Vlad Halyasov

Today I am the founder of HoneyTech, a Boosta ecosystem company that develops an international comics platform and its own content production studio.

I came into entrepreneurship through what I call the school of employment. Before launching my own business, I worked in large IT companies and went through nearly all key business roles: performance marketing, analytics, product management, and partner negotiations. This experience gave me a broad understanding of how a digital business works, from user acquisition to product development and monetization.

Early in my career, part of my drive came from status and recognition. But the first year of running your own company brings you back to reality very quickly. When the company is unprofitable and the team has two people, the title "CEO" means nothing. Only product, economics, and systematic decisions matter.

Competition and discipline have been with me since childhood. At school, I actively participated in academic competitions and won city and regional contests. That was when I first felt the thrill of intellectual competition, and also earned my first money.

Later, at Genesis, I experienced the power of focus and extra effort. I managed to scale the advertising traffic and buying direction from roughly $100,000 to $7 million in monthly ad spend. At 20, I first started earning about $1,000.

Over time, I began to see that period differently. Spending many hours in the office does not necessarily mean effectiveness, and health cannot be treated as a long-term expendable resource.

HoneyTech was the result of a long cycle of experiments. It is my ninth business project. Some previous launches happened in an intrapreneurship format, where new products are built inside existing companies.

The main lesson of this path is not to wait for the perfect moment. I try to keep my radar on constantly: analyze markets, click through ad creatives, study how products monetize, and compare what I see with my own expertise and capabilities.

How did the business idea come to you?

The idea for HoneyTech appeared unexpectedly during a taxi ride. I was scrolling Facebook and saw an ad creative from what is now one of our competitors. Out of professional curiosity, I clicked the link.

At that time, I was actively looking for an idea for my own business. I felt I had outgrown my job, and my strongest expertise was Facebook advertising and building digital products.

I quickly realized that I could assemble the website, product layer, and marketing myself. The biggest challenge seemed to be the content, namely comics, and the entire system of producing and sourcing them.

It was both a choice of love and a choice of calculation. For two months, I studied the market and saw a clear growth trend in digital content consumption. The world was still living through the COVID-19 reality, and demand for online entertainment was growing fast. I also saw the potential to scale in the US market to $1-2 million in monthly revenue.

For me, it was important to enter a niche where even partial success would not cap the business at a few thousand dollars a month. Otherwise, it becomes psychologically difficult to move into scaling later.

What key skills helped you launch the business?

The foundation of my growth was a combination of broad operational expertise and measurement discipline.

First, before HoneyTech, I had worked in almost every key business role we later needed:

• analytics, including Excel, SQL, and dashboards
• product management
• performance marketing in Meta
• negotiations and partnerships
• organizing design and development teams
• evaluating advertising payback

This allowed me to launch the product without illusions about how business works and who is responsible for what.

Second, my main management framework is a data-driven approach. I believe hypotheses should be generated boldly but tested pragmatically, almost like an accountant. We look at ROI, payback, CTR, CPA, and CPL not as pretty report numbers, but as the language of business management.

Third, hiring and delegation became critical. I went through a painful stage: the first five people I hired did not stay with the company. The next five, however, formed the core of the team and still work with us.

That experience taught me how to sell the company as an employer, select people carefully by professional and personal qualities, and build areas of responsibility so the business can scale without constant manual control.

What were the three hardest challenges in the first years?

The first was raising investment and working in complete uncertainty. We received investment in January 2022, literally two months before the full-scale war. On the first day of the invasion, we had to discuss directly with the investor whether the project would be closed.

The second was the long road to the first meaningful financial results. We reached the first $100,000 in revenue about a year and a half after raising investment. It was a difficult and tense period.

The third was building the content creation chain. At the start, I thought it would be enough to buy comics. Very quickly, it became clear that the best content is not sold, and the content that is sold often cannot earn money.

That forced us to create our own studio: develop scripts, production, and comics creation, a direction I had not planned to launch at all at the beginning.

What crises did your business face and how did you overcome them?

The sharpest crisis happened not in the first year and a half, but during the next six months, when we found working unit economics and started scaling marketing.

In a subscription model, a paradox appears. If you know that $100 invested today will return with profit in a year, you begin actively investing in marketing. At the same time, the daily financial result gets worse because revenue is stretched over time.

For an investor, this can look like growing losses and a signal to shut the business down.

I had to prove that temporarily increased losses were a natural consequence of scaling with correct economics, not a flaw in the business model.

The decisive step was involving an independent third party whom the investor trusted. I convinced that person of our logic, and they helped communicate the position to the investor.

Which decisions were most effective for company growth?

The greatest impact came from decisions where I consciously put long-term scaling above short-term comfort.

The first was reinvestment. We did not distribute dividends early on. Instead, we put money into marketing and the team to bring the business to more than $10 million in annual turnover. At one point, this created tension with investors, but it preserved our development pace.

