E51: From No Code to No Limits with Nik Shevchenko

Dive into Nik's astonishing tech voyage from crypto mining teen prodigy in Russia to selling his No Code marketplace for millions. Now a Thiel Fellow with his sights set on the Metaverse, Nik shares invaluable startup wisdom and teases his latest ventures. Tune in for a blend of raw entrepreneurial spirit, hard-hitting advice, and a peek into the future of AI and smart glasses. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Cache Flow Podcast. Nik's early crypto-mining hustle. Building and selling a No Code platform. Lessons from raising $3M in venture capital. The importance of co-founders. Nik's intriguing new AR/VR venture. Resources: Stealth Curotec Hiring Platform from Referrals Smart Glass Connect with Nik Shevchenko: LinkedIn Email Connect with our host, Brian Dainis: Linktree Quotables: 41:02 - I have a theory on this, you know, there's all these like schools of thought that say, you know, launch early, launch often, you know, speed to market. Which all that stuff is true. Like you have to be fast, you can't be slow. If you're slow then you're never gonna go anywhere. So you still have to be action-oriented. But I think a lot of these like, these theories of like you should be embarrassed of your first MVP. 13:10 - I was still in Russia and then I joined 500 Startups and in 500 I basically started my second company, which is a talent marketplace with Love No Code, And I've been working on that for three years. I've been building the team from Russia and then I left Russia even before the war, and I was just started to travel. I traveled to like at least 30 different countries. 16:57 - I worked on this for like three years and my investors were like, Nik, you know, okay, you're doing this thing and you know, we kind of like hit, hit the ceiling basically. It stopped, it stopped growing really aggressively. So, and like I just kept talking to like a lot ad lot of other people and they were all basically the same. Like, Nik, you know, you're a smart guy and you're building a cool thing and now you know your company's just basically growing. Like it's just a couple percentages months, four months. And I was like, yeah, you're actually right and this is how we made the decision to sell. 22:38 - We were thinking that we'll just spend, spend a lot of money on the marketing and then, you know, it'll like [grow] and then we'll get customers and then we'll like re how do you say, recur them, you know, with our product basically. But what happened is we bought marketing, people came and then they left from the product and we were just left with nothing. So this is number one, never scaled prematurely before the product 31:25 - if you're a startup, don't solve any problem until you've solved product market fit. And like there's all different kinds of businesses. Like if you're building like an HVAC company and you want to like scale it up to a national billion dollar HVAC company that services HVAC units, like you don't need to verify product market fit. Like, you know, obviously there's HVAC installations in every house and everyone has one and they break, so yeah. You know, like it's obvious there's product market fit there, you just need to be like competitive in the landscape and it's like price and service and quality and all, you know, sales capabilities. So there's no product market fit challenge there.