With all the buzz around Tinkoff Bank’s sad rebranding, I figured it’s the right time to share a story about how Oleg Tinkov actually helped me launch my first business back in 2009. And no, this isn’t one of those “he inspired me” stories, he really helped.

Back in high school, I got into design, and by my first year of college, I was working at design studios around St. Petersburg. Around the same time, Oleg Tinkov started filming his “Business Secrets” – interviews with entrepreneurs he knew. I remember binge-watching those episodes. At the time, he felt like a total role model to me, this wild mix of rock’n’roll vibes, raw energy and fun, fearless marketing.

In my third year of college, in 2009, another economic crisis hit Russia and suddenly businesses lost much money. At the time, I was working in a company that focused on “premium” websites, not quick, cookie-cutter stuff, but full-on custom builds. We spent real time talking with clients instead of just handing them a generic brief and cranking out templated designs. But as the crisis hit, the head of the studio announced it was time to go assembly-line: fast, standard solutions. I was 20, full of idealism, and said no. Naturally, I got fired and honestly, it was fair.

After I got fired, I went to my parents and told them I had to quit school and immediately enroll in a design program in London, because I couldn’t grow in St. Petersburg anymore. They, quite reasonably, said no.

After thinking it over again, I decided that getting a diploma might not be such a bad idea after all. Since I had just been fired from the best studio in the city, there was really only one option left – start my own branding company (of course). I teamed up with a project manager from my previous job and we got to work on our website. We worked at his place, coming up with a name for the company, calling other design studios to better understand how they worked and creating fake projects to fill out our portfolio. We named the studio agrrr.com. Our email was emc2@agrrr.com and the favicon on the site was literally an icon of Jesus, because, well, the word “favicon” clearly contains the word “icon.”

While getting everything ready, we realized that no serious company could exist without an office. So we rented a space in a warehouse complex for $200, 15 square meters, deep in the heart of an industrial zone. Next door, there were about 50 migrant workers sleeping in their unit and the bathroom was so disgusting that even the flies couldn’t handle it, they basically dropped dead from the smell and the view.

On February 13, 2010, we launched our website and I sent a message to Oleg Tinkov, who at the time was hugely popular on LiveJournal. LiveJournal was a blogging platform, basically the predecessor to today’s social media.
Here’s what the message said:

Hi Oleg,
We don’t need your money. But today we launched a branding company – AGRRR.com If you really want to support young entrepreneurs, post this message on your LiveJournal.

Oleg posted it. He said he didn’t even have look at the site, just decided to help some young guys. We couldn’t have asked for better publicity the day after launch. By today’s standards, it’d be like Taylor Swift letting a band formed yesterday open for her show. It was a hit – thousands of people visited the site.

We started getting inquiries from clients who had found us through Oleg’s LiveJournal. One of them was an invitation to join a pitch for Mirel – the biggest confectionery company in the Urals. We actually won that pitch and signed a contract for what felt to us like an insane amount: $40,000. For context, my salary at the previous company was around $1,000.

At the time we won the pitch, we hadn’t even registered the company yet. And we started working without any upfront payment. To officially register the company and fly to Chelyabinsk for our first business trip, all before we saw a single ruble from the client, I borrowed $1,700 from my mom to buy the tickets.

Some of the works we managed to do at Agrr

Then came the security check, they couldn’t figure out why the company had been registered on the same day the contract was signed. Trips to Chelyabinsk, lectures on cake recipes, 30 hours of interviews with key people at the factory, a fancy 60-square-meter office (obviously), our first employees, and of course, a full-time accountant, who also happened to be my partner’s sister (because obviously a five-person company needs proper bookkeeping). The branding agency lasted about a year, and after that, I moved on to other projects.

Without Oleg Tinkov, we’d never have taken off like that at the start. But more than that, it was a signal of support – an act of belief and approval in the spirit of entrepreneurship. That same boost still shows up in the projects I’m working on today. I don’t think many people have done as much for entrepreneurs now in their 30s and 40s as Oleg has.

Oleg, thanks, you’re cool!