From startup to $10M ARR: the honest story of Affise with Dmitry Zotov
No Bullsh!t, June 18, 2025, 80 min, 2,929 views. The guest is Dmitry Zotov, founder and chief technology officer of a performance and affiliate marketing platform he has been building since 2016.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 80 min |
| Views on YouTube | 2,929 |
| 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
The company grew to the scale of processing more than a trillion clicks a month and has spent the last year developing its own mobile attribution product as an alternative to the established players. The conversation opens with two painful failures: a botched infrastructure migration caused by a hiring mistake, and a first unsuccessful attempt to raise institutional money in Silicon Valley. Dmitry then explains how his management style changed as the team grew from 50 to 150 people, why company culture has to be practised daily rather than declared on paper, and how AI changed development and the speed of shipping features. A separate block covers going to market with no budget.
Key ideas
- A bad hire in a critical role, for instance on an infrastructure migration, can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars and weeks of emergency work by the team.
- Company culture is real only when it is practised daily through habits of communication and priorities, not when it is described on a website or in a knowledge base.
- Soft skills, the ability to make a point and reach agreement, now matter more than hard skills in development, because much of the code writing is done by AI.
- AI does not remove development entirely, it removes the simple tasks: juniors without AI tools will have a harder time, seniors who use models for generation and review go faster.
- Going to market without a budget rests on conferences, stands and partner sales: it takes six months to a year of consistent presence before a large company notices you.
- In fundraising investors now demand sustainable growth rather than growth at any cost: a sane burn rate, profitability or break-even, and the basic recurring revenue metrics.
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