Tactiq

Nick Nikolaiev was working in AI productivity solutions across Europe and the US when he co-founded TaskPace AI, an AI management assistant for Salesforce users. With the engineering team based in New Zealand, he found himself in countless remote meetings. He noticed something critical: "meeting productivity is highly related to the amount of information captured during the meeting." Around the same time, his co-founder Ksenia was at Atlassian working on team productivity solutions and saw the exact same problem. They realized that when insights were lost from meetings, teams couldn't execute effectively.

Instead of overthinking it, they followed lean startup principles: build an MVP themselves with zero external resources. Ksenia, Nick's co-founder, was the superhuman here—she "designed, prototyped, and made our MVP in just a few weeks." The biggest challenge wasn't technical; it was psychological. "The biggest challenges were not trying to polish the product too much, finding the courage to put it out there, and getting public market feedback as fast as possible." They had to override their instinct to spend months perfecting the UI and design. They clicked publish, launched to the Chrome Web Store, and held their breath.

Their marketing budget: $0. Instead, they spent hours manually responding to relevant threads on Quora, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. Whenever someone asked about saving captions, transcribing Google Meet, or remote meeting challenges, Nick and Ksenia answered. They commented on videos about Chrome extensions and online class tools. "We got to our first 10,000 users within months. It was a clear signal from the market that people needed our solution urgently." That validation gave them permission to invest more—this was real.

Once they proved the concept, they scaled smartly: TikTok influencers, YouTube content, blog posts, and word of mouth pushed them to 190,000+ users. But they learned a painful lesson early. They sponsored TikTok videos to test the channel, and a Mexican creator created a viral video in Spanish-speaking Latin America. The problem: their extension didn't support Spanish. Suddenly they had thousands of new signups, but frustrated Spanish-speaking users couldn't use the product. Nick recalls: "We had an enormous spike in new sign-ups, which created a tidal wave of support tickets from frustrated users who couldn't use Tactiq to transcribe their Google Meets in Spanish." The team spent weeks toggling between Intercom and Google Translate, dealing with churn and burnout. The lesson: test for unintended consequences in controlled ways.

Over the last year, Tactiq grew 20x with revenue growing 20%+ month-on-month. The team expanded to 7 people, including Nick's former co-founder Alex Leonov as CTO and an ex-Atlassian engineer. They're hiring and planning a Seed round to hit $1.5 million ARR before Series A. Nick's approach to roadmap prioritization is deliberate: test for feature demand before building. "I have hundreds of ideas, but none I can talk about until we try them."

Nick credits much of their success to the Cynefin framework's "fail-safe probing"—testing things even more rigorously than instinct suggests. Equally important: "team-product-fit." Every person on the team has deep product-led growth experience or DNA. "This alignment between business strategy and team aptitudes means our team is always aligned. There's no confusion on direction, roadmap prioritization, etc."