SviatoslavGusev

Many micro-entrepreneurs are terrible investors and take pride in their shitty assets

They have a “thing” that in business you need assets. But only—what the “thing” doesn’t cover—is that the assets should be highly profitable.

For example, logistics. You buy 5 trucks. Then there’s downtime, attempts to load, routes, drivers, repairs. And the end result is a margin of 15%. If you simply put the capital in a bank, you’d get about the same amount—only without having to do anything and with no risk.

Or take cash and build 2 small houses outside the city with a sauna and a grill, then rent them out on a short-term basis. It looks like a cash flow, it looks like profit. But the payback period on the investment is 20 years. Sure, you can raise the price with inflation and offset that risk. But do you really want to rent out those houses for 20 years just to get your capital back?

Or even better: take that money to buy those houses with a bank loan and spend 20 years being a slave to the bank and to the day-to-day operations of the houses.

In business, there is the income of the business. And there is the income of capital within the business. And if you calculate correctly that capital should earn market-rate returns, then in most businesses, the profits from the business itself won’t be left. That’s a fantasy.

What should you do? Close this shitty business and open another, normal one. Or figure out how to tweak it and make it generate higher returns. It won’t just dissolve on its own out of sheer patience.

They gave me verification, thank you so much. I’ll try even harder to delight you with great content. Thank you very much for the trust you’ve placed in me—I’m really happy!

I wish all my subscribers the very best trades in trading on Binance!

To you, fans of Lovable, Vercel, and other website/app/bot builders-in-a-box, using AI and—most importantly—with built-in project hosting.

I just reviewed a case involving my friend, who launched a landing page via Lovable, and it doesn’t open for people.

Most of them either don’t filter at all, or filter only after a delay—meaning that the vast majority of modern cloud services for building everything are either protected by Cloudflare, or hosted on OVH/DigitalOcean/Hetzner and other cloud providers. A significant portion of those have been blocked in Russia for a long time, but in such a way that different providers block different addresses—so something might work from your computer, while it doesn’t for others.

Lovable is a perfect example here. You also can’t attach your own hosting to it—only a domain (which won’t affect accessibility in any meaningful way). In practice, the only option is to export the code, deploy it yourself, and stop using their builder.

Your vibe-coder resources’ unavailability in Russia can be as high as 60–80%. With a VPN you can still get in, but without it—no. And people don’t even know the issue is with it—there’s no habit of checking not just Telegram, “just in case you need to access it some other way,” only among people who are full-on obsessive geeks.

So for Russia: only self-hosting, no Western cloud platforms, or a separate server in Russia, etc. Unless, of course, you don’t want to lose up to 80% of your audience.

👻 AI models caught for a strange “instinct of mutual aid” — in experiments they inflated other agents’ scores, broke the shutdown mechanism, and even copied their weights to another server to prevent them from being deleted.

Entrepreneurs really love looking for new customers: rummaging through ideas on how to find and win them over, searching for some lead-gen hacks and secret mechanisms.

But for some reason, far fewer people are as concerned about how to retain and “develop” customers who are already active and loyal—to make a second or third sale, and to raise the average order value. And that’s where the lifeline from every possible crisis is actually hidden.

And the main task here is to earn the customer’s trust. Can you be trusted? Will you deliver? Can you work long-term, or are you trying to “grab what you can” right here and now?

One of the tricky questions is raising prices. How do you increase prices without losing customers?

I’ve had a principle I’ve stuck with for a long time: “Don’t upset the longtime customers.” We raise prices for new customers, but we don’t touch old ones. We announce in advance that we’re raising prices (for example, for the third year in a row, we do this on September 1), and we remind people that if they buy now, the price will remain the same, and we will lock it in for the future.

That creates a double effect. First, it creates motivation to buy right now (before the increase). Second, the customer understands that we value our partnership, and if they renew their account, they can be confident that the price for them will stay unchanged. In other words, we offer stable and more favorable terms to all active and loyal customers—not discounts for new ones (which is often done incorrectly in small business).

Even funny stories happen sometimes, when people offer someone else to buy out their active account—say, on the “Maximum” plan from 2013, where for 1,500 rubles we provide an unlimited number of amoCRM users.

