[HN Gopher] Scaling a startup from a bunker: founders' story fro...
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Scaling a startup from a bunker: founders' story from Ukraine
Author : Pavlyshyna
Score : 194 points
Date : 2022-06-01 15:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.awesomic.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.awesomic.io)
| [deleted]
| r6ku wrote:
| OleksK wrote:
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| Really glad to hear that you guys are safe and continuing to
| operate. I remembered you were in Ukraine and was wondering how
| that affected everything! I've still got you in the back of my
| mind for when I need some design!
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Thank you, I honestly appreciate!
| svnt wrote:
| I am grateful you found stability in work but this reads like a
| satire. There are plenty of reasons to not grow. War is a valid
| one.
|
| The clearest framing of this for me is that the religion of
| Silicon Valley is primarily founded in avoidant behaviors and
| artificial restrictions on healthy behavior.
|
| I hope you all stay safe and find healing.
| starik36 wrote:
| > avoidant behaviors
|
| Disagree. I find it very helpful to be busy during stressful
| times. Otherwise you are just endlessly thinking about the war
| and incessantly checking news sources.
|
| I can't even imagine the mental pressure these folks are under.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Thank you! We also see it this way from what we hear from
| folks. Eg I limited newsfeed to 2 times a day and try to be
| busy all other times otherwise it gets all energy away for
| being worried.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| hi, thank you for the reply! Safe and yes, therapy helps with
| healing. I might understand your concern around toxic culture
| of "growth at all cost" as SV religion. After bootstrapping my
| 3 companies before, I am not a fan of it too.
|
| Hopefully, this is not the case. We were not pushing people
| during such heart-breaking times, on the opposite, they needed
| work as a distraction and spent at least 30% of work time
| lately on volunteering projects, eg. designing for non-profits.
| This gave an additional sense of purpose to being productive
| and stay strong.
| dang wrote:
| That's a generic flamewar tangent and those do not make for
| good HN threads at the best of times:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| This is obviously not an article about startup growth at all
| costs; it's the story of what's been happening to a startup in
| a war zone. I don't think it's in very good taste to lecture
| people who are going through that, let alone toss cliche
| internet swipes like "this reads like a satire", which are
| against the site guidelines anyhow.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| arcticfox wrote:
| > Exploiting Ukraine in any way for business reasons like
| this
|
| Where are you getting this take from? The founder calling the
| shots seems to be Ukrainian. The entire article is about them
| doing everything they can to take care of their team and
| their country.
|
| And as for why they keep working, his account of the opinion
| of his female employees hiding in bunkers to reduce the
| chance of rape:
|
| > I asked them to rest and take care of themselves & their
| relatives, but they told me that work kept them mentally
| stable.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| This is an amazing story and great concept/startup. I'd love to
| know more about the economics around the company, given that you
| raised 2.5M USD last year- what kind of capital costs do you
| incur that make the VC route a good path here? How do you plan to
| scale up to returns that are comparable with other YC companies?
|
| In other words, geopolitical situation aside, why not bootstrap
| this business or rely on debt?
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Thank you! It's a fair question given though unit economics in
| businesses like ours are usually pretty healthy. As we had a
| bootstrap experience before and were (still are!) very lean, we
| considered the options you mentioned too.
|
| The point for us was not capital costs or smth, but
| opportunities to grow at a different scale. We see VC not as
| primarily funding, but as partners for the journey -- source of
| learnings, support and network. We were mostly focused on
| raising from angel entrepreneurs, even current customers
| joined. Hopefully this answers your question.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Hey! I remember reading your previous article on HN about being
| bootstrapped, and I liked the fun aesthetic of your company :)
|
| Glad to hear everyone is safe, best of luck.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| yeap, that was us :) thank you!
| CedarMills wrote:
| It's a great post with realities of war. Being focused on work is
| a great distraction as well. My issue is how do we respond to
| businesses who are clearly exploiting the crisis for monetary
| gain?
|
| It's one thing to ask for support for humanitarian aid purposes
| (such as fundraising to distribute food, helping someone's family
| get out, etc.), it's another to exploit the war to grow your
| business.
