I was a founder of Topping (topping.com.ua) – one of Ukraine’s oldest and most successful internet startups – at the beginning of the Ukrainian internet era. Topping was a web counter, traffic statistics, and website ranking platform: a small piece of code placed on web pages that collected visitor data, ranked websites by popularity across dozens of categories, and produced comprehensive audience analytics. At its peak, Topping registered over 80,000 Ukrainian websites, processed 21 million requests daily, and scaled to handle 70-80 million daily requests. I was among the people who were present at the beginning of UaNet, knew the founders of Ukraine’s internet infrastructure personally, and helped build the measurement layer that told the early web what it was.
Pioneer UaNet founder
Web statistics platform
#1 registered sites in Ukraine
Competed with BigMir
5 spinoff platforms
2 successful exits
US market adoption
PlatformTopping → rebranded MyTop-in Net
RoleFounder & Owner
Market position#1 registered sites · #2 daily requests
ExitsMyDomain SOLD 2009 · MyTop sold 2011
EraEarly UaNet – founding generation
CompetitorBigMir.net – dominant Ukrainian portal
80,000+
#1 in Ukraine by registered websites
21M
daily requests – #2 in Ukraine
70–80M
peak daily request capacity
5
successful spinoff platforms
2 Exits
SOLD to investors in 2009 and 2011
The Context – What UaNet Was and Why Measurement Mattered
The Ukrainian internet – UaNet – was established in the early 1990s, with the .UA country code top-level domain delegated and first geographical zones defined at a conference of Ukrainian internet specialists in Slavsko in January 1993. The web of the late 1990s and early 2000s was a frontier: growing rapidly, commercially important, but almost entirely unmeasured. Nobody knew with confidence which Ukrainian websites were the most visited, which audiences they served, or how to compare one site against another. Building measurement infrastructure at that moment was not a data analytics product – it was laying the foundation that the entire advertising and media industry would eventually need to stand on.
The competitive landscape: BigMir.net was the dominant player
BigMir.net – founded in 2000 by SputnikMedia.Net – was the largest Ukrainian portal and ran the BigMir Index, the standard measure of Ukrainian web activity across 60 categories. By 2001, the BigMir Index was already tracking Ukrainian internet growth and attracting major advertising budgets from companies like Kyivstar, UMC, British Airways and KLM. Google reportedly considered acquiring BigMir.net for $100 million in 2008. Competing with BigMir, and holding #1 position in registered websites while being #2 in daily processed requests – was a significant market achievement in this environment.
What a web counter/rating service did, and why it was infrastructure
A web statistics counter in the early-to-mid 2000s was a small piece of JavaScript placed on a website. Every page load triggered a request to Topping’s servers – logging the visit, recording the source, categorising the site, and updating the rankings. The data was aggregated into rankings by category, audience analytics by region and behaviour, and traffic trend reports. This was the Ukrainian equivalent of what Rambler’s Top 100 was in Russia, what LiveInternet became, or what early Alexa represented globally – the infrastructure layer that gave the web its own measurement of itself.
Being at the beginning – knowing the people who built UaNet
I was among the first generation of Ukrainian internet builders – the people who were active online when UaNet was still being defined, when .ua domain zones were first being allocated, when the first Ukrainian websites were going live. Knowing personally the people who founded Ukraine’s internet infrastructure gives a perspective on what the Ukrainian internet became that only a handful of people can claim. Topping was built during this founding period and shaped by direct knowledge of how the early Ukrainian web actually worked – not as an abstraction but as a live, growing community of practitioners and businesses finding their way online for the first time.
What I Built
1
Topping – the core web statistics and ranking platform
Built and operated the core platform: a distributed counter system that processed website visit requests at scale, categorised sites across dozens of verticals, ranked them by traffic, and produced audience reports and statistical analysis. The technical challenge was handling the request volume reliably – each registered site triggered a server request on every page load. At 80,000+ registered sites, and with Ukrainian internet traffic growing year-on-year, this required building high-throughput, high-availability infrastructure before the cloud tooling that would make this straightforward today existed. The system was engineered to handle 70–80 million requests daily at peak capacity.
2
Five successful spinoff services – a platform ecosystem
Topping’s data infrastructure and traffic relationships enabled the creation of five additional service lines, each addressing a specific market need in the early Ukrainian internet: MyStat-in Net (extended statistical analytics), MyMail-in Net (email services), MyNews-in Net (news aggregation and distribution), MyShop-in Net (e-commerce catalogue), and MyDomain-in Net (domain registration and management). Each was a standalone business built on the trust and data relationships the core platform had established. The ability to leverage a core platform into five viable adjacent businesses is a distinct product strategy skill that most founders don’t demonstrate in a single venture.
