Cases

Four things I built, each in the same shape: what the problem was, what I did, what came out of it. The numbers are from my own work; where a number is a single building or a single period, I say so.

1. A management company residents could check (Liga, 2012–2021)

Problem. Residents pay into an account they never see, so they assume the worst, delay payments and refuse improvements.

What I did. Started a residential management company with one rule: the people who live here are the client. Every building got its own bank account; from 2014 residents could see the building's income and expenses live, with the counterparty and the purpose of each payment. Requests were handled by a concierge office, not a dispatch desk; the in-house CRM became the seed of doma.ai.

Result. The company grew to about 20,000 residents at its peak. I sold it in 2021.

2. Software for management companies at national scale (doma.ai)

Problem. Most management companies run on spreadsheets, paper requests and a phone; a resident app on top of that changes nothing.

What I did. Turned the CRM we built for our own buildings into a platform for other management companies: billing, requests, resident communication and an open-source core so clients are not locked in.

Result. At the time of my exit in December 2025, doma.ai was used by 10,000 management companies across more than 5 million apartments.

3. Collections in a new residential tower (Unitify at Ande Tower, Batumi)

Problem. In a new building residents could not see clearly what they were charged for, and paying took effort. Collections were around 40%.

What I did. Moved the building to Unitify: clear charges per apartment, payment in the app, news and requests in one place.

Result. Collections rose from 40% to 80% over six months. Unitify is also live at Avant Park in Azerbaijan, and in February 2026 we agreed with Paynet to develop digital services for residential buildings in Uzbekistan together.

4. A coffee shop that did not become a chain (Papa Carlo, Ekaterinburg)

Problem. One good specialty coffee shop, opened in 2015; the obvious next step looked like a chain.

What I did. As investor and co-owner, grew it to four locations — then closed, sold or reworked three of them, and later ran a closed experiment that let guests buy a small share of the shop.

Result. One shop, still open, one of the oldest surviving specialty coffee shops in the city. The lesson I took: running one coffee shop and running a chain are different skills, and you cannot scale something that is not working.

What these cases have in common

Make the money visible, remove the trip, do the boring operations well — and only then scale. If you are working on something similar, write to [email protected]; who I am glad to talk to is on the Introductions page.