I assume poor country refers to Ukraine. We have designers connected to the app from almost all continents though, including Canada, Germany, Portugal.
Thank you! It's a fair question given though unit economics in businesses like ours are usually pretty healthy. As we had a bootstrap experience before and were (still are!) very lean, we considered the options you mentioned too.
The point for us was not capital costs or smth, but opportunities to grow at a different scale. We see VC not as primarily funding, but as partners for the journey — source of learnings, support and network. We were mostly focused on raising from angel entrepreneurs, even current customers joined. Hopefully this answers your question.
hi! Thank you for the reply and what a great point. I can relate and yes, a lot of business in Ukraine are urged to switch to other markets to survive. I assume their cold outreach attempts might look naive and exploiting. I still believe that begging for help and offering some services are different, and sorry that disturbed you, really.
I assume they still need to make payouts, keep workplaces and support the economy. From my perspective, begging for charity is not okay when you can bring value. Maybe I am just too optimistic about examples you mentioned.
Keep up the good work and thanks for providing a sense of normalcy to your employees in the midst of this crisis, I'm glad something like that is going on at this time.
this is not how the west works nowadays. we are anti-survival because we do not feel threatened(big mistake), we are all about appearances and passing judgments.
Thank you! We also see it this way from what we hear from folks. Eg I limited newsfeed to 2 times a day and try to be busy all other times otherwise it gets all energy away for being worried.
hi, thank you for the reply! Safe and yes, therapy helps with healing. I might understand your concern around toxic culture of "growth at all cost" as SV religion. After bootstrapping my 3 companies before, I am not a fan of it too.
Hopefully, this is not the case. We were not pushing people during such heart-breaking times, on the opposite, they needed work as a distraction and spent at least 30% of work time lately on volunteering projects, eg. designing for non-profits. This gave an additional sense of purpose to being productive and stay strong.
