S12 E24: Volodymyr & Vitalii Sydorenko, Gearheart - Part 1

This episode is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in their industry. And that's exactly what this show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. Listen to the Build with Michael Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts. One of our first projects we were building that was about pretty high volume of data processing and I made an architecture for that and we developed it and the first version that we did it didn't truly scale. I realized that I made this design essentially based on things like I read in books. And that was the moment I realized, okay, I cannot make guesses like that anymore. We're so focused on doing great work for our clients that we completely neglected building the business itself. No pipeline, no positioning, no structure on growth. When the market turned in 2022, we felt that immediately because there was nothing underneath us. My name is Volodymyr Sidoronko. And my name is Vitaly Sidorenko and we are running the team at Gearhart. This is Code Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting, nothing on the backhand. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. Company is its people. The teams help each other achieve. Most proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. Dry the ups and downs of the startup live. You need to really want it not just about technology. All this and more on Code Story. I'm your host Noel Labhart and today how Vitaly and Vladimir Sidoromko built the world's best AI powered product studio so you can build the best solution even at your early stage. Today's episode is brought to you by Tech Domains and this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect.com and found next to nothing. So I did what every founder does. Settled. Here's what I wish someone had told me. You're building a tech startup. Just get a tech domain. It instantly tells investors and customers what you're about. Don't overthink it. Secure your tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, Slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand so they make better plans, write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops. If you're running Claude, code, Cursor or any agentic workflow, Unblocked is worth a look. Learn more@getunblocked.com CodeStory this episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics and traces, but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help. Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data in real time before it's stored or analyzed. That means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools. To see how it works, get a demo@mezmo.com CodeStory that's mezmo.com CodeStory this episode is sponsored by Brain Grid. If you are building with AI coding tools but your features keep breaking, you need to check out Brain Grid. It is the product management agent for AI builders. Brain Grid turns messy ideas into clear specs, tasks and prompts that coding agents like Cursor and Claude can actually build the right way ship real software, not fragile prototypes. Start free at Brain Grid. Vladimir Sidoronko lives in London and collects mechanical keyboards. His most unusual hobby is that he does clay sculptures of characters or random people. At times he has two cats and likes to spend time outdoors. In fact, in three weeks time from this recording he will be traveling to Switzerland to do the Via Ferrata. To add to all of this, he has started to write children's books and hopes to publish them someday. Vitaly Sidoronko currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal. He is into sports and loves to hit the gym and regularly tracks his calories. Last year he started playing tennis and finds that he can't stop. He enjoys hiking, which is great in Lisbon and in the past he spent many years building startups, exiting and also in venture capital. You may have noticed that Vladimir and Vitaly have the same last name. That is because they are brothers. As kids growing up they did a lot of boxing together as well as clinging to classic films like Back to the Future. Fourteen years ago, Vladimir got interested in building solutions and realized he could only get so far by himself. So he decided to build A team to deliver these solutions. Two years ago, Vitaly and Vladimir started to consider all of the shifts in the SDLC and what that meant for the current business. Vitaly decided to bring his prior startup and VC experience and join the team. This is the creation story of Gearhart. Essentially, Gearhart is a product development studio and we are building enterprise SaaS products. We have 40 people on the team, all of us are Ukrainians and right now we're just scattered all over the world, but still all are Ukrainians and we have people in all time zones, I think. So the products that we usually build are about workflows, automation, data processing, stuff about working, which it's a bit funny because I got into development in the first place because I wanted to make games. I started playing games as a kid and then I learned development to do that. And it turns out I'm far better on making tools for efficient work than to do stuff for fun. So there are a couple projects we're particularly proud about. So there is SmartSuite and globally and SmartSuite. I hope it sounds familiar. It sounds familiar because it was featured on this podcast a few years ago. Also we are now launching a separate brand. It's called beyond the wow. It's an AI native MVP studio and we are helping early stage founders build their first products using AI. The way it all started, I was just doing freelancing work myself. I just did development and then I started assembling a team gradually. Just I realized that there's a bottleneck to what I can do myself. And I just started, okay, I'll need some more people. And it evolved naturally for a while. Then after some time, Vitaly joined me. When we actually had to grow up a little bit in terms of processes and what we're doing and what's our proposition. But essentially that's the way it started. I would say that 2022 year hit and the market shifted, AI arrived and before that, this market of software development and outsourced software development was growing really fast. And especially in Ukraine, we have lots of IT development companies before this year. That year it was really easy to grow and you didn't need much of specific value proposition or market focus or something like that. It was enough to just do the development work fine and customers were finding you. But after 2022, war started also market shifted, AI arrived and we had to ask ourselves a hard question. If building software keeps getting cheaper, what are we actually here for? And another thing that we still have this one of the biggest customer SmartSuite that Dimar mentioned. And for, I would