From coffee capsules to an AI agency in the US: the path of an international entrepreneur
No Bullsh!t, June 4, 2025, 75 min, 1,218 views. The guest is Grigory Shevchenko, founder and CEO of a marketing agency, who has lived and worked from the United Arab Emirates for the last three years with clients in the United States, Europe, the Emirates and Russia.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 75 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,218 |
| 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
He has more than ten years in business and several companies and crises behind him. The conversation starts with three key failures: the move from employment into entrepreneurship, a coffee capsule business under his own brand where the market turned out to be too small for profitability, and a business-to-business niche selling equipment through marketplaces that collapsed with the pandemic, grew into a marketing agency and then fell again. From there Grigory explains how the company diversified and how speech analytics and AI changed the work.
Key ideas
- Size the market before entering it: competitor shares tend to line up around 40, 20, 10, 5, 2 and 1 percent, so even sixth place in a small market may not be worth the effort.
- A business without a financial cushion is fragile to external shocks: agency revenue fell fourfold and without a reserve people had to be let go.
- For companies with revenue between two and fifteen million dollars a year an external contractor is usually cheaper than building an in-house marketing team.
- Selling directly to a founder is simpler than corporate sales: one person decides with clear motivation, though the financial discipline of the client is weaker.
- For small and mid-sized business the best way to optimise paid advertising is not to build your own machine learning, which usually lacks data and budget, but to work with what the platforms give.
- Speech analytics of calls, transcription plus analytical prompts and checklists, pulls weaker sellers up to the level of the strong ones and surfaces what is actually said.
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