When you become THE boss

Greetings from Deepli! This article will be on courage and taking everything into own hands in order to provide a security to everyone who committed to you and your vision.

I have never had any business before I founded A-LabInsider (a former name of current Deepli). Same, I have never liked coding, even R with its annoying packages. Same, I had no plan to become a businessman (or -woman for politeness). But there are obstacles that change this. And you never know when can they come. In my life they came several times. Those were different phases, but all are united with growth and something better next. Enjoy your day today and tomorrow it will be a better day. Those phases were:

• visit to Boston in 2017
• software engineer that disappeared with backend in the middle of 2020 when customer wanted to buy
• senior software engineers that sank down the new product in end of 2021.

I do not like to complain, but there are some informations that I would like to share with you, which are valuable when you are building your next company.

When you are building a company or product, it is important that you have a team. A team not just like a group of people, but the group whom you know, with whom you can spend an extra dinner together and with whom you are friends. And this is for all functions in the company. So if you have tech, marketing, sales, finance - all those people should be a team. If this is just 1 or 2 functions out of several it is difficult unless you have an external expert who can lead, but again he would be counted as a team member.

My case was different. I saw a problem that became visible during a PhD, I saw a solution in a software application with data and metrics, and I went on and started building it. The problem is that the components of a project contained pieces where I had no skills and in fact no idea about despite that read books, but you can not compete with a person with 20 years of experience if you just read a book about it.

The history of A-LabInsider started with an Excel spreadsheet, where the labs were collected. This way multiple thousands were organised and thanks to an advice from former research institute where I worked (I was a heavy networker, an advice that received during consulting classes from ManagementConsulted.com, I wanted to make my way through) I focused on just few countries with complete coverage. It is because some businesses operate only internally, no global sales like we do. So this is how we started.

Needless to say that to make more and achieve the next stage, you need to have people who will work for you. MTurk, Fiverr - those were platforms were it got me off the ground in 2020. 2018 was reading, 2018-2019 was minimal product with Excel sheet and Pubmed API and first consulting sales. 2020 was a year were desperately decided to put own money to build a software, since €200K it was not feasible to raise. Talk to more people, stay harder, increase the numbers, and get creative but work the numbers hard so that they are not BS but really relevant and fresh leads. Talk to more people. €20K of my own budget had made a day. I read a lot of books in 2018-2019, Amazon even made a warning to stop the service for overuse, because I was ordering and sending back :) I reviewed them, and when you buy in batches of 15-20 and so 10 times, even Amazon will complain :) But it was 2018.

They were finishing though, thanks to COVID German support grant of €14,000, it was another cash poured into project. And because the tech was difficult, I trusted only to "good ones" as I saw at that time. American developers are known to be good (at least to me), turned out that I hired an intern with no much experience. But he became a Head of Product, the product made it to a software, I could test it. I was excited. I introduced him to couple of prospects, we were asking €50K for the license. Fun, right? Once the prospect became interested, the engineer disappeared and informed he quits. He worked at Gartner by the way. I called Gartner, searching for him and informing about the case. It was tough. But in those couple of days of silence I understood - search for a next man, this one is over. So I found a great one, who became a friend, a guy whom I met in Berlin at an event. And he became a CTO for several years, still is. My friend!

The backend was made from scratch and even better, the new screen and features were added, all done pretty fast, in one month. With that joint venture with my friend we took it off. From the first revenue I returned the funds to a friend and so we went. I did a lot of informatory emails, cold outreach, prospecting. I also remember that some of those things could have been done way cheaper if I would know that what I know now.

What makes you to Forbes is not just an idea, but an execution, and revenue demonstrated. And we had it. Believe it or not, but I worked hard to collect all the money that were available. Sales folks, software engineering, marketing, etc. all those functions someone did. Before I worked with hundreds of people, now it became 1-2 dozens. Looks like a company, right? Yet, I had no idea what business is. And this is the mindset, this is what I feel I still have, though it became different.

Working with young people, with students in any functions is way more reliable and fun than with old people who have families and only care about the money they receive. It was fatal, but there is some positive in it. In fact, there is a lot of it in it. After interns, I decided to hire a full senior engineers software team. I saw an opportunity. A company gave us an idea for a new product. I saw money in an air. That's the reason why took a risk. I didn't know where we were heading and the market.

People say it is difficult to make a new product and be successful with it. But I have not had such thoughts, I knew about an expansion and new opportunities for more business.

