In February 2024, you launched Salesdep.ai — essentially a productized version of what you had been doing by hand for ten years at Clever Consulting: according to various interviews, you built dozens of sales departments for Ukrainian businesses. At what exact moment — and after which specific client pain point — did you realize: "I can't scale any further with consulting, I need to build a SaaS"?
It was a cumulative effect. After seven years in consulting, I realized that scaling this business was extremely difficult, because only people with very deep expertise can work as consultants. As the owner of the company, I spent years training consultants to guarantee the quality of our consulting services. Afterwards, many of them went on to open their own companies using my methodology. To date, more than five companies have been created this way, and they are all operating successfully.
At the same time, responsibility for all consulting projects — and we ran up to five projects simultaneously — ultimately fell on me as the head of the business. It was an extremely high level of responsibility. At some point, I burned out and realized that something had to change.
On top of that, each new consulting project was no longer a challenge for me. I had accumulated so much expertise that I stopped feeling any professional growth: most situations were familiar, and there were almost no new intellectual challenges left.
That was when I decided to change the business model and my whole approach to doing business. That is how the idea of Salesdep.ai was born.
Salesdep.ai has chosen a niche where most "trendy" AI SDRs don't play: you focus on inbound conversion through messengers rather than cold outbound. Is this a deliberate positioning of "not competing with the big players" — or a consequence of the capital available to a Ukrainian founder? And who, then, is your real competitor?
We do focus on inbound conversion, but we also work with warm outbound on existing client databases. We see that there is almost no competition in this niche, because companies specializing in cold outbound usually don't dive deeply into either the client's business processes or the product they are selling.
With our background as a consulting company, we understand very well how to revive and reactivate client databases. That is why one of the most valuable cases for our clients is bringing former customers back into communication and moving them through the sales funnel again.
As for this being a consequence of the capital available to a Ukrainian founder, I would argue with that. In reality, Ukrainian founders don't always have access to much capital — sometimes even less than international founders do.
Our real competitor is not other AI solutions, but outdated communication methods: mass SMS campaigns, robocalls and other ineffective tools that businesses still use even though they no longer deliver results, and customers are tired of such messages.
We, on the other hand, bring old client databases back to life with modern AI tools. As a result, customers respond far more positively and see the company as an innovative business that uses the best modern technologies in its processes.

What specifically are you changing in the product or GTM in 2026 to accelerate MRR growth, and what metric do you use to set yourself a deadline?
In 2026, our main bet is on developing our partner program. It already allows us to attract new clients, and we expect this channel to drive exponential growth in both the number of clients and the usage of our platform.
This is a channel that cannot be built without the ability to create long-term partnerships. We have been building exactly these kinds of relationships for more than ten years in consulting, and today they have become one of our key competitive advantages.
Please tell us about the evolution of Salesdep.ai's technical team — how did changes in the CTO role affect the product architecture (the move to new models, AI Builder, the planned AI Voice/Video)?
At first, we partnered with the owner of a small development team, and for the first year and a half the product was built under the leadership of our previous CTO. During that time, we managed to build the platform's core architecture and get AI agents working in text-based communication.
However, we did not share the same vision for the company's development strategy or for the pace of product development. So I made the decision to look for a new technical partner.
We now work with Vitalii Miniailo. Thanks to his team, within a very short period we enabled AI agents to make phone calls via API telephony. This is quite a complex technical task: in real-time communication, it's not only correct answers and good objection handling that matter, but also latency, pauses, intonation and natural-sounding speech. We are continuing our testing and are already seeing very positive results.
Working with our current technical team, we also quickly adopt every new tool that can strengthen our product. In particular, we have already integrated AI agents into the platform that reconfigure the product on their own based on a client's text or voice request. There is no longer any need to change individual settings manually — the AI agent does it without human intervention, which significantly speeds up onboarding for new businesses.
We also constantly test new AI models, as well as providers of voice models and real-time communication solutions. In effect, we set up a kind of "battle" between them so that at any given moment we use the solutions that deliver the best quality of service.
Separately, we keep improving the AI agents themselves, expanding the range of possible dialogue scenarios and describing in detail how the agent should act in each situation.
We have also significantly deepened our integration with CRM systems. After a conversation ends, AI agents automatically update the CRM: they not only move leads who agreed to the proposed action to the next stage of the sales funnel, but also correctly handle those who declined, moving them to the appropriate statuses or sections of the funnel. In addition, AI agents create a task for the responsible manager to follow up with the client, and the full transcript of the conversation is automatically saved in the CRM.
All of this allows us to handle practically every task our clients set for us and to quickly reactivate large databases of "dormant" customers for the companies we work with.

