Three Very Strange Meetings
Part one

The first meeting was with a very pleasant and ambitious young woman, who left a great impression on me at first. If we ignore the fact that she was late to our meeting, the conversation lasted about 30 minutes. During that time, we kept discussing the same thing, and it felt like we were 100% aligned on the project. We were both eager to collaborate and decided to schedule a follow-up call a few days later. This was supposed to be a conversation about our strategy for working together. Naturally, I was excited.

Her experience was in helping to develop beauty projects, and according to her, she was very good at it. She also had a team that was very effective at their tasks. I saw our collaboration as an opportunity to combine our strengths: I would handle IT development, and she would take care of the physical spaces. We would work parallel to each other toward our common goal. I already had a team of developers, and significant progress had been made in this area. We had proven success in the Russian market, but to scale, we needed investment and a larger team to open concepts in different countries. Together, we could change the world!


But as we continued meeting and having calls, I started to realize that the process of signing a memorandum of understanding was going nowhere. She didn’t seem to understand what she wanted from my company, or what she was willing to contribute in return. A 50/50 split wasn’t appealing to me, as I already had a ready product, while she only offered skills and potential investors.

Each of our meetings felt increasingly strange. She would probe for all sorts of information about me and my business, but on her end, nothing was revealed, and there was no clarity on where we were headed. When it came to development, she and her team were completely out of their depth. I found myself explaining basic things to them repeatedly. From the start, I told her that our collaboration would need to be indirect since IT businesses typically don’t have physical assets and are focused on development. Her expertise, on the other hand, was entirely in construction, branding, and marketing physical spaces! She and her team didn’t understand anything related to IT, and I had to repeat many things multiple times to both her and her team.
At one point, I gave an ultimatum: either we agree on clear plans, shares, and a solid strategy, or our partnership wouldn’t work.
She told me that she had a potential investor who was interested in joining the project and would be ready to meet in a month to discuss the details. I provided her with all the necessary information about the project and how I envisioned its development.

The meeting took place in a cafe-restaurant. I arrived at the agreed time, but it turned out they were 30 minutes early. The investor had the vibe of a 90s gangster. His energy made it clear that if anything went wrong, it wouldn’t end well. But I still presented the product to him. The only thing that seemed to concern him was why it had taken me so long to develop it. I reminded him that we had launched our first release in just six months, without any external investment. If we had outsourced the project to independent studios, it would have cost at least $300,000, and the development time would have been anywhere from one to two years. These were the timelines given to me when I sent out technical specifications for cost assessments. By contrast, I was presenting a finished design and a detailed 150-page technical document.

The only useful thing the "investor" said was something he echoed from my earlier conversations with my potential partner. When she asked him if she should collaborate with me, he replied, "Only if it's beneficial for both of you." He essentially reiterated the same thing I had been saying all along: these were two separate businesses.

So, what was the outcome? We parted ways. They told me I was toxic and that they would develop the IT product on their own if they wanted. They claimed they could do in a month what had taken me two years to accomplish. I wasn’t upset, as it became clear to me once again that if someone thinks IT development is easy, they’re completely out of touch with the reality of it. They wouldn't even be able to replicate what I had done, let alone do it better.

I’ll share more about the other meetings in a future post!