became a multiplatform template provider. We analyzed Google trends, looked for new market players and started working with them.
In 2013, my partners and I sold Template Monster to a US private equity fund. Under the contract, we can disclose neither the amount of the transaction nor the sales terms. Yet, I should remain the CEO of the company until 2020.Ukrainian army transformation
In 2014, I visited Chonhar, a Ukrainian village on the border with the Crimea. It happened just a week after the annexation. Having seen the poor state of things in the region, we decided to help. We launched the first project called the First People’s Landing Battalion and developed the crowdfunding platform of the People's Project to help the wounded and victims of the fighting.
In August 2014, I was appointed as an adviser to the head of the Mykolaiv regional state administration for volunteering. In September, I was authorized Plenipotentiary by the minister for procurement. In October, I became an advisor to the minister of defense and chairman of the Volunteer Council at the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. In November 2014, he became a co-founder of the Association of National Volunteers of Ukraine and curator of the“volunteer landing” — a group of volunteers who began working in the Ministry of Defense.
In volunteering, I was awarded the Order of Merit, III degree.Since then, the People's Project has grown a lot as a platform. We transformed it from a portal that serves one volunteer group into an ecosystem that serves a whole volunteer community. We assumed the functions of fundraising and financial control. It turned out to be a Kickstarter for volunteers.Weblium Studio
In 2017, I founded Weblium 1.0 in a do-it-for-me web-studio. We did not raise the money and financed the development at our own costs. Our projection was to build the product during the first year and break even during the second. Our first step was to hire CTO who selected the stack of technologies, then we hired three independent consultants to get a second opinion. The choice of technology is often a determining factor in whether this kind of business will succeed or fail.
After that, we hired three front-end and two back-end developers, UX guru and UI designer, QA engineers, product manager, etc. Our team of website setup experts created websites for users who could then edit them in the intuitive editor themselves.
We acquired our first customers from Facebook, having spent around $1500 to generate first 100 leads. We also tried Google Adwords but the cost per lead was extremely high (over $100) while our average check size was only $150.
Then, we developed an affiliate program, using PostAffiliatePro. Affiliates generate around 30% of total volume now.Draftium
In 2018, the world saw Draftium — a tool for Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi prototyping of landing pages and multi-page websites. Initially, the product was created for internal use of Weblium, but we realized that there are no convenient block tools for prototyping websites on the market. 3 weeks after the launch, Draftium became the Product Hunt Design Tool of the Year and received the Golden Kitty Award.
Weblium DIY
The successful launch of Draftium made us realize that the main product — Weblium DIY website builder — is ready to enter the big world, and we decided to launch it in a month. Weblium DIY is a full-fledged site builder with an integrated AI supervisor that helps a person without design skills to create professional modern websites. On January 15, 2019, Weblium 2.0 was launched. Users rated the product well, making it the Product of the Day and No. 2 Product of the Week on Product Hunt.
The number of users is growing every day. Our ambitious target is 1000 created sites per day.Digital Women 2020
In 2018, I launched the social project Digital Women 2020. Its main goal is to digitalize one million businesses founded by women around the world by 2020. Each week, participants receive mentor sessions, relevant online courses, invitations to useful events, and discounts on digital tools. What's more important, we are evaluating the digitalization level of their business and providing a step-by-step instructions on how to develop it further.
Mentorship
Since 2017, I’ve been a mentor in the Google Launchpad, Omnic Accelerator, SeedStarts, and partner of entrepreneurship development programs from PrivatBank (“KUB”) and OschadBank (“Buduy svoe”).