Vladyslav Podoliako built his next business inside his first

Vladyslav Podoliako had won his first client, hired help and acquired the reassuring sensation that a business was happening. Then the client left. A Polish app developer had paid $4,900 a month for help reaching the American market; when its plans changed, the young agency’s income went with them. Podoliako and his business partner, Michael Maximoff, were left with $200. Entrepreneurship had delivered its first invoice for overconfidence.

They bought a domain, put together a Wix website and went looking for short projects whose customers would pay upfront. Blockchain startups preparing token offerings supplied a temporary answer. That chapter brought revenue, then another lesson: a customer whose campaign lasts a few weeks is unlikely to provide years of dependable income. The pair had learned how to get attention. Keeping a business alive required rather more.

Belkins, which they cofounded in 2017, grew out of those adjustments. Today Podoliako runs a business built around helping other businesses find customers, alongside Folderly, the email deliverability company that emerged from its working problems. There is a pleasing lack of romance in the machinery: research, sales conversations, technical settings, invoices. His career makes a case for paying close attention to whatever keeps going wrong.

A researcher finds his customer

Before he was selling meetings, Podoliako was finding information. He describes discovering an aptitude for data research while young, turning it into freelance work and eventually becoming a head of research. His responsibilities expanded into qualifying data, working with sales colleagues, connecting customer databases and automating processes. Finding a useful answer was becoming a commercial skill.

At a technology startup, he met Maximoff. They wanted independence; a layoff provided the push. Their partnership joined an interest in research and systems with experience in sales and client management. Neither ingredient could do much alone. A beautiful list of prospects earns little if nobody can start a conversation; a persuasive pitch has limited use when addressed to the wrong people.

That division of labour became less rigid as the company developed. In 2023, Podoliako described regularly exchanging responsibilities with Maximoff. He had started with finance, legal work, research and product development, then taken on delivery and later sales. Maximoff’s responsibilities moved too. They switched when the business needed it, rather than according to a ceremonial timetable.

The arrangement is a small rebuke to the idea that a founder’s original job description must become a family heirloom. Trying a colleague’s work gives an argument rather less room to hide. It also gives a business two people who understand more of its moving parts.

The inbox had other plans

Belkins’ work placed it close to a stubborn problem: writing an email and having it arrive are separate achievements. Podoliako recalled an episode involving roughly 800 mailboxes under the agency’s management. Open rates fell from 90% to 40%. The team repaired the immediate problem within days. He kept investigating the delivery process.

Folderly came from that investigation. Its subject was the less glamorous side of correspondence: sender reputation, domain configuration, authentication and the reasons a mailbox provider might distrust a message. A sales team could polish its prose all afternoon while the infrastructure quietly escorted the result into spam.

The first experiments involved two Belkins customers who permitted the team to work on their delivery problems. Their experience supplied an early test of whether the solution helped outside the founders’ own operation. Later, Folderly acquired its own people, objectives and budget. A useful internal fix was becoming a separate business, with obligations of its own.

“The main thing is the result.”

Vladyslav Podoliako, on how his team works

By September 2023, he was discussing the product with The SaaS CFO’s Ben Murray: the route from agency work into software, the mailboxes and templates that could upset delivery, and the remote team behind the service. The technical problem had become something customers would pay to understand and resolve.

Customers before the grand unveiling

Podoliako’s method for developing software begins unusually close to an invoice. An established service business already hears what frustrates customers. It has people to ask, work to observe and relationships in which a proposed solution can be tested. The next product idea may be sitting in a client conversation, looking thoroughly unimpressive.

In his account of developing Folderly, the agency pre-sold $100,000 of the product before release. That money helped turn demonstrated interest into development resources. He has argued for putting a capable leader and a small team around such a project, then allowing the team to grow as the product proves itself.

His later advice to aspiring founders is similarly practical: look at what people search for, read their complaints in communities and speak to people who know the market. Even a modest page or advertisement can test interest before a larger build. He also published a free Bootstrapper’s Playbook. The recurring preference is for evidence that arrives before expenditure.

