From Developer to CEO of a Ukrainian Web Studio

The challenge

Growing from developer to CTO to CEO in one company is a business-building story as much as a career one. Each step needed a different set of skills, and each one was earned through the results of the previous role. The company changed as I grew: from a web agency to a market-leading product company to a premium studio serving Ukraine’s largest corporations.

The clients set the bar. Inter Media Group was one of Ukraine’s largest media groups: Inter covers 99.7% of the country’s territory, and the holding included channels such as NTN, K1, K2, Megasport, Enter-Film and Enter-Music. Its digital presence was visible to millions, so reliability, performance and brand execution had to meet broadcast standards. Product placement agencies and large business holdings brought their own campaign timelines, governance and procurement.

At the same time the studio built and sold its own e-commerce CRM to Ukraine’s most significant online retailers. Running a project-based studio and a product business in parallel meant two business models, with different teams, sales cycles and commercial dynamics.

My task: as CTO, build the technical foundation: the team, the CRM product and the high-load architecture. As Director and co-owner, transform and run the business: the rebrand, the legal restructuring, the clients, the finances and the growth of the team.

What does 90 million requests a day mean?

90 million requests a day is about 1,000 requests every second on average, and much more at peak hours. In those years there was no cloud to absorb that load: Amazon EC2, one of the first cloud server services, was announced only in August 2006. Systems like this ran on the company’s own servers, so the load had to be shared between machines with load balancing, kept fast with caching, and handled by carefully designed database structures. Here each request was a hit counted by a web statistics service, such as a page view on one of more than 100,000 websites.

What I did

1. Led the studio’s technology as CTO and grew the team

   I joined Adelite and took ownership of the full technical direction. As CTO from 2004 to 2006, I led a team of over 10 developers and managed the delivery of all web projects for high-profile clients. This period built the technical foundation, the CRM product and the infrastructure architecture, that the next period would scale.

2. Built an e-commerce CRM that reached 60%+ market share in Ukraine and CIS

   I built the e-commerce CRM product from the ground up as lead developer, and across both roles I led its development and market expansion. It became the leading software platform for Ukrainian online retail, with over 60% market share across Ukraine and other CIS countries; at peak, one in three of Ukraine’s largest online shops ran on it. It was a separate product business, built and led in parallel with the studio, and its customers were Ukraine’s most significant online retailers.

   Technical details

   • Data: optimised database structures, inventory and order management for high-volume retail.
   • Integrations: multiple payment gateways and external APIs, built around the edge cases of Ukrainian payment infrastructure.

3. Designed high-load architecture for 90 million requests a day

   As CTO I designed high-performing architecture for load balancing of high-traffic projects, optimising caching, database structures and request handling for the studio’s most demanding clients. The most demanding case was the web statistics server for one of Ukraine’s largest website rating systems: real-time traffic statistics for over 100,000 Ukrainian websites, with over 90 million specialised requests per day, on self-managed hardware. It connects directly to my parallel work on Topping / MyTop-in Net: the same era and the same challenge of high-throughput statistics infrastructure.

4. Transformed the business as Director and co-owner: rebrand to A1 and restructure

   From 2006 I was Director and co-owner, and I led the full transformation: legal restructuring with the transition to MyTop Ltd, a strategic rebrand from Adelite to A1 with a registered trademark, and repositioning the studio to serve Ukraine’s largest clients. My responsibilities grew from technical direction to running the business: financial oversight and P&L, customer relationships at C-level and team growth to 30+ developers, with continued hands-on work on the most complex projects.

5. Delivered for the Inter Media Group TV holding and large Ukrainian holdings

   We served the entire Inter Media Group holding, managing the digital presence of a multi-channel, multi-brand media group with national reach and high public visibility. A1 also served product placement agencies and some of Ukraine’s largest business holdings. Each client type worked differently: broadcast media with public brand obligations, agencies with campaign-driven timelines, and holdings with their own governance and procurement.

Results

From 2004 to 2009, the work delivered:

• A web studio rebuilt as A1, a premium studio with its own trademark, serving Ukraine’s largest media holdings, corporations and international clients.
• An e-commerce CRM with over 60% market share across Ukraine and CIS countries.
• Infrastructure that handled 90 million specialised requests a day for 100,000+ websites in real time.
• The entire Inter Media Group TV holding as a client.
• A team grown from 10+ to 30+ developers.
• A business run in two models at once: project-based studio services and product revenue.

What I learned

The clients you can serve are a direct function of the technical problems you can solve.

A1 won and kept Inter Media Group because it could build and run digital infrastructure at the scale and reliability a national broadcaster needed, and the technical credibility earned by processing 90 million requests a day made that conversation possible. A strong product position and a premium agency position also reinforce each other, if both are managed deliberately: the CRM’s market share opened conversations the agency alone couldn’t start, and the agency’s corporate clients gave the product credibility and distribution. Growing inside a company to ownership teaches the whole business, from technical execution up through the team, the product, the clients and the P&L, because every decision has visible consequences at each level.

Evidence and further reading

• Related projectFounder of Topping, a web statistics platform built from scratchThe same era and the same challenge: high-throughput statistics on our own hardware.
• Related projectCo-founding Ukraine’s e-commerce industry associationThe industry body I co-founded in 2008 for the market our CRM served.
• Service · this siteOperation Partner: managing partner, co-founder, board memberHow I bring the same business ownership experience to companies today.

Inter’s coverage of 99.7% of Ukraine’s territory is from Wikipedia’s article on Inter.

Skills and technologies

• CTO
• CEO and co-owner
• P&L ownership
• E-commerce CRM
• Software product leadership
• Payment gateway integration
• High-load architecture
• Load balancing
• Caching
• Database optimisation
• Web statistics at scale
• Agency leadership
• Rebranding and restructuring
• Enterprise client delivery
• Media sector
• Team building

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