The second was a trip to South Korea. We could not negotiate content from Kyiv, so I decided to go there. We held about 40 meetings, and only one succeeded. But that one gave us a Korean intermediary partner who had trust in the local market and still helps us get content on good terms.

That was when I understood something important: in Korea and Japan, foreign companies often work through local intermediaries because there is historically a high level of distrust caused by unfair cooperation cases.

The third was launching our own comics studio. This removed our strategic dependence on third-party content. In two and a half years, we went from not understanding comics production at all to a level where our team is already preparing its own school for authors.

Which mistake do you now consider your most valuable experience?

My most valuable lessons came from working with people.

For a long time, I believed that if a person truly wants to achieve a result, they will be able to do it. Later I realized that desire alone does not guarantee success if natural abilities and competencies do not match the role.

For example, an analyst may sincerely want to speak at conferences and sell a product, but without the right communication nature, it will not be convincing. An operations manager may want to do creative work but not have the skills to create stories.

The price of such mistakes is high. Hiring means months of searching, onboarding, and expectations, after which you sometimes have to admit that the cooperation does not work.

Now I evaluate people through three factors: can, wants, and fits the values. I also pay attention to cultural compatibility and potential red flags, such as when a person says all their previous managers were incompetent.

How did you earn your first $100?

I earned it at 14, in ninth grade, as a reward for winning academic competitions. In total, I received about $300.

How did you earn your first $1,000?

At about 20, while working at Genesis. I was responsible for affiliate marketing and buying Google traffic. We scaled ad spend to about $1 million per month, after which I negotiated an income of $1,000. Later I realized that I had underestimated my negotiation position.

How did you earn your first $10,000?

At 21, I received a $10,000 golden parachute after leaving Genesis. I spent part of the money traveling around Europe with my mother, visiting Budapest, Italy, Rome, and the Vatican. I saved the rest.

How did you earn your first $100,000?

At about 29. That amount came from the development of HoneyTech and, above all, a strong team. That was when I first felt the difference between a model where everything depends on one founder and a business that systematically produces results through a team.

How did you earn your first $1,000,000?

At about 30. The value of my stake in HoneyTech has exceeded $1 million for several years.

I am most useful to entrepreneurs when the business depends on the speed of data-based decisions and the ability to build a team that scales results.

The first area is performance marketing in subscription products. I can share a payback-oriented approach: how to read key metrics, build forecasting models, and make decisions based on unit economics. I can also explain why a temporary daily financial "minus" may be a sign of healthy scaling rather than a business problem.

The second is building a data-driven culture. In my approach, hypotheses are allowed and necessary, but the final word belongs to analytics. ROI, payback, CTR, CPA, and CPL are not just report numbers, but the language in which the business makes decisions.

The third is hiring and delegation. I can share how to select people by energy, real track record, proactivity, and respect for the team. I also know how to avoid a founder's common trap: after failed delegation, returning to the "I will do everything myself" model. A separate topic is how to present the company as an employer and grow strong middle-level people into leaders.

I can also talk about raising investment through venture-builder models such as Boosta, Burner, and Genesis: how a founder with a minority stake can receive enough freedom, capital, and speed, and how to prepare the business story so investors believe in it.

Your experience: how to systematize a business?

For me, systematizing a business means dividing the company into autonomous blocks with clear roles, responsibilities, and measurable metrics.

In practice, this means finding or growing strong leaders for key areas: marketing, product and platform, content, finance, and technology. Then responsibility must be transferred so the company can operate without the founder's constant operational involvement.

I believe startups are often created by "middles". Juniors do not yet have enough independence, while seniors sometimes see too many reasons why an idea might not work. Middles combine energy, ambition, and basic experience. My practice is to hire ambitious people from around 25 and gradually grow them into top management.

System also means a clear management rhythm: regular meetings with key leaders, which take about 30% of my working time, around ten hours a week. This is paired with performance reviews, six-month goals, compensation reviews, and gradual expansion of responsibility.

One simple but effective tool is planning the next day in the evening. It saves cognitive energy in the morning.

Your experience: how to grow 2x in a year?

I see doubling a business in a year as a combination of three factors.

First, reinvestment. Instead of stopping after early results and distributing profit, it is important to consciously invest money back into marketing, product, and the team while the market allows fast growth.

Second, a team that does more than its job description. My main contribution to last year's threefold company growth was hiring strong people, delegating correctly, and avoiding unnecessary control.

Third, strategic decisions that unlock new sources of growth. In our case, that was a breakthrough in content: the partnership in South Korea and launching our own comics studio.

At the unit-economics level, I follow a simple principle: marketing investments should pay back in about one year with a target profitability of about 20%. Venture investments must outperform basic instruments like the S&P 500. This framework disciplines scaling: we are not spending a budget, we are buying future profit with predictable payback.