ARAKCHEEV

I built marketing at Swapster from zero to launch in three months, leading 12 people across digital, design, SEO, development and BD on a $100K annual budget. Halfway through, Google stopped accepting Kyrgyz crypto licences and cut off our core paid channel; I rebuilt acquisition onto new channels in weeks, and the launch shipped on its original date.

It launched narrow: a card for paying Russian subscriptions and the odd trip. I redefined the ICP around a daily-driver card and financial service for Russian-speaking relocants, then rebuilt the product and messaging around it. That shift moved both numbers that mattered: first-deposit conversion 3% → 12% (the target was 5–8%), and monthly retention of transacting users 73% → 89%.

The third-party cards we resold could be terminated without notice, so I anchored the brand on our own platform rather than the card. The product had to outlive any single rail.

First hire in the function: no marketing existed and the brand was weak, with an ICP of node operators, blockchain projects and stakers. I hired and led a team of five. The team blamed weak activation on the UX; the session data showed first-time operators stalling on missing information. I cancelled the redesign, restructured the dashboard, and shipped 10 per-blockchain landing pages that became the SEO layer and the Google Ads structure. Activation went 18% → 31%.

A $40K influencer programme returned close to zero: their audience were traders, our ICP were infrastructure operators. I moved the budget into a free analytics tool instead. It hit 2,500 DAU and 10,000 MAU in its first weeks and converts 6% of users to paying, the top of the freemium benchmark.

80+ JTBD and Voice-of-Customer interviews over four months put a new entry-level pricing tier into the product. I brought in ~50 enterprise validators through SEO, landing pages and BD at $600–1,300 a month each, through the 2022–23 bear market. Paid CAC came from $250 to $160, short of the $150 target, but payback on a $30/month plan went from over eight months to five.

I ran marketing for a video-game store and repositioned it into a geek-culture store, restructuring the assortment and pricing off the sales analytics, and the numbers followed: revenue 3.5× over two years, average order value up 68%.

As an official distributor I ran co-marketing with Blizzard, Riot Games and Valve: named-partner programmes end to end, brands with ~270M players between them.

Then I built GLHF, the holding’s own private label, from zero on its own factories.