A price tag with consequences

There is a comic footnote to running Belkins: people occasionally mistake the name for the electronics accessories brand and ask about iPhone cables. Podoliako recounted the confusion to pricing specialist Mark Stiving in April 2025. Even a company devoted to clearer commercial communication must occasionally explain what it sells.

The more consequential confusion concerned Folderly’s price. Podoliako recalled starting at $200 per mailbox per month, a deliberate experiment at the expensive end of the options he was considering. Demand followed, but so did expectations. Customers paying a substantial price expected the problem to disappear quickly; connecting mailboxes and doing the necessary setup still required their participation.

“Be courageous about your pricing,” he advised. His account is useful because it includes the work created by the decision. A higher price changes what a customer expects from the product, the support team and the speed of resolution. It writes a promise that operations must subsequently honour. The number on the pricing page can be changed in minutes. Earning it takes longer.

The expensive pleasure of being wrong

Growth did not spare him the costs of inexperience. In a January 2025 interview, he discussed underestimating the difficulty of an enterprise product and spending time and resources rewriting Folderly’s infrastructure. The lesson he drew was to begin with a smaller viable product, take the technical demands seriously and test before committing too much.

Later that year, speaking with executive coach Glenn Gow, he recalled resisting his technical team’s recommendation to rebuild. The work ultimately took roughly ten to twelve months. It is an awkward anecdote for a founder to volunteer, which makes it more revealing than an uninterrupted procession of milestones.

“I thought I’m the smartest in the room,” he said. The attraction of the sentence is its lack of a flattering escape clause. He had wanted to preserve momentum. The engineers were describing a limitation that enthusiasm could not remove. Listening eventually became part of the job.

His willingness to revise extends to customer acquisition. As Belkins moved towards enterprise work, he described comparing the cost of winning business through different channels. The figures made a persuasive argument for content and advertising in that particular segment. An agency selling outreach had reason to look beyond outreach for its own customers.

Leave room for another person

Systems occupy much of his attention, but people keep interrupting the diagram. His 2023 conversation with remote work entrepreneur Liam Martin covered the CEO’s continuing involvement in daily operations as Belkins grew. His message was that knowing the work still matters after the team becomes large enough to fill an organisation chart.

When discussing the disruption caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he credited relationships with customers for helping the company adapt. Clients helped rework processes and supported efforts connected with refugees. In that account, goodwill had practical consequences. Years of dealing with people as partners mattered when ordinary arrangements stopped being ordinary.

He has also described wanting employees to bring business ideas into the group, where they could draw on existing sales, finance, marketing and hiring expertise. The aspiration connects his interests as an operator and investor: build an environment where another venture has somewhere to begin.

A sales founder argues for restraint

By 2025, Forbes had included Podoliako in its Europe 30 Under 30 selection for Media and Marketing. His interests were extending beyond the agency and its email product. Discussing plans for 2026, he spoke about growing with his teams and described an agricultural technology project using weather, soil and other farm data. The former researcher still sounded interested in what information could make possible.

His July 2026 writing returned to a subject much nearer the inbox. Cheap AI-generated outreach, he argued, creates pressure on a shared resource: the recipient’s attention and trust. Making messages easier to produce does little to enlarge the time available to read them. He called the resulting pressure interruption inflation.

That argument is a pointed development for someone whose business helps companies start sales conversations. He wants systems to consider relevance, timing and whether contact deserves to happen at all. On his own site, the current themes include founder involvement in selling, clearer processes for AI operators and the limits of automated prospecting.

The connection to his beginnings is close. Research meant finding information someone else needed. Belkins made a business of finding the right people. Folderly addressed whether the message could reach them. His recent argument adds a further question: should this particular message be sent? After years spent opening commercial doors, Podoliako is making a case for knowing when to leave one politely closed.