say five years or so, the whole team was focused on building this product and didn't spend much time on business development. So all these things together, it was time to change. Before Gearhart, I built my startups before I founded two of them, exited one of them and worked in venture capital for a while. So I was like this business development and product person. And Vladimir invited me to Gearheart to help to build business and to make this shift to come up with something, okay, what now we do with AI and how it will change our work. After that we realized that the value we can bring is not just writing code, it is knowing what's worth building. Because we built more than 80 different projects so far. And me personally have my experience of building my own companies before we realized that we can help founders not only to build, but also to validate and to save money by doing right choices at the beginning so that poor execution is a commodity and product judgment isn't. So that's what we started to do. That's really what led us to where we are now, where we have Gear cards for complex enterprise work and the new brand yonder. Wow. For founders who want to build their first products with AI. Same team, same standards, but two different journeys. So I'm curious about what you would consider the catalyst for Gearhart and this was probably for Vladimir. As you started the company, tell me about how bit it started and what would you consider the quote unquote MVP of Gearhart? What sort of tools or methodologies were you using to bring it to life as you really formed the company? As I told, I started learning programming to make games back in my school years and then my early twenties. I made two more or less serious attempts to run my own projects. One of them was game and another one was just a web application. I quit my job and I worked on one thing for a while, then another thing for a while. And so with both of them, I made the most common mistake I think founders make like technical founders make, is that they build it first. And then I realized that nobody is buying it unless they sell it actually. So I had the product running and I tried selling it. There was some very limited success, but eventually didn't take off. And then I went to do some freelancing work again and then I built another product with the same exact story, by the way, as if I didn't learn any lessons from the first one, like at first build something because this time it's a great idea, everybody will love it. I Won't have to sell anything. And it turns out I still have to make calls, make meetings and do sales. And I realized just I hate it. I hate it so much and I'm not very good at it. And so I thought, okay, let's maybe then I should really focus on building stuff. Because I think after all of those months of building these products, I got pretty good at that. And I already was working professional developer before that for a while. Essentially those two products, I made the first landing page of Gearheart. I put those, my failed startups, as my portfolio. Like this is what I've built. And I started looking for clients. And my idea was that, okay, I want to work with my clients as sort of partners. Like I expect of them to be experts in their domain. I expect of them to know how to sell and I'm willing to bring the technical expertise and be a technical partner for them. Found my first clients essentially through network and upwork. By the way, back then it was called odesk. I'm not sure how many people remember those times in terms of methodologies, I'm not sure if it was the best way, but that was the way I did it that I just really wanted to focus on building stuff and I really didn't want to learn about how to actually run business. And I think leftovers of that ethos and that approach are still life in the company to this day in a way that we really focus on making products as good as we can and technical expertise as good as we can. And then the rest of it, we're just trying to make it as simple as possible with very little bureaucracy and very little barriers between developers and the team in general and the customers and clients. For a while I was just trying to, okay, we will find smart people, we will build cool stuff, and if people are smart enough and good enough, they will figure it out. And so we started working like that. And it worked for so long without even kind of official hierarchy or very well defined processes. I guess MVP was okay. Me and two failed startups as portfolio. That's how it started. And then I started hiring some people. This episode is sponsored by Brain Grid. Building with AI coding tools is exciting until the moment things start breaking. You ask for a small change and suddenly three other features stop working. AI gets confused, Mrs. Edge cases and loses track of your intent. The problem is not code generation, the problem is planning. That is why Brain Grid exists. Braingrid acts as your product management agent. It writes clear specification maps, UX flows, asks the clarifying questions. You forgot to ask and breaks big ideas into engineering grade tasks that AI coding tools can build reliably. It guides Cursor, Claude, Code Replit, Winsurf and others so they deliver features that work and keep working. Founders use BrainGrid to build real AI native SaaS products without a technical background. If you want reliable features instead of fragile prototypes, try braingrid for free at braingrid AI that's Brain Grid AI Today's episode is brought to you by Tech Domains, and this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, when I was building my own tech startup, I went on the hunt for that elusive dot com. Looked high, looked low, and guess what I found? Nothing. What I did find cost me an arm and a leg. So I did what every founder does under pressure. Threw in extra letters, settled for the less than optimal name, and here's what I wish someone had said to me back then. Noah, you're building a tech startup. Just get a tech domain. Techstartup techdomain it could not be more obvious. It tells investors, customers, and anyone who looks at your website, really, that tech is at the core of your build. And I've kicked myself plenty since, especially when I see the clean and sharp names. Tech companies have landed on Tech Nothing Tech 1X Tech, Aurora Tech CES Tech Ultra Tech, Alice Tech Neon Tech, Blaze Tech PI Tech. You get the idea, so take it from someone who learned it the hard way. