MyCity

Stepa Mitaki was working in digital advertising for major brands when he lost faith in the industry's ability to create meaningful products. In 2012, he met co-founder Dennis and they began tinkering with ideas to improve their city through technology. They created MyMurmansk, a simple website where citizens could post ideas for urban improvements. In the first 48 hours, they collected almost 200 ideas. Within weeks, requests poured in from other cities wanting the same platform. That's when they decided to turn it into a commercial product: MyCity.

Dennis built the prototype for MyMurmansk in just two nights (after the initial idea sat dormant for nine months because the three-person team was busy with day jobs). The speed was remarkable—Stepa immediately prepared a press release, and they launched two days later. The product was elegant: a map-based interface where citizens could suggest improvements. But when they transformed this community movement into a commercial SaaS platform for local governments, they didn't know anything about selling to government. They made their first major strategic mistake: assuming they could build demand bottom-up by letting citizens create free sites that would pressure governments to adopt the premium paid version. "That didn't work at all," Stepa recalls. "It might have worked in the private sector but not in government."

What actually worked was old-fashioned direct sales. At a conference, Stepa met a woman from the urban planning department in Tromsø, Norway. Their product was precisely what she needed. After several months of conversations, they launched their first version with Tromsø—their first paying customer. Over time, they made three one-time sales totaling between €20,000–€30,000. The team (which peaked at five people) worked mostly for free, keeping costs low by only paying for hosting, maintenance, and travel for sales pitches.

They couldn't scale, and early on, they didn't even know how to approach growth. A major turning point came during an interview with a US accelerator. When asked "How do you measure success for your clients?" Stepa was stunned—they'd never thought about it. They were selling a platform without defining what success looked like for their customers. Even worse, they didn't do serious customer research. They relied heavily on instinct, which worked for building the citizen-facing features but failed for the government side. The fundamental problem, Stepa later realized, was that municipalities had no existing process for handling citizen feedback on new ideas. They had processes for reporting problems (potholes, drainage), but not for soliciting and managing creative suggestions. "We created a product for a non-existed market," he says plainly. They had built something with real product value, but the market need simply wasn't there.

There was no dramatic shut-down day. Instead, their energy "vanished gradually." The startup faded away as the team realized the core problem couldn't be solved by better sales tactics or feature improvements—the market itself didn't exist. Stepa moved on to become a Product Lead at Moscow City Government. Looking back, he identified two critical lessons: (1) put far more thought into customer conversations, especially with the actual decision-makers (local government), and (2) pick key north star metrics from day one to guide strategy and measure client success.