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Build Skills That Pay
Vitalii Dodonov grew up outside Moscow and started working at 13, packing parachutes at his father's skydiving club. By the time he left for university, he had packed around 20,000 parachutes and made about 800 jumps himself. At 17 he moved to Canada alone on a loan from his dad and studied chemical engineering at the University of Alberta, teaching himself programming along the way to automate a research process in a professor's lab.
After graduating he worked in data science at Deloitte, then became a senior software engineer at eBay, building side projects on nights and weekends to keep his technical skills sharp. In 2021, a customer introduced him to John Hu, who was looking for a technical cofounder for a company he had started out of his dorm room a few months earlier. John had left private equity to become a content creator, and through that experience ran into a problem firsthand: making content had never been easier, but making money from it was still genuinely hard.
Vitalii left the corporate path to cofound Stan with John. He brought the systems thinking and technical foundation. John brought the customer understanding and go to market instincts. Between the two of them, they had what they needed
Today the company focuses on helping Creator Entrepreneurs and founders build sustainable businesses for themselves. That means Stanley, an AI Head of Content that drafts posts autonomously in a creator's own voice, and Stan Store, an all in one hub for selling digital products, coaching, and community programs.
They crossed $3M in ARR about a year and a half in. The next year they hit $10M. The year after that, they passed $30M with fewer than 30 people on the team. Today the company is at $40M ARR.
Here is how a corporate engineer and a former private equity associate built that, and what it taught them about listening closely enough to your own users.
Building on English, Not a Fixed Language
Vitalii jokes that their primary coding language is now English, thanks to AI. Beyond that, the team uses current, relevant technologies rather than committing to a single stack out of habit: a lot of TypeScript and Python, with Cloudflare recently becoming a core part of the infrastructure.
Stanley's pricing is dynamic and service driven. As a user's scope of work grows or changes across channels, pricing adjusts with it, and users can renegotiate with Stanley directly at any time. The pricing model reflects the same philosophy that runs through the rest of the company: stay responsive to what is actually happening rather than locking into a rigid structure.
The Customer Who Was Also the Founder
The early team was just John, Vitalii, and their first founding engineer. They launched Stan Store, an online storefront letting creators sell digital products, courses, and other offerings.
John would message creators directly, persuade them to try the product for free, and gather their feedback. Vitalii would take that feedback and ship improvements almost immediately, sometimes within hours of hearing it. When early users liked what they saw, they told their own audiences, and the team built in public on TikTok and other platforms alongside that word of mouth.
The product found traction quickly because John was the customer. He understood the pain point in a way market research alone could never have surfaced. That firsthand understanding is a large part of why the early growth curve was as steep as it was.
Vitalii is genuinely proud that the company crossed $30M in ARR with fewer than 30 people on the team, because hiring exceptional people was a priority from day one. In his assessment, nearly everything of value he has done in his career has come from working alongside great people.
A Wedding, Then a 14 Day Sprint in London
Since those early days, the company has grown largely by building in public and sharing the process as it happens, not after the fact. One story captures that approach clearly. Vitalii's cofounder had just officiated his wedding. The very next day, the two of them flew to London, booked a flat, and gave themselves 14 days with no distractions to ship something new. They documented and shared the entire process as they went, the wins and the dead ends both, instead of waiting to announce a finished product.
By the end of those 14 days, they had shipped a fully functional AI content tool for LinkedIn, launching to 250 paying customers on day one. Much of that early traction came directly from people who had followed the build in real time and were ready the moment it shipped.
The reasoning behind building this way is tied to the pace of the creator economy itself. Trends and creator needs shift constantly, and shipping fast while sharing openly means the team learns from real usage and real pain points instead of guessing. That feedback loop is one of the company's biggest advantages over competitors running longer, more closed off planning cycles.
Vitalii's advice on this point is direct: do not wait until something is perfect to start talking about it. Share the process, not just the outcome. By the time you actually launch, you already have people who feel like they built it alongside you.
