From large corporate to a start-up
Have you considered starting your own start-up but don't know how to get started? This is session is for you.
Vladimir is an Executive Coach for Founders and Technical Leaders. He coached and mentored at various U.S. and U.K. incubators and accelerators, with a primary focus on launching, developing, and sustaining startups. Vladimir champions innovation, particularly in transforming ideas into tangible businesses (zero-to-one approach). He also focuses on integration of frequently misaligned perspectives of business and technical challenges.
He's a serial entrepreneur, having founded three companies with successful exits in fintech and spacetech, demonstrating proficiency in scaling businesses through various funding stages. His entrepreneurial journey, encompassing roles such as Founder, CTO, COO, and CISO, lends him a comprehensive perspective on creating optimal data and technology services.
Vladimir holds MBAs from Columbia and London Business Schools and dual degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Stony Brook University, where his studies spanned software development and robotics. He is passionate about enhancing communication strategies, studies organizational and social behavior, and is an avid reader.
There’s no perfect playbook for turning creativity into a business. It’s really just a mix of instinct, strategy, and a lot of trial and error. In this session, I’ll share my messy, unpredictable journey of taking the leap, from marketing your personal brand to juggling life while running a solo creative business. Whether you’re on the edge or already mid-air, let’s navigate the uncertainty together.
Join me as I share my transformative journey with ADPList, showcasing how the platform enabled me to build a thriving coaching practice that transcends geographical boundaries. I'll detail my evolution from a traditional career path to becoming a location-independent solopreneur, highlighting how consistent personal branding and strategic side-hustle development led to a 5x return within two years.
Key takeaways:
- How to leverage digital platforms to democratize coaching access globally
- Building a personal brand while maintaining a full-time role
- Creating implicit revenue streams through coaching
- Strategies for scaling your impact across time zones
- The power of consistency in building a sustainable coaching practice
My company Path Unbound, a boutique UI/UX design school, is a challenger brand in a saturated market with many big named schools. We experienced a long slump in revenue in the first couple of years in business because we couldn’t find our product positioning. We offered products similar to our big competitors and tried to beat them with lower price only to have the opposite effect. People start doubting if we are bad because we were so much cheaper.
Last year, we discovered the magic formula to growth for us as a small challenger brand without big budget for advertising. We started to repackage our big product offerings into smaller ones that are ultra flexible serving mini segments of user personas. We started to see results within weeks of launching our new offerings, attracting more customers than we’ve ever have. In this talk, I’ll how we structured our product offerings according to customer personas and how other small businesses that are challenger brands to big competitors can thrive doing the same.
