Ihor Volovoy and the first $100

The first hundred dollars came from lathes. Before Ihor Volovoy was running a digital marketing agency, he built and promoted a website about the machines he was studying. Mechanical engineering supplied the subject; search engine optimization supplied the experiment. Someone looking for information could find his pages. A modest sum followed. It was a small transaction with a rather large implication for his working life.

At the time, his jobs had included serving drinks and carrying restaurant orders in Kherson. Copywriting offered a way into work at a computer. SEO came next. Later, at the technology company Wezom, he progressed from specialist to leading a department, while continuing to take freelance clients after work. Those clients eventually became part of the new agency, Elit-Web.

A lathe is an agreeably unglamorous starting point for a marketing career. It offers little assistance with personal branding. It does, however, give a student something specific to explain to a specific audience. The subject was familiar to him. The new discovery was that being found had commercial value.

Before the agency, a game economy

Volovoy’s account of his early internet life includes another marketplace: Lineage II. He played the online role-playing game and sold items and crafting resources to friends and acquaintances for real money. The amounts were small. He nevertheless remembers the experience as motivating, and as something that influenced the direction his life took.

That detail gives his later career a useful texture. The internet was already a place where effort, knowledge and another person’s willingness to pay could meet. Long before there was an agency presentation, there was a trade between players. No boardroom required.

In a personal essay in June 2022, he also described his experiments with investments and cryptocurrencies, including experiences that had disappointed him. His agency, he wrote, remained his main project and principal source of income. The essay’s candour matters more to this portrait than the fashionable assets of that moment. He was willing to describe attempts that had failed to reward his enthusiasm. His career includes curiosity, and his own account leaves room for a wrong turn.

The freelancer learns to build a company

The move into agency ownership began with a practical proposal. Volovoy approached a friend who already ran an IT company about building a digital marketing business together. A freelance team became the starting point. The work covered search optimization and paid advertising, including services delivered for other agencies under their own brands.

By March 2024, he was describing an operation with an in-house team spanning SEO, social media, development and online advertising. His job included setting direction and making sure projects addressed the requirements of individual clients. That is a substantial change in the unit of work. The specialist can finish a task. The chief executive has to make many people’s tasks fit together.

He also described flexible project budgets and payment arrangements, rather than a single minimum budget for every customer. The longer ambition was to expand the agency’s work in the United States. These are quieter details than an award announcement, but they reveal the business he wanted to run: varied clients, work organized around their circumstances, and a market extending well beyond the place where he started.

When the plan became survival

At the end of 2021, Elit-Web had drawn up a development strategy and planned events and further growth. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine overturned that programme. The agency’s main office was in Kherson when the invasion began. Relocating to territory outside the occupation became an immediate problem.

Looking back at 2022, Volovoy said Ukrainian clients initially paused their work. European and American clients represented about 30 percent of the agency’s portfolio at that point. In his telling, that overseas work helped cover salaries and keep the company operating, while the team reduced spending elsewhere.

By mid-April, some Ukrainian clients were starting to resume promotion. The agency also offered free advice through a digital support channel and restarted some projects without charging, seeking to preserve the progress already made. The decision connected a client’s ability to recover with the agency’s own future. A marketing relationship can look rather abstract on a contract. Here, it involved an immediate question: could both businesses remain in a position to work together later?

A report has to earn its place

Ask Volovoy how the agency works and the answer soon arrives at reporting. In his account, paid campaigns begin with demand and competitor research, keyword selection, targeting and a media plan. That plan sets out the tools, expected traffic, budget and measures of success. Clients receive daily, weekly and monthly reporting.

For SEO, he describes an audit of a site’s structure, content and competitors, followed by work on its internal organization, speed, content and links. His stated values include usefulness, transparency and responsibility. Those words acquire more substance when a client can examine where the money went.

The unromantic work has a certain appeal. A media plan gives a promise some edges. A report gives a customer something to question. Both make the relationship less dependent on the reassuring manner of whoever presents the slides. Volovoy repeatedly returns to the client’s ability to see what is happening. In an industry paid to attract attention, he spends a notable amount of time explaining how the buyer can inspect the work.