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it. Secure your tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by Mezmo. If you're responsible for reliability, performance, or platform architecture, you already know the problem. Telemetry volume is growing faster than teams can manage it. Mesmo addresses this by moving observability upstream. Instead of storing everything and asking questions later. Mesmo processes telemetry in motion filtering, transforming and enriching logs, metrics and traces before they reach your observability backend. The result is cleaner data, reduced ingestion costs, and faster root cause analysis. Using the tools you already rely on, Mesmo integrates with platforms like Datadog, Dynatrace, and open source stacks, giving teams more control without adding operational overhead. This is especially useful for platform engineers and SREs supporting complex distributed systems where context and speed matter. To see how active telemetry works in practice, get a demo@mezmo.com CodeStory that's mezmo.com CodeStory this episode is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind. Sincera Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in the industry. And that's exactly what this show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds at Magnite, Chalice, Doubleclick, and Liveramp to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. This show is for you if you've had some of these breakthrough moments yourself, or if you're seeking inspiration for the next one. Listen to the Build with Mike o' Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Your coding agents have access to your code base. Maybe you even connected other tools via mcps. But access doesn't mean context. Agents can't reason across mcps. They don't know your architectural decisions, your team's patterns, or why the API was shaped the way it is. So agents look in the wrong place and deliver bad outputs. Then you spend time correcting more loops, more tokens. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, Slack and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand so they make better plans, write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops. If you're running Claude, code, cursor or any agentic workflow, Unblocked is worth a look. Learn more@getunblocked.com Codestory from that point, Gearhart is formed, you're having success and you're providing your customers their world class solutions. And then let's say Vitaly is joining, right? And you're noticing all these things about the software development process. How have you progressed and matured Earhart Again, I kind of liken that to product life cycle. How do you go about deciding what is the next most important thing to build or to address or create with Gearhart? So in terms of building Earhart as business, I am not as good businessman as Vitaly, that's for sure. And most of my business decisions were pretty much reactive. Okay, like how? Let's figure out this bottleneck so that we could get back to development. So I think there were a few decisions that shaped Gearhart. I think the interesting part was we worked remotely from the beginning and actually the main reason I just didn't want to spend time managing a real office and I was like why do I need it? So we just started working remotely and that was 2012. It wasn't as popular as these days. Back then it was pretty unusual, especially in Ukraine. But that Turned out to be a nice filter for people because it attracts specific types of people who are self organized, they don't like and don't need a lot of management. And also with remote work, if somebody cannot get themselves together to actually do what they sign up for, that's also very visible very quickly. That part I think it allowed me to build a really reliable team from early on. And so that's what one thing, another thing is I really wanted to keep company small. That was not the goal specifically, but I had the limits that we are not growing past specific limits. And it just, I was afraid that if I were to build a company of 100 even people or 200 people or something like that, then my day to day work would not be building products anymore. It would be running business. I will have clients that I don't know personally and I will have team members that I don't even know at all. So I really wanted to keep company small and focus more on how do we build more interesting projects. Essentially how do we find more interesting projects to work on. Then one of the events that happened that really gave a boost to our progress was work on SmartSuite. It's a really flexible and complicated no code platform. And like we've built a lot of products for different domains before. Like we built a tool like to manage photo studios or to manage medical lab with its specific workflows and stuff and other things like that. But all of them were for specific domain, for specific company, specific direction, stuff like that. And it's smartsuite idea that it has to be flexible enough that it should cover all of those use cases. We can replace entire category of applications. And so working on it, it brought our understanding of all of these workflows and the processes in business and the technical part of it to the next level. It was really interesting and challenging and also it's just larger than what we built before. So it was the largest team that we had working on a single project. That also led to some changes on how we organize work. Then I started burning out a little bit because all of these things that I was hoping again that if we're staying small that they won't have to think about how do we build business properly and how do we build workflows properly inside of our team. We'll just figure it out. It turned out that even with 40 people, when we have multiple parallel projects, it doesn't easily work that way. And it seems that even if I want to have a team of just 40 people, it's better to build business to support a team of 80 people and then just choose to set 40. But when I started realizing that, okay, I need to change something, I knew that first of all, I don't know how. But another thing is, I don't really want to do that. I'm still a technical person. And around the time, essentially I invited Vitaly to join us and help me with all of the following changes. Now, we separated two different directions, so we keep gear cards for complex enterprise grade solutions that you definitely can't automate somehow. But in the same time, we still want to work. We still work with founders who has domain expertise, but don't have product expertise and never built products before. That's why we created this brand beyond the wow. By the way, I didn't explain the name. Now, when you build something with AI, anything actually if you do anything with AI, you have this WOW moment really fast. So you just put some prompts. First prompt, you get first result and you're like, wow, I did it like in 10 seconds. Now what I can do if I spend, I don't know, day for that. But here is the catch that after this first wow, you may spend a lot of time to tweak this last 10%. And sometimes it takes so much time you start a bit nervous about it. So that's why we call this brand beyond the wow, because we help founders to go beyond the wow