|
| When the war started, I had numerous cold emails from Ukrainian
| businesses offering services (primarily outsourced marketing,
| design, software engineering) with the first paragraph containing
| emotionally charged, guilt-tripping statements. Those emails
| started to cause me to have some resentment and I marked them as
| junk. I will not be pushed to support a business that's trying to
| guilt trip me, regardless of what's happening.
|
| War is bad, majority of world supports the Ukrainian side. I pray
| for the conflict to be over soon.
| passivate wrote:
| If you still have them, can you share those emails with names
| redacted?
| [deleted]
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| hi! Thank you for the reply and what a great point. I can
| relate and yes, a lot of business in Ukraine are urged to
| switch to other markets to survive. I assume their cold
| outreach attempts might look naive and exploiting. I still
| believe that begging for help and offering some services are
| different, and sorry that disturbed you, really.
|
| I assume they still need to make payouts, keep workplaces and
| support the economy. From my perspective, begging for charity
| is not okay when you can bring value. Maybe I am just too
| optimistic about examples you mentioned.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| this is not how the west works nowadays. we are anti-survival
| because we do not feel threatened(big mistake), we are all
| about appearances and passing judgments.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Keep up the good work and thanks for providing a sense of
| normalcy to your employees in the midst of this crisis, I'm
| glad something like that is going on at this time.
| jen20 wrote:
| > majority of world supports the Ukrainian side
|
| And one way you can support it is to support the Ukrainian
| economy by doing business with companies there.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>My issue is how do we respond to businesses who are clearly
| exploiting the crisis for monetary gain?
|
| Yep, and not only that, what I see in those pictures are many
| young, military age healthy males that are hiding out in 'safe
| places' while other men and women are literally putting their
| lives at stake to save the country and the lives of the
| residents - while this group is pimping their business. Doesn't
| feel right to me.
| trhway wrote:
| Putting those young healthy males without significant
| training and enough effective military hardware right into
| the trenches being shelled/bombed would be a typical Russian
| approach which produces a lot of dead and wounded without any
| positive result. As it has become obvious over the last 3
| months Ukraine had learnt to fight differently, smarter.
|
| >while this group is pimping their business.
|
| From the macro scale POV, the large wars are won by
| economies. USSR and USA won over Germany and Japan by running
| larger economies (USSR starting 1942/43).
|
| One of the significant part of the war being waged by Russia
| is to decimate Ukrainian economy. These guys are successfully
| fighting it back. Them continuing to exist and even thrive
| and grow is one more piece of war lost by Russia. It is a
| long game/war. It is very possible that the conflict would go
| into ceasefire smoldering mode for years during which the
| survival of Ukraine as independent nation would be decided
| not by occasional artillery exchanges across ceasefire lines,
| it will be decided by whose economy would continue to develop
| successfully.
|
| >hiding out in 'safe places'
|
| They aren't hiding from draft. Most of them could easily be
| reached and drafted by army when/if needed. Ukraine drafting
| offices are overwhelmed with people ready to sign up.
| qaq wrote:
| So helping people to have a job bad but once they loose the job
| and have to rely on handouts helping them is good hm...
| zucker42 wrote:
| I understand why you might not like getting these emails, but
| is there any reason you think they're bad in some general sense
| (at least worse than any other email advertising). I'm sure
| there are some customers out there who would like to buy from
| Ukrainian companies given what's going on.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I strongly suspect many are not actually Ukrainian; I
| recently got Facebook ads for a "Ukrainian educational toy
| maker" selling puzzles I'd seen on AliExpress.
| dhoe wrote:
| Very timely, I was just wondering the other day how you guys are
| doing. Can't wait to be able to justify signing up with my badly
| designed side project!
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| thank you! You're always welcome to try us out
| dollyworld wrote:
| wow, thanks for sharing this
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Long time ago, I also worked for an outsourcing company in a poor
| country. They didn't call it a startup though.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| I assume poor country refers to Ukraine. We have designers
| connected to the app from almost all continents though,
| including Canada, Germany, Portugal.
| shashanoid wrote:
| This is crazy. Getting goosebumps from reading that blog post.
| It's extremely hard to imagine how you managed to pull that off.
| All the best & I hope you all stay safe <3
| DariaRud wrote:
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