Yuliia Sychkova is a co-founder and Head of Delivery at Fulcrum Rocks, a design & development company from Ukraine. Over just 4 years, the company has delivered around 30 products which already have over 20 million users worldwide.
Having worked in several startups and industries before, Yuliia leveraged her experience into setting a Delivery Department at Fulcrum, optimizing its workflow, processes, and performance.
Yuliia advocates hypothesis validation as an essential stage in creating really valuable products for users. Such focus on delivering products that bring real value transformed into Fulcrum’s mission and work principles. Along with her colleagues, Yuliia helps startups discover their market fit, and verify hypotheses with real users in order to design and develop products that someday are going to be a unicorn.
Please tell us a little bit about your business – what is Fulcrum Rocks all about?
Fulcrum Rocks is a design & development studio that works with early-stage startups and helps them create their web & mobile applications. The company’s main service lines are: Product Discovery, Design Services, MVP creation, and dedicated & skilled Product Team.
Based in Ukraine, Fulcrum team creates products for entrepreneurs worldwide – founders from the USA, the UK, Europe, Israel, and lots of other locations. In just 4 years, Fulcrum has already helped to build products that are used by over 4 million people and still keep growing. The company’s mission is to turn ideas that inspire into products that help.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
Before Fulcrum, I have been working in several startups and industries like, for instance, in marketing operations – I have tried myself in a role of CMO, Product Marketing Manager, Head of Marketing Operations. This experience provided me with valuable insights which I later applied at Fulcrum.
Although I joined Fulcrum not at the very start but a bit later, it became a place where I could finally focus on project management, setting up the delivery processes, ensuring efficient performance, and shaping a whole new but so essential department for the company.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- First of all, one of the top skills any entrepreneur should possess today is resilience. It’s the ability to adapt your business to a changing environment, face new challenges and look for new approaches in order to stay afloat. The last decade demonstrated pretty well that business should not just prepare for changes, but accept the fact that the fast-changing world is our new reality. To succeed, entrepreneurs have to react fast to any changes, refocus and welcome new approaches.
- Next, would be natural curiosity. Entrepreneurs should keep an eye on what’s happening around them, follow the trends, and recognize in advance upcoming changes in their industry. A successful entrepreneur is one who ‘catches the wave’ and whose product is on time. That’s why, it’s essential for any business manager to get as much information, data, and reports as possible in order to always be aware of what’s going on around.
- Finally, a successful entrepreneur is a great communicator who is able to properly present the benefits of their own business, who knows how to approach people and widen their own network, and who can create their own strong team which is going to be the company’s foundation. The power of communication should never be underestimated since it plays a great role in every aspect of the business.
What are your plans for the future, and how do you plan to grow this company?
Despite the war in Ukraine, we stay really optimistic, ambitious, and determined as never before to reach our goals. In the near future, we want to see Fulcrum becoming a platform for startups that bring billions of dollars in value. In regard to our services, we want to be useful to entrepreneurs at every stage of the startup’s life: from the part when we help to choose and validate an idea to the comprehensive development and maintenance of a platform with millions of users.
We’d like to transform from just a vendor into a partner and co-founder of startups when each Fulcrum’s member has a transparent way to participate or even create their own startup. We’d like to polish our customer experience so that every one of our customers would be satisfied with Fulcrum’s services and experiences. Finally, we want Fulcrum to be a dream workplace where each team member feels productive, self-grown, and secure.
How have the pandemic and lockdown affected you or your new business?
Luckily, pandemic and lockdown had a smaller influence on the tech industry than on other industries – like catering, logistics, etc. The biggest challenge we faced during the pandemic is to set up remote work for our team and, actually, keep everyone engaged and motivated. So, first of all, we took care to provide everyone with all the necessary equipment to be able to work from home. Then, we focused on keeping regular connections with the team, launched various online initiatives and activities to raise the team spirit; set up daily, weekly and monthly meetings within the company and project teams in order to provide a smooth and productive workflow.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
It’s hard to define the most successful one since it’s a wise synergy of marketing approaches that brings the best results. Yet, in the early stages of our company, referral marketing as well as focusing on raising awareness about our business were the most effective.
While we looked for new customers via referral channels to grow our portfolio and expertise, we made sure to be present on all the platforms our potential clients visited. We grew our presence to reach new people, make Fulcrum visible to new audiences, and gain a place in our customers’ consciousness.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
When you’re working in a startup, you have a new challenge coming up every week or even day. For us, one of the biggest challenges was to preserve the quality of our services despite the fast growth. In just 1 year, we grew from 25 to 60 people on board. Such growth required us to restructure, create new departments and functions, adapt our processes, and experiment with new approaches. At the same time, our customers should not feel any shift in the quality we provide. Leveraging these two vectors was a great challenge for us. Then, the war, of course. We had to relocate our people fast, and keep everyone safe and motivated, but also we had to return to work in order to fulfill the commitments to the customers.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
Let it be Notion, Jira, and Hubspot. In the Notion workspace, we structure and hold all essential information about the company, our departments, their processes, and workflows. It’s shared between all the employees, so everyone on the team can stay updated and easily reach any information needed. We also use Notion to share information about the projects with our customers. If structured properly, Notion is a great place to store your data.
For project management, we use Jira which allows us to keep track of the work progress, track team performance, follow the work done and what’s left, as well as get an understanding of the project status in general. Also, we’ve integrated Jira with numerous external resources which made this tool even more convenient for us. For Sales and Marketing, we use Hubspot. With this CRM, we can keep track of all our customers and leads. It allows us to stick to proper and timely communication, follow up on our leads when necessary, and manage our opportunities.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Productivity is the result of good planning, and the ability to focus and relax. It means that you shouldn’t just work 24/7 because in that case, you’re going to burn out super fast. It is important to dedicate your time to various spheres of life like work, sport, family, and hobbies. If you plan your day properly, you’ll find time for each of these aspects and still be motivated and productive.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
First of all, when I see the results of my work, it really inspires me to conquer new and new horizons. In my case, these results are happy customers, satisfied users, and, of course, top-notch applications. Also, it’s my team and people around me who motivate me to grow, learn something new every day, and never stop polishing my work. They are all great personalities, open to new ideas, resilient to any challenges we face, and driven to change this world for the better.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
I would advise them to turn every mistake they make into a valuable lesson. It’s okay to be wrong and to fail when you start, but it’s crucial to learn from every failure in order not to repeat it. It’s almost never possible to create something perfect from the first try, so just prepare to fail and be happy with every failure you have, because this is the kind of experience you can’t buy.
What is your definition of success?
For me, success is about being able to change the world in a positive way. It really doesn’t matter whether you can change only one life or hundreds of them. The most essential thing is that you do something helpful to make our world a better place. So, if your job/hobby/business is changing something around us, helps other people, is useful for someone, then… Yes, it is a success for me. I don’t believe in creating big corporations without bigger goals or earning money without understanding how to apply them in a wise way. The biggest success is helping other people in any way possible. Either by introducing new cool technology, revolutionary medicine, or just helping them achieve their dreams.
How can readers get in touch with you?
I would be happy to chat with Billion Success readers and be helpful in any way possible. So, to get in touch please message me via LinkedIn or just visit Fulcrum’s website and leave your feedback, contacts, or questions via our Contact Form. Our Business Managers would forward your message directly to me.
