The job was supposed to involve iPhones. During Anatolii Kasianov’s first week, before the project even had a name, Bogdan Nesvit changed the brief. He wanted to build interactive stories using Unity. Kasianov had other offers. He could have taken a more straightforward iOS development role. Instead, he learned the new tools, recruited freelancers, and helped ship an interactive story within a month. Some working relationships begin with a handshake. This one began with a moving target.
Nesvit remembers another detail: Kasianov arrived dressed in black and talked about launching startups constantly. The clothes were incidental; the appetite for building was useful. Their colleagues eventually found a name for the partnership, “bogda-lik”, combining Bogdan and Tolik. It sounds less like a corporate governance arrangement than a pair of characters from a children’s book. Yet it captures something that their later titles would take time to acknowledge: two people were already running the show.
Today, Kasianov is co-founder and co-CEO of HOLYWATER TECH, the Ukrainian-born company behind My Drama, My Passion, My Muse and FreeBits. His route there runs through programming, utility apps, a deliberate sale, and the problem of getting a story onto someone’s phone. Following that route reveals a founder whose most consequential work often happens before the audience presses play.
A company that learned what to leave behind
HOLYWATER’s founding story starts in March 2020 with $100,000 and a team of seven. Genesis and a business angel supplied the initial backing. The early products included live wallpapers and video-editing tools. These were practical, marketable applications, a long way from a streaming catalogue full of fictional billionaires. They also gave the founders experience in the unromantic parts of mobile business: finding users, making payments work, and deciding which experiments deserved another week.
Kasianov describes himself as a dropout who co-founded the business at 24. HOLYWATER describes him as a self-taught engineer. Both details fit the first-week episode: his education in building a company included accepting work that had changed shape before he had settled into it. The useful qualification was the ability to make the revised idea work. A founder can frame that as flexibility. A developer still has to produce something that runs.
In 2022, HOLYWATER sold three apps, GetHabit, Wigetbox and Refine, to an Israeli buyer for more than $1 million. The point of the transaction was to concentrate on a content ecosystem. This is an unusually concrete expression of focus. Keeping an app portfolio would have meant keeping its demands, too. Selling it gave the next direction room on the calendar as well as money in the account.
Kasianov’s advice to developers considering a sale was correspondingly practical. Build applications that can scale, identify companies that acquire them, and study those buyers’ strategies. He treated an exit as something to prepare for through the product and the potential buyer. Even the departure had to be engineered. The early apps had done their job; the company could now spend more of its attention on stories.
The cliffhanger has a delivery problem
My Drama launched in March 2024. Its series are made for a vertical screen, with short episodes that let the viewer carry a continuing plot around in a pocket. Alongside it, My Passion publishes books, while My Muse offers series produced with generative AI support. FreeBits adds an advertising-supported way to watch. These products give the company several routes to an audience and several ways to learn what that audience follows.
For Kasianov, distribution has been a central part of the work. In an August 2024 essay about creative marketing, he described a system producing more than 200,000 advertising creatives a month and testing more than 100,000. Those were his reported figures at the time, rather than a current production tally. Their scale helps explain why his background in software matters inside an entertainment company. A good story still needs someone to encounter it.
He described adapting advertising to the place it appeared. On TikTok, the team watched trends and built short videos around them. In games, rewarded ads offered a different opportunity: viewers watching for a bonus could give the story more time to unfold. The same premise might require a different opening, pace or presentation. A cliffhanger is versatile, but it does not arrange its own media buying.
The ambition in that essay was to make promotional work compelling enough to travel organically, with some videos already attracting millions of views without promotional spending. There is a pleasing reversal here. Advertising, normally the interruption between pieces of entertainment, becomes a piece of entertainment that has to earn its own audience. Kasianov’s engineering work sits behind that contest, making it possible to try many versions and inspect the results.
Popular books can become screen stories. Viewer response helps guide the next creative decision.
The numbers beneath the drama
His approach to infrastructure is just as revealing. Kasianov has described choosing RevenueCat to avoid spending weeks building custom subscription systems. The company uses its subscription data alongside AppsFlyer for campaign attribution and Amplitude for behavioural analysis. These systems concern a different sort of suspense: whether an advertising campaign brings in customers whose payments justify the cost of finding them.