building products with AI and we started to build our processes around it to deliver MVPs. Sales ready MVPs, like in two weeks. If we're talking about prototypes, it's a couple of hours. That's what we are doing now in terms of beyond the wall. Another thing that I realized doing it, that actually sometimes surprised me. I always assumed that people in tech were naturally curious about new stuff. I always thought that if the person is a developer, when something new comes up first people to catch it is technical people. But when AI came out, even really strong developers, we didn't automatically pick this up and we faced with, okay, how can we change that inside of our team? And how can we engage great people who embrace this new technology and also build processes around that? What is the process you go through to identify that someone's the right person to come work at your Gearhart, Right? How do you build that team? And I'm curious about what you look for in those people specifically to indicate that they are the waiting horses to join you. In general, we are trying to minimize the distance between the clients and the customer and the team. Right? And we build processes around this. So we have a developers talk to the client to figure out requirements of the features. We let our QAs and our developers to give demos to the client. And we are just trying to always organize this. A lot of communication there that's more than necessary, but without any artificial barriers there. And it also this part always what was driving me most, not just programming thing, but then see how people actually use it. One thing I'm looking for with technical team is I'm looking for people to be interested in that and how the product works and how people, people are using that. Not only the technical part of how fun it is to build it, even though it's really fun to build stuff. So that's one thing. And I try to find people who are not afraid of talking to clients and customers who are actually interested in that. And it's so much fun also that some people do really hate it with their guts. They won't talk to anybody, they just want to program stuff. And others they really yearn for. Okay, give me some people to talk to. I want to see how this is used in the world. Wild. So that's, that's one thing, I'm just looking for people who are embracing this approach and actually like this. Another part is just people have to be nice and pleasant to work with. And I can, it might sound funny, but I cannot understate this. So we, a few times we tried hiring people who are like extremely competent in what they do, but a bit hard to talk to or something like that. And it never worked. And so at some point I realized, okay, so that have to be one of the focuses like official criteria that we are paying attention to. And I really like how that works because when I ask clients about, okay, so how do you like working with the team? Is there anything to improve and whatnot. They constantly tell that, okay, so the team is really pleasant to work with. I can really like how they communicate and how friendly they are. So there's that. And in terms of developers specifically, I prefer working with full stack developers. And I try to check always that they have all the fundamental principles right and they're not afraid of learning new tools, switching language and stuff like this. So I understand that eventually everybody has their preferences. Somebody tends to work more on the back end, somebody likes databases more. So there are preferences. That's obviously everybody has them. But I think it's really important to, to not be afraid to learn new stuff, to pick a tool for the job. And the best developers I worked with, they're never afraid. If a task requires, like for example, they spent years writing Python and the new project requires Go, for example, it's not an issue for them because they have the fundamentals, they have the right mindset. It's easy and it's interesting for them to switch and learn new things. And eventually this experience working with different frameworks and languages, it makes everybody like a better developer. So I think those are the most important things I'm looking for. Oh, wow. And another one is ownership. I try to verify if people like doing that, take ownership of what they're doing. And it's also so interesting, like how different people are. Some just want to make their parts and be like in the middle of a pipeline and then there's some other people who just really want to be in charge of something. And I really like those guys and girls that they want to take a feature, they want to figure out how it works, they want to build it and then they want to take credit for this. That's the best, I think, approach to building these things, this kind of team. They're really self organized, self motivated, they're not afraid to ask questions. They will figure it out. You just give it to them and they'll figure it out. And if all of a sudden it requires some additional bit of even design work, they will do it. They will figure it out and do it because they are interested in building the end feature, the end product and presenting it to the client and show that this is what I've done. The only thing I wanted to add is looking for people with this early adopters mindset because we work with startups, we work with founders and it's super important for people to naturally embrace something new because it is something we are guiding finding our customers for, right when building new stuff. And of course it depends on the position, but of course we're talking about developers or product managers, product leads. We are trying to find people who tried to build their startups before. Even like any tries are fine. It just shows that people are naturally curious about it. It's just an experience that helps a lot in our work, in our work to work with our customers and to help them to make right moves based on our mistakes we did with our previous startups. We hope you've enjoyed part one of this creation story of Gearhart with Vladimir and Vitaly. Stay tuned for part two. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Lampart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast Podcast, Spotify or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously, and thanks again for listening. This episode is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Mike o' Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in the industry, and that's exactly what this show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds at Magnite, Chalice, Doubleclick, and Liveramp to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. This show is for you. If you've had some of these breakthrough moments yourself, or if you're seeking inspiration for the next one, listen to the Build with Michael Sullivan. Wherever you get your podcasts.