So I hired 3 more senior engineers and it became tough. Some were doing what were not supposed to do, I was the youngest among them, it generates friction when you have no tech background yet need to navigate. And the obstacle was muslim and 3rd countries world. When you work with a man from a strict muslim country or with lady from pretty poor muslim country or with another man who hates Russian speaking people (I was born in Ukraine) it becomes difficult. People demand money and show as if work, though you understand that for such time and for such skill level it should be more. When folks work for the money and don't care about best possible way, in fact one can show "care" but that "care" is only how to get more money from you. And you pay a market rate. You need to hire for a salary below average and if there is a potential then it can go up. But if not, the risk is that you have neither money nor work. And then people say bosses are hard. They are because there are risks and the only one responsible for them is the boss. The employee does not get a lawsuit, but a company and a boss does and has to cover it.

So only only these "senior" folks caused money sank, but also a lawsuit by overusing the service without thinking about pricing or taking my advice into account. Poor coders, market rate paid folks, and haters inside. When fired, the backend for a new product sank, not available even for a trial account. We re-made it from scratch but this case taught you something. This is in addition to market stop, I have never experienced how is it when market ends, I always knew I could find the money, but this time the market ended, we were not making any sale for a couple of months - a pretty fearful trend.

But it was a beginning of a new life. We have not raised the seed round and I decided not to anymore, it gives more freedom and does not push to the target. A new phase started. I decided to take over the tech part. Sales, marketing, product and labs/publications I had before, this is what made us successful. But tech was difficult, as I said I didn't like coding not even R. But this time the things turned upside down. When for a task that I know is easy, an engineer with 15 years of experience working for me full time says it will take 2 months and I don't know how to do it. And believe me, I am as a CEO know everything how to do it, I just figure it out! Laughing...

Still, product is my strength and data is a part of it. I reviewed all courses on Data Science from top universities on YouTube. It was 2 weeks of learning, non-stop videos, but I received an answer on my question, how do we build a product I wanted and which algorithm do we apply for disambiguation. And so I became an algorithm designer. I reviewed the data science part of everything we've built so far, and some of it done at that time with our best intern turned out to be a complete BS. This is how can you trust to people. If you do not know how to do the job, do not hire or be open it will not succeed.

In 2.5 months not seeing Python before, the new products were done. Some call it genius, but my genius is in asking questions, or it is just lazy people at companies who charge for 3 months but do the work in 2 weeks. The algorithms were done or corrected where required, the data was made, the features required were done. And needless to say, I saved a lot of money which we earlier paid for completely useless staff doing the job manually, while senior engineers were sitting around!

Web development became a next stage, but this is still in progress. However, interestingly, with this new data science approach I opened new horizons and opportunities for our customers. It is so good to know what you can do. It opened us new projects, and became another line of business. Knowledge is good. But market depletion is also something I did not know about. Going to another segment opened new opportunities.

Needless to say about enorm valuable market research done by our ambassadors. Many thanks to them. Though we still make mistakes, we learn from them. The €10M contract which we were supposed to bring to the company sank, but this is not because we were not good, but because we have not asked questions which were critical. We were excited by it, but those lessons helped us to review the business model and make a new from scratch.

And so it happened - being good at data and people. Project navigation, deliveries, generating value for companies, searching for new opportunities and new ways of growth. Same segment and same method do not work any more. It helped to get off, but the new opportunities are in new connections. Seek inspiration and ideas and live each day as if it is your last one.

In the meantime, we even received an offer from a company to be acquired. And have 3 more companies for joint ventures. The ambassador network is scaling, I believe we can make something good here. Your core customer may die, but go and find another set of customers. The fun is in value created and people happy with your service.

Data over the web may not be the best business model, but at least this is our current standing, delivering datasets that matters to someone. As well as people service so the others may get their problems done.

There are still unexplored opportunities and I am excited about them. Once they are depleted, we will find what to do next. So far, I am happy about our standing and progress. The take home message, you become happy when you take everything into own hands or have a full team.

Being a CEO means being able to navigate through any situation that comes. Whether it is another lawsuit or a simple co-incidence of when you book a hotel, come to a hotel after an event to finally fall to bed and not being able to find such hotel! Such thing happened to me in Darmstadt during Curious2022 event. I booked a hotel on booking.com, paid for it, came to an address (everything is correct, street, postcode) and imagine: no such hotel exists! And it is 9 pm. So things happen, as a CEO your job is to navigate through all of them.

Wish you many successes in your endeavours! Stay happy!