Latest news with #AnatoliiKasianov
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
How I Built A Successful Tech Startup Where 90% Of My Team Can't Code
Anatolii Kasianov🇺🇦, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at HOLYWATER / My Drama & My Passion & My Muse apps. When I tell people that most of the team at our tech startup, HOLYWATER, is not technical, I often see surprise. And then I show them our results. Our platforms for e-books and video have seen great success in the industry—without a huge team of engineers. Instead, we hire business-oriented and creative minds. Here's how it works and why a non-technical team can be the driving force behind a tech startup's success. Your Whole Team Shoud Be Focused On Business Metrics For us, development is just a tool, and by using AI solutions, we can build products much faster and efficiently. Our team consists largely of product managers, operations managers and creative specialists, whose decisions directly affect the business. They are engaged in our go-to-market strategy, marketing execution and product iteration based on real user feedback. If you're currently running a startup, reconsider your hiring approach. Instead of defaulting to a certain number of developers, invest in a product manager who deeply understands both the market and product. You won't regret hiring someone who knows what needs to be built, how to launch and how to grow. While developers lay the foundation, it's the business-minded team that builds the future unicorn. An Entrepreneurial Mindset Is A Must For Devs Developers should also think like founders. When I hire engineers, I don't just assess their technical skills—I look for entrepreneurial ambition and awareness of the business context. During interviews, I ask candidates about their goals, which founders they follow, what business podcasts they listen to and how they stay current with market trends. I want engineers who can think like entrepreneurs, not just code executors. This approach shows strong results. When developers understand the bigger picture, I've found that they form effective duos with product leads, solving not just technical challenges, but also focusing on business outcomes and aligning their own growth with the startup's success. For instance, one of our developers recently built an AI-powered solution for generating creatives that increased the marketing team's productivity by 30%. Your Сreative Team Must Have A Nose For Trends Our creative and marketing teams form the largest portion of our workforce—and for good reason. While developers work more linearly and systematically, supporting the product and building scalable solutions, creative work requires human intuition, cultural understanding and trend awareness that can't and shouldn't be automated. When hiring creative professionals, look for people who live and breathe your niche. In my case, I want to hire marketers who watch booktok (the book and reader niche of TikTok), understand vertical video series trends and can spot emerging cultural movements before they hit mainstream. Their job isn't just to create content—it's to hack trends and understand what genuinely resonates with our audience. The biggest challenge with creative teams is getting them to embrace data-driven decision-making. While many professionals rely on intuition ("this creative will perform well"), I encourage them to base decisions on actual performance metrics and ROI analysis. With your team, be sure to analyze creative performance so that they can directly understand how their work affects business metrics and profits. This way, they will become interested in building a data-driven approach. Design An AI-Forward Culture I believe that whenever a task can be automated with AI tools, we should do it immediately. It is not an option; it is a rule. We have automated a lot of processes, from communication to production and marketing. In a fast-paced market, it's essential not to miss trends, and you need to share information with the team instantly. That's why it's important to use tools that can help you quickly share in-house data and catch trends. Special attention is paid to the automation of creative materials. Our team now generates 2-3 times more creative content with AI agents and LLM models, often without involving creative teams at the initial stages. With the help of AI tools, we have also reduced the localization of advertising from five days to 1.5 hours and built systems that create ads without human intervention. The secret of this approach is hiring people who embrace AI rather than fear it. During your interview process, assess candidates' attitudes toward AI tools and their experience solving problems with artificial intelligence. This cultural alignment is non-negotiable. If someone joins your team with anti-AI sentiment, no amount of training can change their mindset. But when everyone is AI-friendly, your team leaders can identify opportunities for automation and growth. Final Thoughts When growing a tech product, don't rush to hire a dozen developers. Start building a team that understands business environments and market dynamics and has a nose for trends. That's how you can make better strategic decisions faster and ensure the rapid generation and implementation of creative ideas. This is especially important in video content creation, where the production cycle can last for months, as well as for the technology industry, where that cycle can seem like an eternity. The future belongs to companies that can enhance human creativity with AI capabilities. After all, the best way to build a tech company is to remember that technology is just the beginning, not the end goal. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Forbes
18-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How To Lead A Lean, Ambitious Team With Empathy And High Standards