One slide, please

By July 2025, he had developed that interest into a detailed argument about how a chief executive should supervise marketing. His proposed rhythm separates daily checks from monthly judgments. Day to day, the team watches conversions, advertising spend, inquiries and changes in the performance of paid channels. The executive receives a concise indication of whether something needs attention.

The monthly view asks broader questions: how traffic divides between channels, whether investment produces a return, which channels contribute revenue or inquiries, and how performance has moved over several months. He recommends keeping each reporting block to a single slide.

This is management through selective attention. A chief executive can become extremely busy examining numbers and still miss the decision they were supposed to inform. Volovoy’s preferred dashboard makes a smaller demand on the reader. It should show enough to support action, with the team doing the investigative work behind it. There is a pleasing economy in the idea that a marketing report, of all documents, should resist the temptation to keep talking.

Fix the house before moving in

Volovoy’s practical advice extends to the point before a website launches. In a discussion about integrating SEO into development, he compares late optimization with trying to renovate a house after moving in. The implication is immediately recognizable: some improvements become much more awkward once everything else is in place.

He argues for considering site structure and search demand early. Poor organization can require expensive rebuilding; duplicate content, broken links, slow pages and images that have not been optimized create further work. Keyword research, in his explanation, helps align the site’s structure and content with what people actually search for.

The appeal of the argument is its timing. Marketing enters while decisions are still inexpensive to change. A developer and a search specialist can settle the arrangement of a site before a customer encounters it. Volovoy is describing a form of prevention that rarely makes a dramatic case study: the correction that never became necessary. For someone whose business depends on improving websites, there is a sensible commercial argument in helping clients avoid building the same thing twice.

The customer is holding a phone

Another strand of his writing addresses mobile websites. In October 2023, an article under his name examined how responsiveness and the experience of using a site connect with search visibility. Its conclusion was direct: businesses need to take mobile use seriously and adapt as search requirements change.

The piece concentrates on usability. A page can be available on a phone and still be tiresome to use. Layout, weight and navigation affect whether someone stays long enough to do anything useful. The practical question is familiar to anyone who has tried to buy something while fighting a website with a thumb.

His advice about mobile use, development and reporting addresses a recurring problem: the avoidable friction between a customer and an action. He writes about structures, processes and interfaces that let other people complete a task. In that view of marketing, a page has work to do after it has attracted a visitor.

Seven speakers, one financial question

On September 30, 2026, Volovoy moderated Elit-Web’s online Performance Driven Forum. Seven speakers examined the relationship between marketing, sales and profit. The programme ended with a live review of participants’ websites, bringing the discussion back to actual pages and actual decisions.

The subjects ranged across YouTube, LinkedIn, content, sales and repeat purchases. Elit-Web’s head of international marketing, Marharyta Nesterenko, discussed qualified leads, acquisition cost, marketing return and profit by channel. Her presentation included a model tying an agency bonus to business indicators checked against customer relationship management data.

For Volovoy, the moderator’s role placed him among people examining different parts of the same commercial journey. Attracting an audience, converting an inquiry and retaining a customer each requires different work. The forum’s organizing question was whether those activities ultimately paid. It is a recognizable continuation of the concerns in his writing: clearer measures, closer contact with revenue, and enough detail to judge whether an apparently busy marketing operation is helping the business.

“Today, we sell the result and the client’s free time.”Ihor Volovoy · 2026

What grows after the founder lets go

In a 2026 reflection on leadership, Volovoy argued that an agency needs a stable business model and department heads who take responsibility for their own areas. He described his role as creating the conditions for that ownership. Employees who arrive with a solution, he wrote, are the people the company values.

His stated priorities now include implementing AI and reorganizing processes for generative engine optimization, the work of making a business visible in AI-generated answers. He describes an ambition to turn Elit-Web into a technological partner for clients. He also stresses relationships that last several years and the value of reputation.

“Today, we sell the result and the client’s free time,” he writes. It is an ambitious promise for a service business, and one that leaves a chief executive plenty to account for. The student’s first website produced a hundred dollars. The company requires a more complicated calculation: client results, delegated judgment, repeat business and time well spent. Volovoy’s public career keeps coming back to making that calculation visible.