Toki

Vladimir Esaulov, a backend engineer with over 10 years of experience, had previously failed at a game development company—a failure he attributed partly to lacking proper game analytics. A few months into the pandemic lockdown, he began asking himself: "How do marketers search for trends and measure their success on TikTok?" That question became the seed for Toki.

Vladimir gave himself an aggressive timeline: two weeks for research and one month for development. He recruited his friend Alex as a co-founder; Alex handled the landing page and design while Vladimir coded. They talked to marketers about their pain points—particularly the time wasted measuring campaign success. The biggest technical hurdle was that TikTok had no official API, and existing GitHub libraries were unstable. They solved this by automatically scraping data from the app's display. Two months later, Toki was live with a subscription SaaS model offering different data tiers.

Growth was where things fell apart. Vladimir and Alex had no marketing experience and relied on cold Facebook messages and comments in marketing groups. They got interviews with marketers who gave "crazy optimistic feedback" and some signups, but zero paying customers. A month in, they decided to launch on Product Hunt. The result was impressive on the surface: 6th place finish, thousands of visits, dozens of free users, and glowing messages saying "Toki is awesome!" But behind those metrics was a harsh reality: zero paid conversions.

Product Hunt drove traffic and validation but didn't translate into revenue. They eventually got one paying customer on a $99/month plan who stayed for two months. Meanwhile, AWS costs were covered by YC Startup School's free tier. But the real problem wasn't operational—it was psychological. Vladimir realized he didn't have a deep connection to the problem or genuine obsession about solving it for marketers. "Founders need to feel a deep connection with the idea and the problem they are tackling," he reflected later. "I had curiosity in that market but looks like it wasn't enough to keep me motivated."

After 8 months of work, Vladimir shut down Toki. An investment fund had even indicated they'd fund a pre-seed round once they hit 20-30 paid customers—but the bootstrapping plan and lack of motivation meant they never got there. Vladimir learned a crucial lesson: validate with paying customers *before* building, not after.