Pavlo
Kharmanskyi

Tech Entrepreneur. Market-led builder.

20+ Years in tech · 8+ Ventures · 3 Exits · Millions of users reached

Pavlo Kharmanskyi is a Ukraine-born technology entrepreneur whose career spans more than twenty years of internet innovation – from early SEO and online communities to cryptocurrency, creator economy software and fintech.

Having built companies across multiple generations of the digital economy, Pavlo's entrepreneurial journey has been defined by the ability to recognise opportunities before industries fully mature.

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ingold.ua

JEWELLERY E-COMMERCE · 2012–2014

ingold.ua began through a friend whose family owned a large chain of physical jewellery stores. Pavlo had already spent several years building businesses online and saw an opportunity to bring a category still dominated by traditional retail onto the internet.

Much of the basic e-commerce infrastructure had to be created from scratch. Many jewellery manufacturers had no usable digital photographs of their products, so the team hired a photographer, developed its own process for macro photography and produced the imagery itself. Pavlo concentrated on SEO, and organic search became the company’s principal source of customer acquisition. At times, demand grew faster than the available inventory.

Logistics were just as challenging. Conventional postal services would not accept valuable jewellery, so the team assembled its own combination of couriers, drivers, buses and rail transport while carrying much of the delivery risk itself. The business grew, hired staff and opened an office where, at certain points, more than $1 million worth of jewellery could be awaiting photography, shipment or sale.

Pavlo sold ingold.ua to its largest competitor in 2014. The business later became part of gold.ua, which developed into one of Ukraine’s leading online jewellery retailers.

artfour.ua

WALL-ART E-COMMERCE · 2012–2017

Artfour grew out of ingold. Pavlo and the colleague responsible for ingold’s daily operations came across the idea of affordable printed wall art while taking an online business course. Pavlo was renovating his apartment at the time, so their first experiment was a modular picture of New York featuring the Empire State Building. The first print was imperfect, but once it was hanging on the wall, they could see the potential.

The venture initially used the Art4 and Popart names, with its early range focused on pop-art-style prints. Customer behaviour soon revealed a broader market: people were buying the pictures primarily as gifts. The team followed that demand, expanded the product range and developed the business into Artfour. A dedicated production space followed, where the pictures were assembled by hand. Artfour became the market leader in Ukraine in its category.

After moving to Kyiv, Pavlo was dividing his attention across a growing portfolio of ventures. The other investors eventually offered to buy his stake, and he accepted. The business continues to operate under different ownership.

druzi.cv.ua

REGIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK · 2007–2010

Pavlo was sixteen and in his first year at university when he and two partners launched druzi.cv.ua, a regional social network where people uploaded photographs from parties and events, tagged themselves and continued the night’s conversations online. Social networks were still unfamiliar to much of the local audience, and Druzi became one of the best-known digital projects in the region.

The business developed around that community. Clubs and event organisers paid for promotion and commissions on visitors brought through SMS campaigns. The team also created a local discount programme, with Pavlo walking from shop to shop, meeting owners and selling the membership cards himself. It became his first experience of B2B sales.

The same community supported Midnight Promo Studio, the event brand through which Pavlo organised dozens of large techno nights across western Ukraine, some attracting audiences of up to 10,000 people. The events generated photographs, conversations and relationships that then returned to the social network.

As VKontakte expanded, local communities and event promotion moved to the larger platform, and Druzi gradually lost its audience. Pavlo continued operating Midnight Promo Studio until 2010, when he closed the events business and shifted his attention fully towards web and software development.

Druzi was the first clear example of a model that would recur throughout his career: building a community around emerging behaviour and then creating a business around the activity already taking place within it.

VK Network

COMMUNITIES NETWORK · 2010–2017

VKontakte had displaced the regional network Pavlo helped build. In 2010, he began again on the platform that had overtaken his first online community. The first VK communities were created around travel, geography, science, sport and popular culture. Advertising requests gradually turned them into a business.

Over time, the network expanded to more than twenty communities. A team of around five people managed the daily content, while Pavlo handled the larger advertising campaigns and sometimes produced the creative work himself. Most of the revenue was reinvested into growth through giveaways, acquisitions and advertising exchanges with other networks. The combined audience eventually exceeded ten million followers.

The network never had a formal company name and remained a side project alongside Pavlo’s other ventures. For several years, however, it was also one of his most reliable sources of cash flow, financing a range of new products and experiments.

When Ukraine banned VKontakte in 2017, the economics of a business built entirely on the platform changed. Pavlo sold the network in a seven-figure exit worth more than $1 million.

itadviser.dev

WEB AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT · 2017–2021

ITAdviser was the culmination of almost a decade of web-development work. Pavlo began by building SEO websites and selling them for around $100 each. In 2012, that work became more structured through Lalalend, a small studio specialising in one-page landing sites at a time when landing-page marketing was expanding rapidly.

The team progressed from relatively simple websites to increasingly complex client projects, while continuing to develop and test products of its own. Across those years, Pavlo participated in building more than twenty different digital products and acquired a practical understanding of software development, infrastructure, design, delivery and distribution.

By 2017, after his move to Kyiv, these activities had developed into ITAdviser, a standalone software-development and outsourcing company. Pavlo founded it with an experienced outsourcing executive who also became the CTO of FinSafe, his crypto-focused fintech.