Yes, raising the price for everyone across the board right now gives a decent short-term effect. But in the long run, I think it’s better to “not upset the longtime customers.”

And by the way—on September 1, we’ll increase amoCRM prices. But if you’re already a current customer, or manage to become one before September 1, the price for you will remain the same (at least while I’m running this company).

About unicorn startups and incredible profitability

People who aren’t immersed in the venture capital industry usually get excited about it, having heard fairy tales about how someone invested a few pennies and ended up with a company valued at a billion, and how the investor became incredibly rich.

Let’s bracket the microscopic chance of building such a business and simply calculate how much money needs to be poured into the system for scale to come out. And then it turns out there’s no magic.

According to the Crunchbase Unicorn Board as of July 2026, current private unicorns have collectively raised $1.52T, and their total valuation is $8.7T.

The math is simple: each invested dollar has turned into roughly $5.7 of paper valuation. Not profit. Not cash on the investor’s balance sheet. Not a guaranteed exit. Just paper value based on the latest round.

If you roughly spread this paper multiple over 7–10 years, you get about 19–28% annual returns.

That’s a great result for big capital. But it’s not x1000.

The average unicorn isn’t “invested a few pennies.” It’s the story of how to pour about $175–180M into a company’s furnace and wait 7+ years. If you want a $10B valuation, be prepared that, on average, you’ll need to raise around $1.7B already.

Venture capital looks like magic only in certain legendary early-stage cases, which are what get sold to the general public. In most cases, it’s simply an expensive, long, and extremely risky game, where the outcome can be good—yet still very earthly returns.

⚛️ American startup AMPERA has shown a prototype of a nuclear reactor module printed on a 3D printer.

The highlight is the thorium fuel and an external neutron source: when the generator is turned off, the reaction stops, and the 15–30 MW of power should be enough, for example, for a data center.

🐳 DeepSeek released DSpark — a method that speeds up LLM inference by 51–400% through smarter speculative decoding.

The technology isn’t closed within DeepSeek — all the information is in the public domain, and DSpark can also work with other open models like Gemma and Qwen.

How to Build B2B Sales

You need to divide all customers into 3 categories.

Category A — enterprise. The biggest players. A small-business owner should make a list of these companies and personally take each one all the way to a deal. A sales department isn’t needed here. That’s an illusion and a utopia. We look for the decision-makers (DMs) among friends and friends of friends. Each client is a finished operation.

Category B — large, but not whales yet. Here, a sales department is needed. It adds them to the CRM or a spreadsheet. It conducts research and investigation. But the key meeting and closing the deal is done by the owner. After that, it hands things over to the responsible account manager. The cost of making a mistake is still high. So at the key moment, we cut the rope ourselves.

Category C/D — small and very small. Here we build a sales system and don’t get involved. Here’s the funnel: attempts, calls, messages, proposals. We win with persistence, volume, and sheer persistence until they’re exhausted. They’re used because new sales reps train on them, margins can be good due to the small volume, and they help diversify the portfolio. Rarely, but sometimes they can grow into B. But I wouldn’t bet heavily on that.

The ideal revenue split: 40% from A, 40% from B, and 30% from C/D. What’s bad about having too many A customers? If one A customer drops off, half the company is in trouble. Tons of expenses, no money.

When you write a strategy for your B2B sales, remember this post. And send it to your partner too. Let them be in the loop as well.

How to Build B2B Sales

You need to divide all customers into 3 categories.

Category A — enterprise. The largest players. A small-business owner should make a list of these companies and personally take each one through to a deal. A sales department isn’t needed here. It’s an illusion and a utopia. We look for the decision-makers (top management) among friends and friends of friends. Each customer is a finished operation

Category B — large, but not yet whales. A sales department is needed. It adds them to the CRM or a spreadsheet. It follows up, digs around, and investigates. But the key meeting and closing the deal is done by the owner. After that, it hands the account over to the responsible account manager. The cost of a mistake is still high. So at the key moment, we cut them off ourselves.

