Jivochat revenue is $8.5 million

My name is Tim Valishev, and I’ve been a startup CEO for 8 years during which I’ve built two profitable companies: Octoline, an IP telephony service for business focused on the Russian market, and JivoChat – a live chat for websites that helps 140k sites around the world to talk to their customers. I want to share an approach to growing the company that worked out quite well for me and I hope you’ll be able to use it in your business. Whenever the company grows and there’s a need for a new department, I step down to become the first member of the new team and do the work myself for a couple of months. Once I get a feeling of what the process looks like from the inside I start hiring and delegating. At different periods in my companies I wrote code, created interface designs in Photoshop, did the bookkeeping and accounting, supported customers in chat and by phone, managed ads on Adwords and searched for new recruits. So I’ve tried in every role for my company for some time. Of course as a CEO I had a lot of things to worry about at every moment and now we’ve hired guys that are much better than I am at every field. But despite the fact that I’m a shitty designer and my code caused some major fuck-ups along the road, I still believe that this approach was one of the reasons why we’ve been able to build a successful company with thousands of customers without outside investments. Let me try to explain why.