Interview With Zakhar Azatian, Founder And CEO of Be Hard

Zakhar Azatian is the Founder & CEO of Be Hard, a consumer mobile app that helps people change their lifestyle through structured, high-accountability challenges. Based in San Francisco, Zakhar is a two-time founder who started building products early, first as an iOS engineer, then transitioning into product leadership and growth.

Over the years, he’s developed a very practical worldview: in the consumer market, it’s not enough to have a “good idea” or even a “good product.” What matters is moving fast, learning faster and building a repeatable engine for improvement across product, marketing and team.

Be Hard grew out of Zakhar’s own experience with challenge-based self-improvement. He liked that challenges remove ambiguity: the rules are clear, progress is measurable, and the “restart” penalty creates real accountability. Be Hard takes that structure and makes it easier to follow through, whether someone is trying to lose weight, build discipline, stop a bad habit or stay consistent after a medical operation.

The outcome so far: 1M+ users impacted, strong monetisation, $490K MRR and a growth playbook built on reinvesting revenue back into acquisition and product momentum.

What Makes a Great And Successful Founder?

Efficiency and persistence are the base: founders have to execute well and keep going longer than most people can.

On top of that: proactivity (you don’t wait for perfect conditions) and aggressiveness in speed (you move fast, ship fast, fix fast). Finally, a founder must be able to hire and work with a team, it’s one of the biggest multipliers. Even if you start lean, the ability to bring in the right people and collaborate effectively becomes critical as you scale.

But the most defining trait is the absolute rejection of the phrase “That’s not my job.” When I was strictly an iOS engineer, I didn’t just write code. I learned how QA worked, how product metrics functioned, how to set up analytics, and how basic marketing operated. If you are a founder, you have to be willing to do the unglamorous work to understand every vertical of your business.

You might not get paid extra to learn it, but the knowledge you gain is invaluable. Because I learned those things early on, when I eventually started my own company, I knew exactly how to set up monetisation, hire the right people and launch our first ad campaigns. You have to be a constant learner.

How Has Software Development and Ideation Changed In The Last Decade?

Speed and iteration are radically different. Building products has gotten dramatically easier, especially recently because prototyping and even early builds can happen much faster with modern tools and AI-assisted coding. A designer on my team can use an AI tool to build a fully clickable, functioning prototype without writing a single line of code. Because of this, the sheer volume of apps being released has spiked massively.

Because building the product is now the easy part, the real challenge has shifted entirely to distribution and competitiveness. When “anyone can build,” the differentiator becomes what you have beyond the product itself, things like network effects, data advantages, or ecosystems that are hard to copy. 

Look at Tesla’s self-driving tech, every new user feeds data back into the system, making it better for everyone. If you don’t have a unique way to capture attention or build a network effect, your software will just get lost in the noise.

What Spurred You On To Start BeHard?

I wanted to move from building entertainment products to building something I felt was more useful in people’s lives. I was going through my own challenge journey and I experienced the difference that strict accountability can make.

During a period of transition (including relocation and a long job-search process that felt repetitive), I started building Be Hard for myself as a side project. I published it, it began gaining traction, and I realised it was the most logical step: a product where my B2C growth and product background could create meaningful impact at scale.

What Key Industry Problems Do You Solve?

If you look at the statistics, a massive percentage of the population, over 97.3% struggles with a poor lifestyle. The core problem is that people don’t just need a habit tracker, they need structure and accountability that reduces decision fatigue and increases follow-through.

Traditional habit trackers often assume you already know exactly what to do, and missing a day has no real consequence. Challenges solve that by providing a clear ruleset, a timeframe and a “game-like” commitment mechanism: break the rules and restart. Be Hard makes popular challenge programmes easier to execute (and easier to repeat), supports people working on goals like weight loss or sobriety, and can even help in moments that require extra discipline like accountability after a medical operation.

The researchers* measured how many American adults met four basic criteria that define a “healthy lifestyle”:

1. A good diet (aligning with USDA nutritional guidelines)
2. Moderate exercise (at least 150 minutes a week)
3. Not smoking 4. A recommended body fat percentage (under 20% for men and 30% for women)

The study found that a staggering 97.3% of American adults failed to meet all four criteria. That means only 2.7% of Americans are living what is medically considered a baseline healthy lifestyle.
Here is how the individual habits broke down:

• 71% were non-smokers (the only metric where the majority passed)
• 46% got sufficient regular exercise
• 38% ate a healthy diet
• Only 10% had a normal/healthy body fat percentage

*study published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2016, conducted by researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Tennessee.

What Has Been Your Biggest Achievement So Far In Your Career?

Building products that create measurable impact at scale, bootstrapped Be Hard to 1M+ users and 490KK MRR. Personally, another achievement is the transition from pure engineering into leading product, growth and company-building, learning the full stack of what it takes to turn a product into a real business.

What Has Been The Biggest Challenge Since Founding Be Hard?

The same answer as above:) Building Be Hard into a bootstrapped, profitable business from zero without fundraising, while reaching a large user base and turning it into a real “business at scale” rather than just a product.

What Is Next For You And BeHard?

We are transitioning in to a comprehensive, AI-driven self-improvement ecosystem. We’re building a flow where we rank all categories of a user’s life (sports, diet, sleep) and generate a progressive, multi-phase plan. 

How Can We Find You?

The simplest way to test an app is https://www.behard.co/, which links directly to the app on the App Store / Google Play. You can also follow me on Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakhar-azatian/