Illusions are what kill a business: lessons from 1,000 startups
No Bullsh!t, August 20, 2025, 135 min, 1,999 views. Sergey Kuznetsov talks with Ilya Krasinsky, founder of an analytics company and a founder camp, who has worked with more than a thousand startups and businesses over the years through an accelerator and consulting.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 135 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,999 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
Ilya explains how a traction map and a customer segmentation framework grew out of first principles and the theory of constraints, why the overwhelming majority of companies measure conversion and analytics incorrectly, and how a single measurement error can cost a business hundreds of millions. A large part of the conversation is about personal failures: a launch that looked like a failure at the time and turned into a top position in the app store, and the hard experience of building an analytics product where underestimating data quality cost years. Ilya speaks openly about clinical depression and an anxiety disorder.
Key ideas
- Nine out of ten hypotheses in business do not work, because the team's picture of the world and the real world are slightly different, and almost nobody measures the key metrics accurately enough.
- Conversion cannot be raised like a throttle: you can only reduce the number of people who did not buy, by finding and removing the specific demotivators at each step of the funnel.
- Analytics in most companies lies systematically: the classic way of attributing acquisition channels carries a 20 to 40 percent error, and end-to-end recording of leads in the customer system loses part of the data.
- The zone of multiple growth for a business sits in the zone of the team's least competence, and you can only see it by going through many cases and reflecting on them.
- It is better to try with your hands and fail fast than to plan at length in your head, especially with new tools: whoever wants to think it all through first loses the time.
- Never hire more than two managers at once, and part faster with people who cannot carry their area: one weak manager slows the whole team down.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript