An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and to learn from them. When you are starting out, experiments can be scary. What if it fails? Well, it can. But you’ll learn as much from it as you would from a successful attempt.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stanislav Levykin, CEO and Founder at Muver.

Before founding Muver, he was the owner of a marketing company, a taxi service, and a notary startup. Muver began as a side project for his taxi service, and soon he saw this technology’s potential in becoming useful for all drivers. Muver enables them to use multiple gig driver apps simultaneously to pick the rides and deliveries that suit them best.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

​​Growing up, I lived in a small town in Siberia, close to the great Lake Baikal. My father took me fishing and hunting in the deep taiga from the age of five. I started my first business at the age of nine. It was selling balloon figures. I’d buy long balloons with my pocket money, twist them into some shapes and sell them at the town square. In high school, I made money repairing computers, installing and updating software.

At 17, I moved to Moscow to study law at Moscow Finance and Law Academy. I thought that this would be the most useful degree for my future career as an entrepreneur.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Keep trying and don’t give up. I believe that this simple truth is the basis for achieving any goal in any field. You can learn to do things yourself or find people who can help you… But it would be impossible to move forward and enjoy the rewards of your labor without following this motto. I follow this principle every day of my life, as there are daily complications and new problems to solve.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Unfortunately, I don’t read a lot of books. But I enjoy watching interviews with successful entrepreneurs and am often inspired by their stories and unconventional approaches to solving problems. I find it interesting to try and understand their thinking. The ones that have affected me the most are the interviews with the Russian-Israeli entrepreneur, venture investor and physicist Yuri Milner.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

Most of the time, an idea means nothing, it’s the implementation that counts. Keep trying and don’t give up. In my experience, the Lean Startup methodology works best as the first step. It’s the easiest way to understand the viability of your idea while you take simple, quick steps with little resources required. It helps you to understand in general whether your idea is something the market needs. And if it is, that’s a great positive reinforcement. You can use different methods of testing your ideas after that. There are many ways: from in-depth interviews and analytical studies to launching an advertising campaign on a non-existent “dummy” product, measuring the engagement and interest of potential target audiences.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Without a doubt, you must pay attention to the potential competitive environment. If you are not confident in your abilities, you probably shouldn’t compete in the same market as the large corporations (although that shouldn’t be the rule of thumb). Research into your competitors and analysis of your findings is one of the first steps you need to take when you plan to start a business. Especially since it’s extremely easy to do these days as literally everything is online. Keep in mind that coming up with something and creating a product are very different from launching a business around it. If there is an interesting market or a problem that hasn’t been solved yet — go for it! What’s important is to do more, make mistakes, and learn from the process rather than to watch someone else take action.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

First of all, if you don’t have a truly ingenious invention that will change the world, then you definitely shouldn’t waste your energy on either patenting or finding a good manufacturer and seller. In the context of startups, the first thing to do is find out whether someone needs your product, how many people could be interested, whether they can pay for the product with money or their attention (social media), how you plan to inform potential customers that the product exists, and how much the product will cost. With simple actions that consume the minimum of resources you can answer these questions and those answers will do much more for your future business than finding the best manufacturers for a product no one wants. Your next step should be the creation of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Once you have that, you can begin approaching potential customers and / or raise initial funds to further develop and expand your business.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

The first one is that you’ll always be working: 24/7, even when you sleep. There’s a common misconception that once you reach the top and become the “boss,” you’ll have more free time on your hands. On the contrary, the number of obligations and the workload only increase once you have your own company.

Second, is that you’ll need to learn to delegate. If you don’t, the workload becomes overwhelming and 24 hours is simply not enough.

Third, you need to learn to plan and handle company finances. You’re the person who makes the primary decisions on allocation of funds within the company (eg. spending more on marketing vs. increasing sales budget). These need to be informed decisions. Don’t be afraid to experiment though, just don’t put all of the money in one option.

Fourth, when picking your team, a person’s vibe is as important as their hard skills. It’s extremely important that you pick like-minded people.

Fifth, don’t be afraid to make mistakes and to learn from them. When you are starting out, experiments can be scary. What if it fails? Well, it can. But you’ll learn as much from it as you would from a successful attempt.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

You should first determine if there is a need for your product. If there is, create an MVP to bring the project to life. Have a group of testers and then do in-depth interviews about their experience using your product. There is a wonderful book on this subject called The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Then, build a team of like-minded people, and develop your idea. With the team’s growth, the business will grow.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

​​My opinion is that this should only be done by yourself, as there is a high probability of having unrealistic expectations.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

It all depends on the type of business. For startups, venture capital is an instrument to test the idea quickly, find your market, segment the audience, and scale aggressively. If your business is set for early profit generation and dividend payments to shareholders, then bootstrapping should fit you the best. In today’s world, however, everything is so jumbled, that you might have a bakery raise venture capital and startups take on bank loans that most likely would never be repaid.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

In my opinion, you should start with yourself and your surroundings: your home, family, friends, etc. On the other hand, of course, as founders of Muver we are extremely pleased to help thousands of US people earn more and become more comfortable financially.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Again, I believe that the change comes from within. When you change yourself, focus on being nicer, doing good things for others, people around you will feel that and reflect it on their surroundings and so on. It creates a domino effect that could potentially bring the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I would love to meet the founder of Y Combinator Paul Graham, Tony Xu from Doordash, and Travis Kalanick from Uber.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

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Making Something From Nothing: Stanislav Levykin Of Muver On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.