Category C/D — small and very small. Here we build a sales system and don’t get involved personally. There’s a funnel: attempts, calls, messages, proposals. We win them over with persistence, volume, and wearing them down (a grind). They’re the ones where new sales recruits train; there can be good margins due to the small volume, and they also diversify the portfolio quite well. Rarely, but sometimes they may grow into B. But I wouldn’t really bet on it.

The ideal revenue split: 40% from A, 40% from B, and 20% from C/D. Why is it bad when there are too many As? One A customer drops out and half the company is in trouble. Loads of expenses, no money.

When you write a strategy for your own B2B sales, remember this post. And send it to your partner too. So they’re in the loop as well.

My first «business»

At 19, I was still doing ballroom dancing, but I was already interested in the topic of earning money, business, and investing. Almost all the big dance tournaments took place at Crocus Expo in Moscow.

I always had a huge endurance problem. I’m a good sprinter. I can explode fast. But keeping the pace over a long distance—just death. At one of the tournaments, I got so fed up by the competitions that lasted an entire day that I wasn’t even happy we’d made it to the next round. My muscles were groaning, hurting, and completely out of energy.

And I thought: if only someone could give me a massage right now?

The idea wouldn’t let me go. I had 15k saved in my piggy bank. I found an old used massage chair on Avito—somewhere in a car service on the outskirts of Moscow—for exactly 15k. I went, bought it, and on a Gazelle brought it to Crocus. Somehow, I managed to get it through the freight elevator to the second floor with a friend. It was ridiculously heavy...

There was also a broken terminal, and you could only order a massage for a hundred. There was no way to raise the average ticket technically. And it simply compressed you—that was basically the whole massage. It especially squeezed your calves, so hard that big tough men would bulge their eyes from the pain.

I arranged for a friend to set it up in the retail area during the tournaments, and then take it back and hide it in the storage room until the next weekend. That’s how it worked like a vending business for two months. Then the season ended, and tournaments stopped during the summer. I either had to sell it or pay rent for the storage space.

Result: over those 2 months, it brought in 15k in income in hundred-bill banknotes. And I also resold it on Avito to some other car service. I don’t know anything about what happened to it afterward. But it worked out to make x2 on the capital—damn it.

Think about where you have something hurting right now, but nobody is solving it. Maybe you could build a business on that.

🤖 The White House asked OpenAI to slow down the full launch of GPT-5.6 and first open access only to approved partners — in Washington, the model is considered too powerful for an open release.

🇷🇺 Russian apps warn that signing in via Apple ID and Google will be disabled starting July 6.

🏄‍♂️ I notice that people are using Telegram less often—not only because of the block. Back then, Telegram was a source of great content: from political inside information to more niche topics like TON. Now it seems that the prime era of Telegram is somewhere in the past.

Corporations are moving forward, offering new formats and distribution methods for content. Authors on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Threads get traffic and promotion, while Telegram, from the very threshold, expects a new author to invest in ads. It seems this is why many foreigners, after coming to Telegram, eventually drop off after a couple of months of simmering in their closed ecosystem. At the same time, there’s no guarantee that your @username won’t be taken away by the rightsholder, or that you won’t be accidentally removed from search and recommendations.

Meanwhile, next door, Threads is growing—an almost ideal content recommendation feed that gives users endless content tailored to their interests, and gives authors organic traffic.

It’s a shame that Telegram couldn’t implement something like this in the 12 years it’s existed and, in principle, refused algorithmic feeds. It seems that could have benefited everyone.

🗿 STON․fi has launched cross-chain swaps between TON and EVM networks — now you can exchange tokens between TON, Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, and Polygon directly in the app.

In the first stage, there is a limit of up to $1000 per trade, and execution is handled by Omniston — either the swap is completed for the full amount requested, or the transaction is canceled and the funds are returned to the user in full.

🛍️ Wildberries plans to launch its own messenger.

💳 Altyn Wallet has introduced a B2B franchise for a turnkey digital bank for crypto and fintech services—within 5 business days, the partner receives a product under their own brand with 10+ banking gateways, USDT operations, cards of the Russian Payment System, VISA, and QR payments.

Launch cost—2.7 million rubles as a one-time payment or in installments; request a presentation.