The Conveyor Belt of Growth

My primary focus at ueCalc is reaching a state of self-sustainability, which means achieving a consistent, minimal revenue stream from service subscribers. It's the classic entrepreneur's dilemma when you don't have external funding: you have to divide your time between earning a living and building the project. Right now, the scale is tipped more towards earning a living. However, the beauty is that my income is deeply connected to ueCalc and the world of unit economics. Every time I solve a client's problem through consulting, I gain new insights and develop new tools that I can then integrate directly back into the product. It’s a cycle where real-world application directly fuels the product's evolution.

The most critical lesson, one I'm still working to fully internalize, is the power of a team. You simply cannot do it alone. The success of Webreklama was a direct result of the incredible team we managed to build. Conversely, many of the challenges I face with ueCalc today stem from the fact that I haven't yet assembled that core team. It's a stark reminder that vision requires collaborative execution to truly flourish.

The connection is very direct. Working in internet advertising from the early days, it became clear by the early 2000s that clients didn't just want to buy banner space on websites. That was a commodity. What they needed was to spend their advertising budgets effectively, and our job was to measure that effectiveness. We learned how to do it well. I'm proud that we were among the first to sell advertising based on interactions with specific types of people, defined by their consumer profiles. Our clients could precisely target who they wanted to reach, regardless of the website or the size of the banner. This mindset of measuring the efficiency of every dollar spent was the seed for everything that came later.

It was the recognition of our limits. Webreklama was innovative, but its main constraint was its location. We were operating in a small, less affluent region in Russia, which fundamentally capped our ability to scale. My knowledge at the time wasn't sufficient to break beyond those regional boundaries. Once I accepted that, I sold the company with a new mission: to build something global from day one. That became Crossss, an e-commerce personalization service where client efficiency and data analysis were the foundation. After selling that business, I immersed myself in the startup world and met Ilya Krasinsky, who was teaching founders about unit economics. I had a moment of clarity: this was the formal language for what I had been doing intuitively for years. I joined the effort, but soon realized that manual formulas were cumbersome. That led to the critical question: what does the *ideal* unit economics model look like? That's how ueCalc was born.

I use a metaphor to make it clear: I view your business metrics as a conveyor belt. This conveyor belt serves customers, who in turn bring revenue to your business. Like any physical conveyor, its performance can be optimized. This is where Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints comes in. The process is straightforward: we identify the one 'machine' on the belt, which in our case is a single metric, where a small improvement yields the greatest possible increase in revenue, or contribution margin, for the minimal cost. The entire business then focuses its energy on improving that one bottleneck metric. Once it's improved, we repeat the cycle. It creates a continuous loop of focused improvement.

This is the most critical part to understand. Unit economics metrics are not just numbers; they are a digital reflection of your actual business processes. When you decide to improve a metric, like conversion rate or customer acquisition cost, you are fundamentally committing to changing and enhancing a specific business process. Improving the metric for 'user onboarding' means refining your welcome emails, tutorials, and support systems. That’s the real power of this approach: it connects a high-level financial goal directly to a tangible, operational task. Of course, explaining the full depth takes time, which is why I wrote my book on the subject.

I can't name companies for ethical reasons, but one memorable case involved a team planning to launch a new venture. They had a revenue target and a plan to get there. However, when we modeled it in ueCalc, they realized they couldn't just arbitrarily change the metrics to hit their goal. Each metric was tied to a process, and their team had limits on how much they could influence those processes. The model showed that with their existing skills and resources, they simply couldn't achieve the necessary performance to be profitable. It was a tough realization, but it saved them from launching a business that was destined to fail. They abandoned the idea, armed with a much clearer understanding of the operational reality behind the numbers.

First, evaluate your idea purely from a revenue standpoint. What model truly fits: is it transactional, subscription-based, or e-commerce? Be honest about how you will make money. Second, understand exactly how your team's daily activities affect the key unit economics metrics. Who is responsible for conversion? Who handles retention? Make those connections explicit. And third, find the realistic limits of your team's impact on those metrics. You can't improve a metric by 1,000% overnight. Once you have a grasp on those three things, you can build a model that reflects reality and confirms that the future you're aiming for is actually achievable.

There are two major hurdles. The first is my limited proficiency in foreign languages. I can manage day-to-day conversations, but I lack the nuanced vocabulary needed for sophisticated marketing campaigns or high-stakes business negotiations. The second is the sheer administrative friction of operating in a new country. Navigating the paperwork for residency, company registration, and compliance takes a significant amount of time and mental energy, especially when dealing with language barriers and different cultural approaches to bureaucracy. It's a hidden tax on a founder's most precious resource: time.

The fundamental need for planning won't disappear. As long as money exists, businesses will need to model, plan, and account for their cash flow. What will change is the degree of automation. I see a lot of progress in areas like payment recognition powered by LLMs, which will drastically simplify accounting. However, the core challenge will shift from data entry to error detection. Right now, errors are made by people and also found by people. In the future, automation will reduce human error, but we'll need sophisticated systems to find the new kinds of errors that machines might introduce. At ueCalc, we are still focused on classical mathematics for now, but we are watching this space closely.

My roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months is focused on adding more complexity and integration. I plan to introduce models that can handle multiple sources of monetization simultaneously, which is a common reality for many businesses. I also want to add new templates for building out a metrics tree and a customer journey map (CJM), and then allow users to use these frameworks directly in conjunction with their unit economics models. The goal is to create a more holistic and interconnected view of the business.

My advice is this: if you believe you have truly invented something, then you must build it. Go for it. Yes, there's always the risk of creating something nobody needs, but we have countless frameworks today to test ideas and mitigate that risk. Ultimately, it comes down to doing what you believe in with persistence. I always think of Edison's famous quote, 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.' That's the mindset. You have to be prepared to try 10,000 times, because that persistence is what separates an idea from an innovation.