In the RevenueCat case study, the founders reported that paid marketing drove 80 percent of revenue. Kasianov said new product offerings could launch four times faster using the service. Those claims belong to that account of the business, but the underlying decision is easy to understand. Every hour spent rebuilding subscription logic is an hour unavailable for a new product, offer or experiment. Buying dependable infrastructure can be a technical decision about where to spend human effort.
For someone who builds automation, Kasianov is careful about keeping time for concentrated thought. He has said he reserves uninterrupted blocks for difficult problems and automates what he can so he can attend to larger questions. This is a modestly unfashionable habit in a business devoted to capturing attention. The person helping stories compete for your spare minutes wants some of his own minutes left undisturbed.
“Track everything, use benchmarks, and seek expert insights”
Anatolii Kasianov, 2024
That advice puts a limit on the romance of the founder’s hunch. An idea can begin with conviction; deciding what to do next requires evidence. It also makes the first-week Unity experiment easier to read. Kasianov took on an uncertain brief and produced a working story quickly enough for the team to learn from it. The leap and the measurement belonged to the same process.
A title catches up with the partnership
In 2025, Kasianov formally became co-CEO alongside Nesvit. The announcement described him as a former CTO who had launched products, built teams and helped shape the company. Nesvit’s own announcement presented the change as recognition of an existing arrangement. The title brought the org chart closer to the everyday work. “Bogda-lik” had acquired a more conventional business card.
His current remit includes development, content and product analytics, with continued involvement in talent growth. That combination places him near decisions that entertainment businesses often divide between technical and creative teams. How quickly can a premise be tested? Which response matters? What deserves a larger production commitment? The software influences the options available, while the audience’s reaction influences which option survives.
He has described using AI pilots to obtain information before committing to full production. This gives a proposed series a preliminary encounter with viewers. It is an approach suited to a founder who wants both speed and evidence: reduce the distance between a creative proposition and an observable response. The pilot becomes a question you can show people.
Hollywood arrives with a production schedule
On October 9, 2025, FOX Entertainment announced an equity investment in HOLYWATER. FOX Entertainment Studios committed to creating and producing more than 200 vertical titles for My Drama over two years. The first announced projects included Billionaire Blackmail and Bound by Obsession, then shooting in Atlanta. The proposed collaboration covered production, advertising, brand partnerships and potential extensions of FOX properties.
For Kasianov and Nesvit, the stated ambition was to widen the genre range and make vertical series mainstream. They named drama, thriller and romance as territory the format could carry. The deal made that ambition tangible through a slate and a production partner. A phone screen might be small, but the arrangements required to keep filling it can be decidedly substantial.
In January 2026, HOLYWATER announced a $22 million financing round led by Horizon Capital, with Endeavor Catalyst and Wheelhouse participating. Plans included strengthening distribution and developing further AI-enabled content formats. Later that month, FOX, Dhar Mann Studios and HOLYWATER announced a separate partnership with an initial 40-title slate for My Drama. These are company milestones, built through teams and partners, in the business Kasianov helped start.
A short film, then a larger question
Kasianov also served as an executive producer, alongside Nesvit, on Distance Between Two Points of Me. Directed by Illya Dutsyk and based on a text by Natalia Serebriakova, the AI-visualised short explores home and belonging. HOLYWATER supplied technology and production support; the filmmaking team supplied artistic direction. The film received two Gold Telly Awards. Its voice came from Vladyslava Shevchenko, a content operations manager whose audition led to her taking the role.
That project offers a different view of the same business. The infrastructure can serve an intimate film as well as a recurring mobile series. It also gives the engineers something less tidy than a conversion rate to work towards: a story that holds a viewer after its final image.
By July 2026, Kasianov was explaining why he preferred the broader term “vertical series”. HOLYWATER and Owl & Co had published a report combining product data with a survey of 2,737 My Drama users. He said testing a new genre on My Muse could take weeks where it had previously taken months. The question had expanded from whether the format worked to what else it could carry. For the developer who accepted a changed brief in his first week, that is familiar territory: learn the tools, make the next version, and give the audience something to answer.