Startup Diary by Julia Palam

I had no money and no connections. What I did have was a burning desire to start my own IT company and turn it into a unicorn. And a mortgage to go with it. Life certainly wasn’t boring. I’m Yulia, I’m 38. I’ve got three startups behind me, though I once worke…

Why did I shut down a startup that was working? Time for a startup story. Here’s the situation: the product works, people use it, money comes in. And I suggest shutting it down. You’d think, Yulia, what more do you want? Sergey and I were building Aqua, a cryp…

I had 1 million subscribers. Why I started over from zero My personal channel gained a million subscribers in a month. You’d think I’d be thrilled. Instead, I ended up opening a new one and inviting people over. Let me tell you what it’s like to have a million…

A startup community of almost 5 million. But where are the customers? Time for startup stories. Our startup had built a community of almost five million. I thought: this is it, we’ll launch and the customers will come pouring in. Some are already paying. Can w…

No money for salaries. Why did people help us? We’re building a team. Our salary budget is zero. The workload makes it feel like we already have an entire company. So what do we do? Here’s how we arranged for people to help when we couldn’t offer a regular pai…

A friend promised to find investors. I lost four months. Today we’re bringing a friend into the business. Because we’ve had beers together—basically, he passed the interview. He said he’d raised large sums before. We happened to need investment. Seemed like a…

We copied a working model. Why didn’t it work for us? We thought: why reinvent the wheel? Let’s take a product that already works in other markets and launch it somewhere it doesn’t exist yet. My partner had built something like it before. What could possibly…

Everyone said, “Great idea.” But no one was in a hurry to use it. When potential customers praise your idea, it feels like you can breathe a sigh of relief and start building. That’s what we did: we changed the product and brought in specialists. Here’s the qu…