Team Voice

Kirill Vechtomov had a long entrepreneurial history dating back to childhood, when he attempted to sell toys at a street market in the USSR before being shut down by his school. After learning computer science, business management, and UX design over 8 years of professional experience, he decided to tackle what he saw as a critical workplace problem: the lack of safe communication between employers and employees. "I strongly believe that people spend a huge chunk of their lives at work," Kirill explains, "and I noticed that lots of people I talked to were unhappy at work."

Team Voice was Kirill's first official startup with proper incorporation, legal, and accounting structures alongside a 50/50 co-founder. He started by showing paper sketches to an HR manager at his day job and then leveraged his LinkedIn network to recruit a pilot group of over 10 HR professionals willing to participate. The development process was highly iterative: "Lots of user research, lots of thinking, lots of doing, lots of testing and iterating. Rinse and repeat."

Kirill's initial customer acquisition relied on his existing professional network and personal outreach. He reached out to LinkedIn connections asking for introductions to people in the HR industry, successfully building a pilot group of engaged early users who provided feedback on iterations.

While the pilot group was helpful and engaged, Team Voice never scaled beyond this core group. Kirill attempted Google Adwords and word-of-mouth marketing but made no large marketing push. The fundamental problem, however, was not marketing—it was product-market fit. "The problem we were trying to solve turned out to be a human problem, not a technology one," Kirill realized. HR professionals universally acknowledged that employee engagement "kept them up at night," but they were overwhelmed with tactical daily tasks like interviewing, screening, and writing job descriptions. They lacked both the time and budget authority to invest in a strategic engagement solution. Selling the product would have required extensive education and sales efforts targeting CEOs and CFOs—a task Kirill couldn't pursue while working full-time.

Kirill shut down Team Voice after realizing the market challenge was insurmountable given his constraints. Working full-time while bootstrapping made it impossible to conduct the extensive enterprise sales required. He reflected that asking for money before building might have helped validate the budget problem earlier, though he acknowledged it wouldn't have solved the fundamental issue of needing to educate executives at every potential client company. Since then, he has pivoted to helping other entrepreneurs learn rapid prototyping and product development.