I started in sales. AIESEC: selling companies on hosting international interns, then coordinating the exchanges across 13 Russian cities. Then Besttoolbars: enterprise sales, pitching software products to international clients, closing deals, flying to conferences. The pitch decks I built to support those sales were a side effect. That's where design started: not in Figma, but in a deck trying to make a product demo legible to a decision-maker in 30 seconds. The lesson stuck.

I co-designed a screenshot tool with two developers. Full UX/UI. One obsession: shorten the flow from screenshot to sharing link. In 2026 I found out it's still running on my original design. 15+ years later.

Built Convlab design agency from a freelance backlog: 24 people, 150+ projects in 18 months. Closed it. Credit, burnout, diluted equity. Started WDI Design School with 12 people in an old office. Ran it for 8 years: 1,500+ graduates, 41 cohorts, 7,500+ design reviews. By the end I could tell what's broken in a design in 60 seconds. That became the skill everything else is built on.

Moved to new country in March 2022 with a laptop and a Payoneer account. Three weeks later: first Toptal contract. Top 3%. Fortune 500, Silicon Valley startups, then Web3. AI platforms. Token launches. Node sales. Clients across US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia. The pattern across every project was the same: technically brilliant products, websites that failed to communicate what made them different.

Now working independently. I find what's broken in your website, design the fix, and ship it. Deep audit first: strategy, UX, conversion, messaging. A structured breakdown of what's broken, why it's broken, and what it costs you. Then full cycle execution: research, information architecture, UX, UI, frontend, deployment. I architect the structure and user flows. AI handles execution. Agency-depth work in days, not months.