3
International technology adoption – US market used MyTop’s software
American technology professionals independently discovered and adopted MyTop’s statistical software as the basis for a web statistics system covering the southeastern United States. This was an unsolicited international validation: the platform’s technical architecture was considered strong enough – by professionals with access to US-built alternatives – to be used as the foundation for their own regional statistics infrastructure. For a Ukrainian startup operating in a market that was largely invisible to the Western technology world, this represented a significant technical credibility signal.
4
Two successful exits – MyDomain sold 2009, Topping/MyTop sold 2011
MyDomain-in Net was sold to a new investor in 2009 – a standalone exit of one spinoff business while the main platform continued to operate. Topping, rebranded as MyTop-in Net, was sold to a new investor in 2011 – marking the full exit from the venture. Two sequential exits from the same founding ecosystem, each to distinct investors, demonstrates both the commercial viability of the platform and the ability to structure and negotiate independent asset disposals. Selling both independently – rather than bundling everything – is the more complex and more valuable path for both founders and buyers.
What This Engagement Demonstrates
🌐
Building technical infrastructure at scale – before cloud, before managed services
Processing 21 million requests per day on self-managed infrastructure – with capacity headroom to 70–80 million – in the early-to-mid 2000s required building genuinely high-throughput, fault-tolerant systems from scratch. There was no AWS to provision. No managed Kubernetes to deploy. No SRE playbook to follow. The system architecture, hardware provisioning, and operational practices were all designed, built, and maintained personally by me. I was developed from scratch own specialized web-server on C++ for Sun Solaris. This is a category of engineering experience that cloud-native engineers rarely have and cannot easily acquire.
🔭
Data-driven market intelligence before “data” was a business category
The audience analytics, traffic ranking, and category-level reporting that Topping produced for the Ukrainian web were essentially what would be called market intelligence or data products today. The business model – accumulate data from widely distributed collection points, aggregate it into insight, sell or license the insight – is now a multi-billion dollar global industry. Understanding this model intimately, from first principles and in a production environment, is a form of data business literacy that predates the terminology and is consequently more deeply grounded.
🚀
Platform-to-ecosystem: five businesses from one data foundation
The five spinoff services – statistics, mail, news, shopping, domains – were each built on the trust, traffic, and data relationships the core platform had established. This is the platform business model: a core that generates data and audience, from which multiple adjacent value propositions can be served. Understanding this model operationally – not theoretically – and executing it to produce five working businesses, each with its own commercial identity, is a product strategy capability that most entrepreneurs never exercise at this scale.
💼
Full founder lifecycle – build, grow, compete, exit (twice)
The Topping story runs the full founder cycle: early-stage creation, growth to market leadership in registered websites, sustained operation in a competitive market against a well-funded dominant player (BigMir), the maturation and eventual sale of subsidiary assets (MyDomain, 2009), and the final exit of the core platform (2011). Operating a startup from founding through two separate exit events over more than a decade is a complete entrepreneurial record – not a highlight reel. The full cycle includes the unglamorous middle period of sustaining a product through market pressure, and the exit execution skill of positioning assets for independent sale.
What This Engagement Evidences
Pioneer Ukrainian internet experience
Active in UaNet from its founding era. Personal knowledge of the people and infrastructure that built Ukrainian internet. A contextual depth about how digital markets form and mature that only comes from being present at the beginning.
High-throughput infrastructure engineering
Designed and operated systems processing 21 million requests per day, engineered to 70–80 million capacity. Self-managed, pre-cloud infrastructure at production scale – a category of engineering depth rarely encountered in cloud-native careers.
Data product design and analytics
Built a data collection, aggregation, and reporting system covering 80,000+ Ukrainian websites across dozens of categories. The audience analytics, ranking, and statistical reporting were the commercial product – grounding data product thinking in first-principles production experience.
Platform ecosystem strategy
Launched five distinct service lines (statistics, mail, news, shopping, domains) from the core data platform. Operationally understood the platform business model – core generates audience and data, adjacent products serve that audience – before it became standard startup vocabulary.
Competing against a dominant market player
Maintained #1 position in registered websites and #2 in daily requests against BigMir.net – the dominant Ukrainian portal that Google considered acquiring for $100M. Sustaining competitive position over years in a winner-takes-most market is a specific strategic achievement.
