My first business: from IT specialist to entrepreneur with 100 dollars
I started as a specialist in the IT department of a Kyiv district administration: maintaining computers, setting up networks, and handling routine tasks. Our department had long been discussing the idea of reorganizing as a municipal technical-support company for government institutions—a one-stop service of our own, instead of holding tenders for maintenance and searching for outside contractors. The department head was to become the director, while another specialist and I would handle maintenance, but no longer for a small government salary. The system turned out to be far too slow: the plan stalled and went nowhere.
Alongside my job, I built and configured computers as a freelancer, and at some point I decided to move on and handed in my resignation. I had 100 dollars in my pocket, which I spent registering my first sole proprietorship—and immediately ran out of money, but I had my own company stamp.
Paradoxically, it was only after I resigned that I was offered the position of director of the municipal company we had been talking about for so long. The computer support department was not reorganized, and its head stayed in place and had to work with me in my new capacity.
The romance quickly faded: no one made ‘everyone work with us,’ no public funding was allocated, and the additional tax for the district budget was very real. We became an ordinary commercial company, with all the risks of the market. But we grew rapidly: eventually we had 13 employees, an office, a warehouse, a mini PBX, and a computer for everyone. We received certificates recognizing us as official partners of Microsoft, Intel, Western Digital, AMD, Konica Minolta, Seagate, ABBYY, ASUS, and a whole host of other brands. But every last bit of money we earned went into this rapid growth; we had no reserves. 2008 hit hard. The government, which accounted for about 80 % of our sales, effectively ‘put payments on pause’: invoices were not signed, and there was ‘no money for now.’ Some debts were paid off after три years, while others were never paid at all, .
We were caught between currency millstones: hryvnia-denominated receivables against dollar-denominated debts to suppliers. Credit limits were cut, the dollar jumped from five to eight, and the cash-flow gap became an impossible chasm. I was honest with the team three times. First: ‘Things are difficult, but we’re holding on.’ Then: ‘No salaries temporarily; I’ll pay everything back.’ And finally: ‘I don’t know how to keep paying; we’ll share whatever we earn.’ Some left immediately; others held on longer.
I understood that I could start over—but from scratch again. So I decided that if I had to make the journey from the beginning, it might as well be a new journey. Alongside my main job, I was passionate about car-based quests: first I played, and later I began organizing them. I created themed games and spent more on prizes than I earned from participation. When it became clear that the IT business was in serious trouble, I calculated that if I stopped ‘pouring’ money into gifts, the quests could bring in a steady 100 dollars a month. That amount, of course, seemed laughable, but it was 100 guaranteed dollars more than I was making from computers at the time.
That is how I gradually closed the IT business and turned my hobby into a commercial venture. At first, we held weekly games for quest enthusiasts; later, we gradually moved into the corporate sector: quests and team-building events. Alongside the business-to-consumer market, we added the business-to-business market.
A few years later, PubQuiz got underway too—a classic English pub quiz that we were the first to run in Ukraine, more than eleven years ago. To this day, teams in pubs in the evening write their answers on forms, listen to musical excerpts, and guess logos, countries, and facts. The format became mainstream. In 2017, we even set a record in the Book of Records of Ukraine, when more than a thousand people took part in a quiz simultaneously at seven venues.