Bogdan Nesvit, Сo-Founder and CEO of HOLYWATER, a tech company that redefines entertainment by unlocking creators potential with AI. Over the past four years, my startup has grown 3.5x. We launched three products, navigated a major pivot and kept building—even while setting up operations at the start of full-scale war. What made it possible is a skilled team that's also deeply aligned with our mission. Together with my co-founder, Anatolii Kasianov, we set out to build HOLYWATER into a leading tech company reshaping entertainment through synergy with AI. Just a year ago, we launched My Drama, a vertical streaming app that's already reached 7 million monthly active users and over 20 million views on most-loved titles. This kind of growth only happens when a team is empowered. While many founders think they have to choose between pushing for performance and being empathetic, I've found the balance is where long-term results come from. People do their best work when expectations are clear and when trust and support are part of the culture. Here are the core principles I follow to build a culture where people stay motivated, accountable and inspired—even in the high-pressure world of tech startups. Don't treat your team like a family. I'm not a fan of calling a team a "family," even though that mindset is common among founders—especially in early-stage startups (we've been there). The difference comes down to boundaries. In a "family," roles often blur. People jump in wherever they're needed, which can be valuable early on. As a company grows, however, that lack of clarity can lead to confusion, burnout and unmet expectations. In a team, clear responsibilities and shared standards are essential. You accept your relatives for who they are, and you might excuse mistakes by saying it's "just their nature." In a team, however, shared outcomes depend on everyone showing up, improving and staying accountable. When someone consistently ignores feedback or struggles to contribute, it affects the whole team—and no amount of tolerance can sustain a high-performing company. At the start of HOLYWATER, we hit more than a few walls. After exiting a million-dollar app portfolio to focus on our content ecosystem, we had to rethink how we operate. That shift pushed us to sharpen our focus and build a culture grounded in clear values and long-term vision. That also means letting someone go can be part of building a healthy team. When it's clear that someone isn't aligned with your values, parting ways can be the most thoughtful and constructive path. Create a safe space for mistakes. True leaders don't always make the right decisions, but they always learn from their mistakes. I've made plenty of errors along my journey, and what's made the difference is my willingness to learn from them. My team doesn't just execute my vision—it actively shapes it by giving me honest feedback. It helps me see myself from the outside, and that's crucial for founders aiming to create something extraordinary. My approach to handling challenges transformed dramatically when I trained myself to stop automatically labelling experiences as "good" or "bad." When someone criticizes my idea or when we face a setback, my brain instinctively wants to label it negatively. Instead, I've learned to pause and ask, "Why am I labelling this as bad? What is this experience trying to teach me?" Now, I see that all experiences, especially difficult ones, direct us toward truth and growth. I transmit this awareness to my team. We have a culture of open feedback, considering mistakes as new learnings and opportunities for growth. The core of my leadership philosophy is built on feedback loops, team self-awareness and valuing truth and evolution over comfort. Support growth and well-being. Building a startup is not a 9-to-5 job. At the beginning, we had our intense periods, and team members worked overtime. At no point did I force them to. Anatolii and I were clear about our vision and also made sure the team had room to grow and accomplish meaningful tasks and challenges. For now, one thing is certain: If you overwork and live in a hurry, you'll end up burned out, not fulfilling those numbers and milestones. That's why, along with clear operations flow and balanced workflow, I promote well-being and self-awareness practices. I regularly share my mindfulness experience with the team, emphasizing what helps me to keep focus and deal with ADHD: meditation, cold water immersion, morning exercise, quality sleep and no alcohol. It's not just theoretical lectures ("You need to sleep well, eat healthy and meditate"). I can speak from experience about what works and what doesn't and offer useful feedback. My goal is to challenge the narrative that success has to come at the cost of self-destruction. As a result, we achieved higher collective productivity, and team meetings became more focused. Our eNPS survey showed 91% of team members said they see strong opportunities for growth. Optimize mundane tasks with AI. I avoid micromanagement. My strengths have always been creativity and generating ideas. This requires me to keep my resources and energy levels high. That's why I actively encourage my team to take ownership of how we implement our shared strategy. This builds their confidence and skills while giving me the space to think big and shape new product ideas. This approach only works because we've built a culture of autonomy supported by smart systems. As an example, My Drama has grown 3.5x in a year thanks to the efforts of a relatively small team. If we had relied solely on manual processes, we'd be lagging. We use AI tools to eliminate tedious, repetitive work that drains creative energy and leads to burnout. In scriptwriting, filming, ad creative development and content distribution, we've built a reliable AI toolkit. It includes both off-the-shelf tools and in-house solutions that help us produce more, spend less and scale faster. As a result, our team members aren't worried about AI replacing them. Instead, they automate what slows them down and focus on what humans do best: strategic thinking and creative problem-solving. Conclusion These principles have helped us get to where we are today, and I believe that founders who follow them can build their own solid team of top performers. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
A Leader's Perspective: How To Grow Your Company With Synergy And AI
