Adventures Lab’s founder Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev) speaks about his professional journey from a successful startup in the health and beauty industry to one of the most promising Ukrainian venture investment funds with more than $15 million invested in startups.
According to the investor, he started his first business being a university student at the age of 17-18. He started to grow a community in social networks promoting such topics as self-improvement and how to be a motivated entrepreneur. With the growth of the community profits grew smoothly reaching more than 2000 dollars a week.
Ruslan Tymofieiev says he focused on affiliate marketing making money with the attracted clients. This was a good start to think about his own business project. Together with partners, Ruslan started a CPA network, he was working on marketing strategies and gaining new consumers.
A crisis came in 2016. Because of an economic collapse, one of the partners of the project informed the team he was going to get out of the business. Ruslan Tymofieiev had to pay the partner`s share and change the marketing strategy to not lose the company at all. He says, three months was enough to build a new business model, achieve success, and outperform competitors.
Despite the prosperity of the project, Ruslan decided to leave it. “I hit a ceiling in this business and decided to sell my stake,” the investor notes. Since 2014, he started to study investment strategies and tried to invest in several startups. Those investments were not profitable but beneficial as a valuable experience. Five years later, Ruslan got enough expertise to become a co-founder of Adventures Lab, a venture investment fund. Together with Andrew Kryvorchuk, who became the Managing Partner at Adventures Lab, he devised its development strategy.
Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev) is responsible for choosing projects worthy of investment. He meets teams, examines ideas and the market situations, consults founders, and discusses alternative ways of developing their projects.
The expert emphasizes that the main criteria that define the future success of the project are the business model of the project and its place on the market. If there is a free niche on the market and the project targets a wide audience, then the probability to obtain funding is very high. Ruslan recommends starting the project development with market research and looking for growing markets. Sometimes, it can be easy to calculate the future maximum profit, and it can be not attractive for investors. Another critical criterion is the level of the founder`s networking. Those businessmen that use all opportunities to share information about their projects usually win because they gather a lot of people interested in what they are doing. They receive critical feedbacks, offers to collaborate, invitations to events where they can talk about their experience as experts, they generally receive a lot of support from media, opinion leaders, and increase brand awareness.
The investors mostly make decisions based on the data, not feelings, but when arguments for and against are equal they can listen to their intuition. “You have to rely on your inner feelings whether you believe in this project or not,” Ruslan Tymofieiev summarizes.