Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen (Part 1)

This is a classic bootstrapping story with a very small team to serious revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Nikita Sherbina: I was born and raised in Ukraine. I moved to the United States about six years ago without knowing anything about this land.

Sramana Mitra: Do you still have a lot of family in Ukraine now?

Nikita Sherbina: All of my family moved six years ago. We moved together. I do know people there whom I’ve known for a long time.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your career. You came here six years ago to what part of the United States?

Nikita Sherbina: I moved to Arizona. We started our first startup there.

Sramana Mitra: Are you educated in Ukraine?

Nikita Sherbina: I did not get my education fully because we started doing startups. I dropped out of college.

Sramana Mitra: In the US, you started doing a design studio in Arizona. That was your first project?

Nikita Sherbina: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happened?

Nikita Sherbina: It didn’t work out well. We had some customers, but we didn’t like to be an agency. It wasn’t something that we liked to do. We like to build beautiful designs but it was hard to scale. That is why we decided to change our business model and jump to a different niche. We wanted to provide solutions at scale. We had a couple of cool ideas which then resulted in AIScreen.

Sramana Mitra: Did you work in between at other places?

Nikita Sherbina: I was working as a product manager in other companies while we were doing our project.

Sramana Mitra: You got jobs in other companies as a product manager and were bootstrapping a startup with a paycheck.

Nikita Sherbina: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Also in Arizona?

Nikita Sherbina: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the period when you were doing this side by side. What kind of jobs were you doing? What were you learning and what were you doing on the startup side?

Nikita Sherbina: It wasn’t easy. My family is from Ukraine and Crimea as entrepreneurs. We had a passion for business. For me, it was in my blood. I was working on my personal project after my shift. I wake up and work on one project and spend some time on my own project.

I was managing a lot of people remotely, because I was a product manager. It was working well because you can hire people from Ukraine, Russia, or the Philippines for really cheap. If you understand the market and you see the vision for a product and you take customer interviews so you understand the pain point, you can understand where to lead your company. This is what I was doing. I discovered different pain points. I created different features for both companies.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen
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