Anatolii Kasianov🇺🇦 , Co-Founder & CTO at HOLYWATER / My Drama & My Passion apps. getty In March 2024, along with my fellow co-founder, Bogdan Nesvit, I launched My Drama , where we produce AI-driven short series. How did we know My Drama would become a viral product? Analyzing trends and adapting quickly. The short series market gained extensive attention in 2024. We found that there was greater demand for concise, accessible and engaging storytelling. The market is currently expected to grow by 10.50% CAGR, reaching approximately $11.91 billion by 2030. At My Drama, my main areas of focus are team synergy and leveraging AI to boost our growth. Based on my experience, I've outlined a few lessons that can help you transform your own business, regardless of your industry. Without full synergy between your team and your company's goals, you will struggle to move forward. Alignment sessions are key in ensuring my company is working in collaboration. Organizations like NASA and Toyota are already using this technique. It offers a comprehensive approach to coordinating vision, strategy and execution across all organizational levels. First, your leadership must come together to synchronize business goals. Then team leaders can join, and each department can have an internal alignment session. You must ensure that everyone knows what your company is working toward and builds their own action plan to get there. In practice at my company, it looks like this: If a creative producer has a task to shoot a top-performing series, the business development team has a task to find a director for it. The main purpose of alignment sessions is to facilitate open feedback and criticism. The team should feel comfortable addressing and critiquing leadership, too. Make it clear that it's far more important to define what is right, rather than who is right. Alignment sessions and an open feedback culture can make a startup more agile. When our team is under pressure during peak periods, we move as one unified force. During one particularly intense growth period, our head of product and head of engineering even switched to marketing for a month to help acquire enough users—that's the kind of flexibility that alignment creates. Automate as much as you can. Category-defining companies don't just innovate—they automate to make innovation possible. At My Drama, we take this approach seriously. Each month, we generate over 15,000 content concepts, localized into 12-15 languages, resulting in more than 200,000 creatives launched. And we do this with a lean team, powered by AI. One of our in-house tools identifies viral moments in our series, cuts them out and assembles them into ad-ready concepts with titles. Another launches campaigns across platforms, enabling us to test over 100,000 creatives per month, something no manual workflow could manage. It's not just marketing. We recently tackled a major productivity drag in product analytics. Our analysts were constantly interrupted with basic data requests: metrics, simple charts, repeat questions, etc. So, we built a custom LLM that now handles those requests in real time, freeing the team to focus on conducting deep research and driving strategic experiments. The takeaway? Automate anything that interrupts your team's focus. Dashboards, campaign setup, internal data lookups—every repetitive task you eliminate gives back compounding creative energy. Don't wait until you scale to start automating. Automate so you can scale. Rely only on data, not your feelings. Once you've tackled the obvious bottlenecks, the real work begins: figuring out what to automate next. Growth doesn't come from instinct—it comes from insight. And that insight lives in your data. If you're a founder building in the content space, there are three core pillars you need to control: 1. Product: Is it fast and stable? Are pages loading in 2 seconds—or dragging at 15? Is the paywall smooth or buggy? Product performance is your foundation, and it's one of the easiest places to lose or retain users. Track the essentials: load times, drop-off points, funnel completion and bug frequency. Then zoom in: Where does your dev team burn the most time? What decisions are they making over and over again? That's where automation can drive the biggest wins. 2. Marketing: Are you shipping enough creatives? Are they performing? What's your CAC and LTV across channels? At my company, most of our revenue is marketing-driven—so our data ops are laser-focused there. We've built an internal tool that tracks everything from ad pass rates to creative fatigue curves, helping us optimize at scale. 3. Content: Script quality, production speed, localization timelines, storyline retention—these all add up fast. Every word costs money. And bad content? It costs even more. In the world of vertical streaming, it's common to cut corners—but that often leads to series that are impossible to market or scale. You can apply this same lesson to any industry. What do you consider your "content" in this context? Within each of these pillars are workflows you can (and should) automate. Use tools to help developers ship faster. Leverage AI to expand creative capacity, automate storyboarding and streamline task management. Deepen your understanding of all processes. None of this came from a textbook. As a co-founder, I've been hands-on with every part of the business—from app development and analytics to screenwriting, marketing and content licensing. This is not because I'm a control freak, but because everything is interconnected. If one part breaks, the whole system slows down. To keep that system running, I've made it a habit to study my own company and its industry. This means regular deep dives with team leads, studying bottlenecks, driving hackathons and brainstorm sessions and bridging gaps between departments. When something isn't working, don't wait—look for patterns, find industry examples and dig into what other founders have done. Be sure to dedicate time to this learning, just as you should do for your regular meetings. You don't always need a traditional education to run a company, but you do need curiosity and the willingness to fix everything that's not working at its best. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