Pavlo’s business partner later took over ITAdviser, which continues to operate under different ownership.

finsafe.com

CRYPTO TRADING TERMINAL · 2018–2019

The idea for FinSafe emerged from a problem Pavlo encountered while managing his own cryptocurrency portfolio. By 2017, he held around twenty-five different assets, while liquidity was distributed across a growing number of exchanges. Rebalancing the portfolio or moving from one coin into another at a competitive price could take one or two hours.

In 2018, Pavlo began building a system that would connect the major exchanges through a single trading terminal. FinSafe combined a consolidated order book with smart order routing, identifying liquidity and executing transactions at the best available price across multiple exchanges. In effect, the company was building a brokerage layer above the fragmented cryptocurrency market.

Pavlo invested more than $1 million of his own capital into the product and assembled a specialised technical team around it. FinSafe became one of the most technically ambitious products he had built, bringing established trading infrastructure into a market where many of those tools did not yet exist.

When Pavlo left the business due to his personal circumstances, his business partner, who also served as the company’s CTO, later closed FinSafe. Parts of the technology were subsequently reused in software developed for outsourcing clients.

artozo.com

SOLANA NFT MARKETPLACE · 2021–2022

While living in the United States, Pavlo and several collaborators entered the NFT market as collectors and users, encountering persistent problems with wallets, payments, fees, security and onboarding. They designed Artozo as a Solana-based marketplace for digital artists and collectors, combining community voting, artist levels, fixed-floor pricing, referrals, staking and an integrated wallet with card payments. Solana made it possible to mint an NFT for around $2 at a time when the equivalent cost on Ethereum could reach hundreds of dollars.

Artozo launched its beta in August 2022. The company assembled a team of more than thirty people, raised close to $1 million, primarily from outside investors, attracted an early community of artists and users, and presented the product at Web Summit in Portugal after winning a startup competition. As Pavlo put it at the time, the ambition was to build a community of people who loved NFTs, rather than one dominated by short‑term speculation.

The company entered the market close to its peak. By the end of 2022, NFT trading volumes had fallen sharply across the industry, changing the economics of building a new marketplace. Pavlo decided to close Artozo in December 2022 and began looking for the next market almost immediately.

onlymonster.ai

B2B SAAS CREATOR OPERATIONS PLATFORM · 2023–PRESENT

OnlyMonster is the largest company Pavlo has built to date. It began in early 2023. A friend asked him to advise on setting up an agency for content creators. After several weeks inside the business, Pavlo saw that agencies were already operating with the complexity of serious companies, while the software available to manage their teams, customers, communications and daily workflows remained immature. That gap became OnlyMonster.

Pavlo asked Aliaksei Vinahradau, a part-time developer from his previous venture, to build the first prototype: a Google extension and a simple dashboard completed in approximately two months. The duo had bootstrapped from day 1. The product developed inside a private Telegram group that initially contained fewer than ten agency owners. Within the first few months, Pavlo introduced billing: those ready to pay could subscribe, while everyone else could continue using the product. Customers began paying, and the revenue went back into engineering and product development.

Once those early payments had established real demand, Pavlo convinced Radyslav Liaskovskyi to join the company full-time as the third co-founder, bringing 20 years of experience in infrastructure and architecture of high-load systems. The technical challenge expanded into building a multi-account, multi-platform environment capable of supporting creator businesses around the clock.

Today, OnlyMonster serves more than 2,000 customers and tens of thousands of users across more than 100 countries. What began as a small operational tool has developed into a broader business management platform for the creator economy, helping define the emerging software category, CreatorOps.

onlymonster.ai →

opensteps.ai

OPEN SOURCE · MIT · 2026–NOW

I build my own products with AI coding agents every day. And I see the same picture everywhere. Most tools around agents are made by engineers for engineers. But the biggest change AI brought is on the other side. People who can invent a product and run a business always depended on big engineering teams to build anything. Now they can build on their own.

Open Steps is my contribution to that side. A free, open source, MIT-licensed set of skills and tools for AI coding agents, made for people who create products. Writing code is no longer the main thing in building a product, and tools should catch up with that. I built it for myself first, I use it in my own work, and everything in it is public, including the test results and the cases where it doesn’t help.

This technology is just starting. I want to be part of building it.

opensteps.ai →

Not Safe For Business

PAVLO’S DIARY · TELEGRAM

Join his Telegram channel Not Safe For Business, his place to document what he’s learned along the way – building products, making mistakes, working through difficult decisions and thinking about where technology is heading.

If you’re curious how Pavlo approaches building companies, you’ll probably find it here.

Why “NSFB”

The name is a play on Not Safe for Work (NSFW), one of the internet’s oldest expressions. Long before OnlyFans existed, NSFW was used to label content that wasn’t appropriate to open in an office or other public setting – typically adult or otherwise sensitive material. After Leonid Radvinsky acquired OnlyFans in 2018, the platform became one of the internet’s defining NSFW brands, making the phrase instantly recognisable to anyone in the creator economy.

OnlyMonster was initially built for the OnlyFans ecosystem, and Pavlo makes a subtle nod to the world the company operates in while giving the phrase a completely different meaning. Not Safe for Business isn’t about adult content at all – it’s about entrepreneurship. It’s Pavlo’s personal diary about what it’s actually like to build companies.

Pavlo uses this channel as a designated place to write honestly about everything that happens behind the scenes. In many ways, it’s an extension of the principles OnlyMonster carries: openness, transparency and sharing the reality rather than the highlight reel. That’s why the channel is called Not Safe for Business.

t.me/nsfbnotes →