Preply CEO Recounts Lean Startup, Zero Salary Year

Kirill Bigai, cofounder and CEO of the online education marketplace Preply, revealed that he and his cofounder Dmytro Voloshyn paid themselves no salaries for the first year of the company's operation. This decision was made due to limited capital, with the founders prioritizing the success of their venture. Bigai stated that they "agreed to not pay each other salaries, because we didn’t have a lot of capital." While dedicating the majority of their time to Preply, they also held outside jobs to cover personal expenses. Bigai, who was 26 when he cofounded Preply with Voloshyn in 2012, explained that the company experienced a period of extreme financial constraint during its initial scaling phase. After raising a small amount of pre-seed funding, the capital was nearly depleted within a year, necessitating a bootstrapping approach to business operations. To maintain low overhead costs, the founders chose to operate their company from their hometown of Kyiv, Ukraine. This lean operational strategy came with significant personal sacrifices, as both founders had to maintain multiple careers to meet their financial obligations. During that first year, following the exhaustion of their pre-seed funding, the Ukrainian entrepreneurs received no income from Preply. They were dedicating approximately 60 hours per week to their startup while simultaneously working side jobs to earn a living. Bigai's side hustle involved working as an implementation consultant at the software company Creatio, building on his prior engineering experience at Nokia Siemens Networks. Concurrently, Voloshyn was pursuing a Ph.D. in machine learning and AI, and also worked part-time as a software developer for AB InBev. With minimal financial resources available, the founders operated a highly efficient business model as they worked to establish the company's viability. Despite the challenges, language tutors and learners began to engage with the platform. However, it took approximately six months before the founders could afford to pay themselves even a modest monthly salary of $100. Their earnings gradually increased over time, and after about two years into their entrepreneurial journey, they were finally in a position to pay themselves $500 per month and leave their other jobs to focus solely on Preply. The company has since grown to achieve a valuation of $1.2 billion, highlighting the founders' perseverance and strategic approach during its nascent stages.