Yevhenii Kostenetskyi has a useful qualification for someone selling a few minutes of play: he knows how to sit an exam. His professional profile records fourteen ACCA exams passed without a resit. Among the results he lists are first places in Ukraine for business analysis, advanced performance management and advanced financial management. Somewhere between those accounting papers and a mobile screen full of puzzles, a different sort of business began.
In 2018, Kostenetskyi joined Genesis, the Ukrainian technology company, and received approval to launch Impulse. He arrived with a finance background. The product he built offered short games, crosswords and logic tasks. By May 2025, Impulse’s team was announcing that its iOS and Android apps had passed 100 million downloads. The distance between those two moments is the interesting part of his story.
A hundred million makes an excellent announcement. It also hides the work rather neatly. A download counter cannot show the experiment that failed, the price that needed changing, or the hours spent maintaining the machinery behind a free game. Kostenetskyi’s public accounts of the business offer a closer view. They concern advertisements, subscriptions, hiring and the use of a small team’s time. The confetti has a spreadsheet underneath it.
The accountant brings his own puzzle
His ACCA studies ran from 2015 to 2019, overlapping with the start of Impulse. In his profile, he records a 74% average pass rate and ranks of eighth, thirteenth and twenty-third worldwide in three individual papers. These are his own reported results, and they give his later work an unusually specific prehistory. Before he was watching millions of people work through small challenges, he was keeping score on some fairly substantial ones himself.
The subjects matter, too. Business analysis asks how an organization operates. Performance management concerns what to measure and how to act on it. Financial management deals with the resources that make a plan possible. None supplies a recipe for an entertaining app. Together they suggest why the commercial details of Impulse occupy so much space in his account of building it.
That continued after the launch. He lists a GoPractice qualification in data-driven product management and growth from July 2018, followed by a product growth simulator qualification in May 2022 and Reforge’s monetization and pricing course that July. The sequence is quietly revealing: a founder already running a growing product was still adding formal study to his working life. For an executive in the learning business, that is a pleasing piece of consistency.
Finance background. Genesis. Approval to launch Impulse. A new set of problems to solve.
One app, then a shared address
Impulse initially developed separately within the Genesis ecosystem. In 2021, it joined Headway, the business founded by Anton Pavlovsky around an app offering condensed nonfiction books. The two products had different formats but an overlapping audience. One served readers with summaries; the other gave players short tasks. Bringing them together put two approaches to small, repeatable learning sessions inside the same company.
This distinction matters to Kostenetskyi’s place in the story. He founded and leads Impulse; Pavlovsky founded and leads Headway. Their names appear together because their businesses came together. Impulse did not begin as an extra feature in a book app. It brought its own history, product and operating decisions into the arrangement.
There is a certain practicality to that partnership. A customer may enjoy reading a compressed argument one day and solving a word puzzle the next. The format changes, while the amount of available time may stay much the same. Short experiences give the products a common commercial setting without requiring them to look alike. Kostenetskyi’s contribution occupies the playful side of that setting.
Who pays when the player doesn’t?
In December 2021, Kostenetskyi described a question that every free-to-download subscription product eventually meets: what happens to the business when someone enjoys the free version and never pays? Impulse added interstitial advertisements through ironSource. Its account reported an increase of around 40% in estimated customer lifetime value compared with subscriptions alone. That measure concerns the value of a customer to the business over time.
The more telling detail was the constraint on the experiment. The team tested advertising frequency while watching retention and the experience of using the app. More commercial inventory is only useful if people continue to return. A puzzle has a beginning and an end; the business needs a reason for the player to open another one tomorrow.
“Our goal was to maximize LTV without damaging retention and the user experience.”
Yevhenii Kostenetskyi · December 2021
His formulation is remarkably plain. It gives two competing demands a place in the same sentence, without pretending either can be wished away. The operator must earn enough to keep growing and preserve enough enjoyment to keep the audience. Advertising inserts a third party into that relationship. Getting the balance wrong is easy; finding a workable balance requires observation.
The hidden cost was somebody’s afternoon
In another account of Impulse’s advertising operations, Kostenetskyi described a team of 25 and a task that was consuming time: managing advertising waterfalls. These systems required repeated monitoring and adjustment. For a compact team, the operational burden mattered alongside the money. Time spent maintaining the advertising setup was time unavailable for other work on the product.
Impulse moved to Liftoff Monetize’s in-app bidding system. The reported results included an approximately 15% increase in revenue per thousand advertising impressions and a threefold increase in average daily iOS revenue from that partner. These figures describe a particular advertising relationship. Their usefulness lies in the connection Kostenetskyi drew between commercial improvement and fewer hours of maintenance.
He said the change allowed the team to redirect saved time toward improving the app. That is a more human account of efficiency than the word usually receives. Efficiency can mean an employee gets an afternoon back for a task that actually advances the product. The next puzzle, improvement or experiment has to be made by someone; software does not become more interesting simply because its advertisements earn more.
The milestones arrived in short sentences
On LinkedIn, Kostenetskyi often leaves the long announcement to the company and contributes a brief reaction. When Impulse passed 20 million installs in 2022, he called it another milestone for the team. At 50 million downloads in November 2023, his response was four words: “Wow! This is huge!” The accompanying announcement emphasized that the figure had been reached with one app on iOS.
That single-platform detail makes the next stage easier to understand. Fifty million downloads had been possible before Android joined the picture. Moving onto another operating system would extend the product’s availability and give the team another environment to develop and maintain. It would also test whether the audience for Impulse extended as readily beyond its original platform.
In August 2024, the Android announcement reported five million downloads in roughly three to four months. Kostenetskyi responded, “What a rapid speed!” There is something appealing about the scale mismatch: an executive reacting to several million installations with the conversational economy of someone pleased that the bus arrived early. The announcements are expansive; his additions are often small.
A global product keeps a local promise
The Android expansion also carried a decision about Ukraine. Impulse had opened free access to its iOS version for Ukrainian users after the full-scale invasion. In August 2024, the company extended free access to all Android features for users in Ukraine. Kostenetskyi explained the move as a continuation of support for Ukrainians.
For a business that had spent years working out how to monetize use, this was a concrete exception to the ordinary commercial arrangement. Geography changed the terms of access. The decision lived inside the product, where a Ukrainian user could encounter it directly, rather than only in a statement of sympathy.
The worldwide numbers and the local decision belong in the same portrait. Impulse’s audience had crossed borders, and Kostenetskyi’s stated ambition remained tied to building from Ukraine. In January 2024, he spoke of continuing to scale and create internationally competitive products from the country. The place was part of the plan, even as the market became much larger than the place.
More capital, the same daily decisions
In July 2025, Headway announced a Series A investment from Bullhound Capital. Kostenetskyi marked the event publicly, expressing pride in Impulse’s place within Headway and enthusiasm for continuing to build lifelong learning products. In January 2026, Endeavor Catalyst joined a further closing of that round. Both developments concerned the parent company and widened the financial context in which Impulse operates.
His reaction to the July investment brought the long arc into view: years of focused growth, followed by a new institutional partner. The app that received approval inside Genesis in 2018 now belonged to a multi-product business attracting outside capital. Its founder had worked across those stages while keeping responsibility for a product people could hold in one hand.
By then, the 100-million-download announcement had already been made. What remains striking about Kostenetskyi is how much of his public record concerns the work below that number: learning another discipline, testing a revenue model, freeing a team from maintenance, opening another platform. The former finance professional found a business in small games. Keeping it going has given him a rather larger puzzle.