In technology, attention tends to move in waves. In recent years it has shifted from crypto to the metaverse and then to generative AI. Each time investors followed with money and founders with new pitch decks, sometimes for products that had little to do with the trend. Some of these businesses survive the cycle. Many do not, because the trend was carrying the company rather than the other way round.
Dmitrii Khasanov came to technology from a different field. He studied economics at the Institute of Economics, Management and Law in Kazan, where he qualified in finance and credit. In 2011 he added a degree in industrial and civil construction from an engineering academy in Naberezhnye Chelny.
He also spent years in senior commercial jobs at construction companies. Melandia Agency and the Arrow Stars investment fund, which puts money into AI and tech start-ups, came later. It is an unusual mix, and a handy one for looking at an old question in the technology business: how do you build something whose value does not hang on the latest trend?
Dmitrii Khasanov on Business Models Built to Last
In construction, a company cannot rely on hype for long. A typical project takes several years, contracts and budgets are fixed at the start, and a shortage of cash becomes obvious to contractors and suppliers long before the building is finished. A weak business model shows up in the accounts rather than in a press release. Dmitrii Khasanov held director and commercial director roles in this sector before moving into marketing and technology.
In tech, the same sums come due, only later, and a funding round can hide them for a while. A founder who wants to grow fast should first be able to say, at least roughly, how much a customer brings in, what it cost to win that customer and what happens to both figures if market conditions turn. If nobody in the room can answer, the company is running on momentum.
Business growth also comes in two kinds. One is bought with marketing spend and can be switched on quickly. The other comes from customers who keep paying and bring others with them. It takes longer to build, but it is what makes a company worth owning five years later. Dmitrii Khasanov, strategic development advisor and angel investor, focuses on early-stage companies, where the choice between the two is still open.
Dmitrii Khasanov Digital Marketing: Which New Tools Are Worth Using
Marketing probably sees more hype than any other business function, because new platforms and tools appear every year and almost all of them promise lower costs and better results. The Dmitrii Khasanov digital marketing profile covers several of these areas, among them artificial intelligence, influencer partnerships and optimisation for voice search. Whether a tool like this helps a company or just adds costs depends mostly on how it is used. Some general rules are listed below:
- AI in a supporting role. Machine learning can analyse data, personalise content and optimise advertising budgets. Overuse carries its own risks, a subject within Khasanov’s area of expertise: automation without a clear business goal adds cost instead of value.
- Influencer partnerships built on fit. A collaboration pays off when the creator’s audience matches the product, whatever the follower count says.
- Voice search. When people use a smart speaker or a voice assistant, they usually ask a full question instead of typing two or three words. For this reason, content should answer such questions directly, in normal sentences.
- Distribution strategy before creative. A good campaign does not bring results if it is shown to people who are not interested in the product, or on a platform they do not use.
New tools appear faster than customer habits change. If a brand knows its audience, it can test a new channel and give it up later without serious losses. When a brand tries to be on every new platform at once, it may gain followers, but this does not always lead to repeat sales.
Product-Market Fit and the Limits of Fast Growth
A scalable business is one that can take on more customers while its costs per customer stay under control. Growing quickly is a different thing, as two well-known stories show.
Slack came out of Tiny Speck, the studio behind an online game called Glitch, which was shut down in 2012. The chat tool the team had built for its own use turned out to be the more promising product. Slack opened a public preview in August 2013 and launched more widely in February 2014, after the team had been using the tool in its own work for a long time.
Quibi took the opposite route. The short-form streaming service raised about $1.75 billion before its launch in April 2020 and shut down before the end of that year. Funding and marketing were in place. However, the company struggled to turn its substantial investment and marketing efforts into sustained audience demand.
Neither story comes down to the quality of the idea alone. Slack’s team had firsthand experience of the problem its product solved and could test the tool internally before bringing it to a wider market. Quibi, for all the money behind it, went to market with little sense of how people would actually watch.
Khasanov invests in early-stage technology through Arrow Stars, and Melandia Agency is where the Dmitrii Khasanov digital marketing background comes in. Both lines of work keep returning to the same question: does the customer really want this? Early-stage investors usually look at product-market fit before many other things. Signs of it include customers who stay with the product, make repeat purchases and recommend it to others, and these signs often tell more than a large number of sign-ups in the first week after launch.
The People Behind Long-Term Value
None of this works without the right people. When a market is growing fast, it often attracts people who want a quick exit, but a company that plans to work for many years needs employees who are ready to build it over a longer period. Sound team building usually rests on a few habits:
- Hiring for judgement as well as for the skills in demand this year;
- Setting team metrics tied to revenue and retention rather than vanity numbers;
- Treating digital transformation as a change in working processes, not only as the purchase of new software;
- Reviewing the business strategy against sales data several times a year, not only during annual planning.
None of these habits is new. They are simply the first to go when a company races to keep up with a trend.
Dmitrii Khasanov, strategic development advisor, has worked on both sides of this: commercial management in construction first, marketing and technology ventures more recently. Although these industries are different, in both of them a company has to control costs, plan its work and think about whether the business will still be viable in five years.
Building Past the Cycle
Hype is not going away. Each new wave of technology arrives with big promises, and a few of them come true. The trick, for founders and for investors such as Dmitrii Khasanov, is to set each new promise against the business model and see whether the numbers still work before betting the company on it.
The technologies tied to the Dmitrii Khasanov digital marketing profile will keep changing, with new platforms next year and different ones the year after. The basic questions about customers change much more slowly. A company still needs to know who its customers are, why they pay and what makes them return, and companies that keep track of these answers are more likely to continue working after the current trend is over.
