Section 1: About me. Dossier.
«There is always a solution; you just have to find it.»
Rostyslav Tuchak
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Join the clubSection 2. About the business. Dossier.
Section 3: Biography.
I'm Rostyslav Tuchak, founder of BotsBand. Today, my company develops chatbots, AI agents, mobile apps, websites, and other digital products. Over nine years, we've delivered about 350 projects, and today our team has 15 people.
Before starting my own business, I worked at a bank contact center and in investment banking. I didn't move into investment banking right away. For almost a year, I called the department head regularly to convince him to hire me. When I finally got a test assignment, I realized I didn't know most of the answers. So I found a consultant, paid 1500 hryvnias for two hours of their time, and prepared. At the interview, about 80% of the questions were new to me. But in the end, I got the job.
After two and a half years, I decided to leave my stable job for a startup. Some time later, I happened to attend a chatbot development workshop. Before that, I didn't even know what a chatbot was. At the workshop, I created my first bot. That evening, I decided to work on it some more, sat down at my computer at around ten, and didn't stop until eight in the morning. That night, I realized I'd found the field I wanted to work in.
I built my first chatbot for my own coat-making business. I had several retail locations, and the salespeople recorded sales in notebooks and sent me photos of the pages. I created a bot they could use to enter sales information right away, with all the data going into a Google Sheet. That's when I saw firsthand that this technology solved a real business problem. After that, I took on my first client for $500, even though I didn't yet know how to deliver their project. I had to research, get advice, figure it out, and ultimately deliver what I'd been paid for.
That's how BotsBand began. At first, I developed and sold chatbots myself. Then people started joining me, the first team leads appeared, and I gradually stepped away from development and began building the company as a system.
What key skills helped you launch your business?
- Healthy persistence.
- A hunger to learn and grow.
- The ability to work with the unknown.
People, the unknown, and finding new products
What 3 most challenging problems did you solve in your first years in business?
- Working with people. At first, I built the company entirely around my vision and what I wanted. Over time, I realized that building a strong foundation requires recognizing and taking into account the interests of everyone on the team.
- Working with the unknown. When I sold my first chatbot, I had no idea how to build it. I got advice, searched for information, consulted people, and gradually found a solution.
- Finding new products. Six years ago, we launched technical support for chatbots. The client pays us a monthly fee, and we take responsibility for keeping their chatbot running. It became the company's most successful product. We currently have 71 project under technical support, and some clients have been working with us for over eight years. More than half of the company's revenue in 2025-2026 years comes from technical support. But after that, we went almost six years without launching new products. As a result, the company stopped growing and settled at a stable but stagnant level. So one of my main challenges now is to find new products that will give the company a new growth trajectory.
What crises has your business faced, and how did you overcome them?
- One of our most severe crises came after the full-scale invasion began in 2022. At that point, we had about 25 clients on technical support, paying for our services every month. After the full-scale war began, all development work froze. We had no clients left on monthly technical support. But I set myself the goal of bringing every one of them back. In the first few months, I managed to bring back 24 clients. The 25th did not return because it was connected to Belarus. This was a severe crisis for the company, but we managed to rebuild almost the entire technical support business.
- Another crisis was managerial. For the first five or six years, I was more of a self-employed specialist with assistants than a business owner. I needed to move from being someone who intervened in every process to a manager focused on leadership.
- We are facing another crisis now: artificial intelligence. Developing certain solutions is getting easier, so clients are beginning to compare our prices with what they can do using off-the-shelf AI tools. That means we need to change our products—make them modern, profitable, and worth paying for.
Which decisions proved most effective for the company's growth?
- Launching technical support.
- Hiring managers and structuring the company around macro functions.
- A decision I'm implementing now: moving to a product line. I want us to be more than a company that develops whatever the client asks for. We need our own ready-made solutions that can scale.
Which of your mistakes do you now consider your most valuable experience?
I don't single out one specific mistake. For me, the most valuable tool after making mistakes is reflection. I learned this at «Mediakliuch», and I usually follow a simple sequence of questions.
First: did I achieve the goal? If there was no goal, the conclusion is obvious: next time, I need to define it before starting. Then I break down the result into two parts: what worked and why, and what didn't work and what exactly influenced it.
After each review, I write down a few specific takeaways. Usually, that's 4–5 points that can be applied directly to the next attempt. For example, if I realize after a negotiation that I went into it without a clear goal, next time I'll define the goal first and only then start the conversation.
For me, it's important not just to acknowledge a mistake, but to turn it into a specific change in behavior.
How did you earn your first $100?
I earned my first money back in third grade, working for my grandfather, who had about 33 hectares of land, a tractor, and a combine harvester. At first, I would go to the store to buy cigarettes for him and charge him one hryvnia ten kopecks, even though the cigarettes themselves cost one hryvnia—that was a profit of 10 kopecks.
Later, I helped with the harvest—loading and unloading wheat and bringing hay bales for the cows. When the harvest was over, my grandfather paid me for my work.
How did you earn your first $1 000?
I can't name a specific job or contract that earned me my first $1000. My first $1000 were probably accumulated over time rather than earned all at once.
After reading Robert Kiyosaki, I started saving 10% of every income from my second year at university. If my parents gave me 1000 hryvnias a month, I saved 100. For many years, I saved consistently and tracked my income and expenses. Over time, I started saving more.
How did you earn your first $10 000?
Here, too, there wasn't a single contract or moment when I earned $10 000. This money came from savings and investments. I invested in various projects, the stock market, mobile phones, coffee machines, and lent money to friends for their businesses.
At the same time, I earned income from financial consulting, selling on Amazon, my coat business, and other projects.
How did you earn your first $100 000?
As with the previous amounts, my first $100 000 were accumulated savings. As for their sources, they definitely came from software development, specifically chatbots. Back then, I sometimes had to work from 9:00 until 23:00.
Section 4: How can I be useful? Experience I can share.
I can help entrepreneurs through brainstorming sessions. I enjoy being the person who joins a meeting, asks additional questions, generates ideas, and helps look at the situation from a different angle. This kind of work can help identify a breakthrough point in a business.
Another one of my strongest areas right now is building investment portfolios. I've been investing for many years, have a diversified portfolio, and see it as a separate, important part of my financial life.
Your experience: how do you systematize a business?
It's simple: by educating the person who runs the business.
I took courses at «Mediakliuch», where I learned many tools for systematizing a business. For me, it's important that the company has someone who doesn't just know these tools but puts them into practice. So systematization doesn't start only with the company's processes. It starts with the manager's own development.
Your experience: how do you grow x2 in a year?
If you earn $100 and want to earn $120, you can simply work a little more. But if you want to grow by x2, x5, or x10, that approach no longer works. You need to change your business model, product, team, business processes, or the way you work with partners or clients.
So my answer is simple: to grow by x2, you need to do more than work harder—you need to find what to change in the business system itself.
Section 5: Club value