International product validation
MyTop’s software was independently adopted by American professionals as the basis for a US southeastern regional statistics system. Unsolicited international adoption of a Ukrainian-built platform is a technical quality signal that no marketing can manufacture.
Startup exit execution – twice
Sold MyDomain-in Net to an investor in 2009 and MyTop-in Net in 2011. Two independent exits from the same founding ecosystem – demonstrating both the commercial structuring skill of positioning assets for separate sale and the operational maturity to manage a platform through to successful investor handover.
Full founder lifecycle – 10+ years
Founded, grew, competed, evolved, and exited over more than a decade. The complete founder record – not a snapshot of the high point – including the sustained middle period of maintaining product-market relevance through competitive pressure and market change.
The Core Insight from This Engagement
The infrastructure layer of a market is the most durable investment you can make in it.
Traffic statistics, audience measurement, and website ranking weren’t products that competed
with what Ukrainian websites offered their users. They were the measurement layer that
every advertiser, publisher, and media planner needed to operate – regardless of which
content sites rose and fell. Building the measurement infrastructure rather than the
content is how you build something that every market participant depends on.
The second insight: being early in a market is a durable competitive advantage only if
you build something technically solid enough to survive the market’s growth.
The Ukrainian internet grew from a few hundred to millions of users and tens of thousands
of websites during Topping’s operating life. The infrastructure had to scale from hobby-scale
to commercially serious traffic levels without the platform tooling that would make this
straightforward today. Getting through that scaling curve – with real users and real
commercial relationships depending on uptime – was the hard part that most early-era
startups didn’t survive.
The third: data businesses are platform businesses. The five spinoff services
weren’t diversification – they were the natural expression of what a trusted data and
audience relationship enables. Every service that a registered site owner might need
(statistics, mail, news, shopping, domain management) was reachable from the core
relationship Topping had already established. Understanding this from first-principles
practice gives an intuition about platform economics that pre-dates and underlies
most of today’s standard product strategy frameworks.
Who This Is Relevant For
You’re building a data or analytics platform and want someone who has done it from scratch
Building a data collection system at scale, aggregating it into useful insight, and turning that insight into a commercial product – these were the operational realities of Topping for over a decade. The understanding that comes from doing this without managed infrastructure, distributed databases, or modern analytics tooling is foundational in a way that cloud-era data product experience is not.
You’re entering or operating in an emerging market and need someone who understands how those markets form
The Ukrainian internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s was an emerging market in the truest sense: new participants, undefined rules, rapidly evolving commercial norms, and infrastructure being built in real time. The pattern of how digital markets form, who the early participants are, how measurement and standards emerge, and how competitive positions get established is something I lived through – not something I studied.
You’re scaling high-traffic infrastructure and want someone who has operated at this level without the safety net of managed cloud
Processing 21 million+ requests per day on self-managed infrastructure in the 2000s required solving problems that cloud platforms now solve for you automatically: failover, caching, load distribution, database performance at scale. The mental models from solving these manually are directly applicable to understanding what cloud services do and why they make the choices they do.
You’re planning a platform strategy and want someone who has built one from a data core outward
The five spinoff services from Topping’s core weren’t planned – they were discovered by following what registered website owners needed next, and what the data relationships made it possible to offer credibly. The practitioner’s understanding of platform expansion is grounded in customer behaviour, not business school theory.
You’re evaluating a technical leader and want to understand their relationship with first-principles thinking
Someone who built high-throughput infrastructure before the abstractions that make it easy, launched five products from a single data core, competed against a better-funded dominant player for years, and executed two exits – has made a lot of technical and strategic decisions without a playbook. That is the origin of genuine first-principles capability.
You want a technology leader who has been through the full startup cycle, not just the early phase
Founding is relatively well-understood. Sustaining a startup through 10+ years of market change – growing, pivoting, competing, and eventually exiting – is the less romanticised but more instructive part of the founder journey. Having done this twice (two separate exits from the same ecosystem) is a complete entrepreneurial record, not a curated highlight.
Building a data platform, scaling high-traffic infrastructure, or navigating a market where the rules are still being written?
In 30 minutes I can tell you whether your situation maps to what I do – whether the challenge is technical infrastructure, platform strategy, data product design, or some combination that requires someone who has built these things from scratch rather than operated them at maturity.
No pitch. A direct conversation about what you’re building and what kind of experience actually helps.
Book a 30-min consultation →