Solving the Wrong Problem, Really Well
The team's advice on growth centers on continuing to listen closely to customers even after finding something that works. The next source of revenue often sits inside a pain point your existing customers already have. You just have to pay close enough attention to actually find it.
As Stan Store scaled, they noticed a large share of users were not making as much money as expected from the storefront tool. The real barrier turned out to be simpler than any feature gap: many of those users simply did not have a large enough audience to sell to in the first place. The company had been solving the wrong problem for a significant portion of its user base.
So they built something new. Stanley, the AI Head of Content, launched to help creators and founders grow their following directly. It connects to a user's social accounts, learns their voice, studies what performs within their specific niche, and generates tailored content from there. Early traction confirmed the suspicion behind it. Creators did not need another generic writing tool. They needed something personalized to their own voice and audience.
That experience taught Vitalii that the biggest threat to growth is not always competition or execution. Sometimes it is building the wrong thing really well. You have to keep listening closely enough to your users to catch that before it quietly becomes a ceiling on the whole business.
Fewer Than 50 People at $40M ARR
The company's biggest structural advantage has been talent density. Hiring only the top 1 percent of people, individuals who treat their work as part of their identity and take real pride in their output, consistently outperforms teams five or ten times the size. That has been a stated priority from day one.
Many companies lose speed as they scale because they add process to manage growing headcount. Stan has avoided that by staying small and dense on purpose. There are no approval chains. There is no habit of scheduling meetings for their own sake. The team ships fast, puts things in front of real users, and adjusts based on what it sees.
With AI in the mix, a small, genuinely exceptional team with the right tools can move in ways that simply were not possible even a couple of years ago. That is a real part of why the company has stayed under 50 people at $40M ARR. The point is not doing more with less. It is doing more because the team legitimately needs fewer people to get there.
Vitalii credits the book No Rules Rules, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, as a real influence on how the company operates. He remembers reading it at a coffee shop in Toronto back when it was just him and John building the company, and calling John midway through to say Netflix had figured something out worth adopting. The company's culture was built directly on those ideas: radical candor, leading with context rather than control, real feedback, and hiring the top 1 percent and paying accordingly. About a year ago, Vitalii spent time with Jessica Neal, Netflix's former Chief Talent Officer, who helped build that exact culture, and learning from her directly felt like a full circle moment..
What Skydiving Taught Him About Fear
Skydiving changed Vitalii's relationship with fear early on. You learn fast that the fear at the door of a plane is not a signal that something is wrong. It is simply the default reaction to the unknown. Once you have jumped enough times, you learn to separate that feeling from the actual risk in front of you.
That lesson translates directly into running a startup. You are constantly making calls without full information, and the fear shows up every time regardless. Vitalii has stopped treating that fear as data. Instead he asks what the real risk actually is, and if it is worth taking, he takes it.
"The fear at the door of a plane is not a sign that something is wrong. It is your default reaction to the unknown."
Side Projects Are the Real Resume
Vitalii's core advice is to start building as early as possible, share it publicly, and stop waiting for permission or perfect conditions.
He points to his own experience as proof. He pulled up Vhinny, a financial data aggregator he had built himself, during his interview at eBay and gave the interviewers a full demo. That is what got him the job, not his resume or his credentials. It was the thing he had actually built on his own time, entirely unprompted.
What Comes Next
Vitalii sees an opportunity to bring more people online, believing that more people will choose to work for themselves rather than pursue traditional employment. He sees Stan as the company positioned to make that happen. The goal is a category defining product that lowers the barriers to living life on your own terms, by making it easier for people to build an online identity and business. He expects that, eventually, every person creating content online will use Stanley.
It has been five years now. The company has grown to 50 people and helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs make half a billion dollars online in total.
Vitalii believes that in the future, all work will become optional. Working with thousands of entrepreneurs, he has seen that their biggest challenge is rarely the work itself. It is getting attention for it. Building a personal brand has effectively become a full time job on its own, pulling people away from the actual building. He would like to see a world where entrepreneurs spend all of their time building and none of it chasing attention, and that is what the company is working toward now.