You have gone through an intense series of accelerators — YEP, Startup Wise Guys, Challenger AI, Vacuum Deep Tech, Seeds of Bravery, Lanzadera, Techosystem delegations. Which of these actually had a revenue impact, and which should honestly be called a "networking experience" — and how would you advise other Ukrainian pre-seed founders to sort through them?
Yes, I really did apply to and take part in a whole series of acceleration programs. And I did it quite deliberately, for one very important reason.
Throughout my entire professional career, I had been developing my skills in building traditional businesses. I reached a certain level of professionalism in that, in particular by consulting businesses. I understand how to build or transform practically any small or medium-sized company, in Ukraine or abroad.
What I lacked was knowledge of how an IT product is built, how startups are created, how the venture market works, and so on. Essentially, by going through these programs, I entered this field in a fairly short time, learned how it operates, and met a huge number of experienced people, mentors and leaders of the Ukrainian ecosystem. And, of course, I put us on the map as a promising startup.
At the time we were going through these programs, we did not yet have a product that worked well enough, so we used the knowledge we gained there to develop our marketing strategy and the basic packaging of our business.
That said, we only gained a real opportunity to sell to clients within the last six months, once we had brought the product to metrics we can be proud of. Right now I am very actively focused on sales, so I have almost no time left for any training programs.
The only program I continue to take part in is Lanzadera, an accelerator in Valencia, where we are getting to know the local startup ecosystem and trying to attract clients in Spain.
I would say that each of these programs was valuable in its own way, and together they make up my personal learning journey.
I strongly recommend that other startups apply to everything that could be useful for their business, especially equity-free programs.
At our startup Salesdep.ai, I have built a whole funnel for applying to various programs, accelerators, trips and conferences. The number of programs we have taken part in, including missions to other countries, could be called substantial. But that is only a 10% success rate across the entire funnel of applications we have submitted.
And I believe this is exactly how any startup should operate in order to take advantage of the opportunities available on the market.
Your LinkedIn is now essentially the main asset of Founder-Led Sales for Salesdep.ai. For many pre-seed founders, managing social media seems like a waste of time that distracts from product development. How did you turn your personal brand into a working channel for attracting partners in the US and Europe — and what would you advise female founders who are shy about stepping into the English-speaking public space?
For me, LinkedIn was a real discovery at the time. Just two and a half years ago, my page was quite small — about a thousand connections. It was only when I started building the startup that I realized LinkedIn is essentially one of the main communication channels in the international professional environment.
I began systematically growing my network: adding people who interested me professionally, potential clients and partners, investors, business angels, representatives of venture funds, the Ukrainian tech ecosystem and our target markets in the US and Europe. Today my LinkedIn network has around 8,500 connections, and it has become a real business asset for Salesdep.ai.
I would advise founders not to treat LinkedIn simply as a place where you need to post something from time to time. It is daily, systematic work with your professional network. I would dedicate at least 30 minutes a day to it: adding relevant people, commenting, writing personal messages — by hand, not through mass automated campaigns. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with a sincere compliment, sometimes simply by supporting someone whose work you genuinely like. And, of course, it is important to create balanced content: not only professional but also personal, so that people see a real person behind the company and the product.
Separately, I strongly recommend learning how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. I have completed several professional courses and open marathons myself and I keep learning now. I even plan to launch my own marathon together with a strong LinkedIn expert.
As for the fear of stepping into the English-speaking public space, I don't think it's really about perfect English or about not feeling shy. If you are building an international business, you need to give the world a chance to learn who you are, what your expertise is and what you are creating. If we don't talk about ourselves, the world simply has no way of finding out about us. For a founder today, a personal brand is not a vanity metric but one of the tools for sales, partnerships, networking and fundraising.

The idea of "an AI agent that calls a customer" still makes many European B2B buyers skeptical because of the fear of "robotic spam." You are currently testing the Spanish market through the Lanzadera accelerator. What is the main barrier to the acceptance of AI salespeople that you face in the EU, and how does Salesdep.ai's technology (intonation, pauses, live dialogue) overcome this "artificiality effect" during a real call?
The biggest barrier we face right now is still people's psychology and the perception of artificial intelligence as a "robot." In my opinion, though, this is already a rather outdated idea of what AI can do. Today, the quality of the voice, the intonation, the natural pauses and the very logic of the conversation are so advanced that in many scenarios it is hard to tell an AI agent apart from a real person.
We understand that this market is only just taking shape. Right now, as I see it, the first 5–10% of businesses are already psychologically ready to implement AI in sales and customer support. But I am confident that this share will grow rapidly over the coming years, because for businesses it is an extremely effective and cost-efficient tool.
From a technological standpoint, at Salesdep.ai we have already worked through most of the things that used to create that very "artificiality effect": response delays, unnatural pauses, reactions to unexpected remarks from the customer, intonation, the use of humor and maintaining the live logic of the dialogue. We have also trained the system to work in situations where the phone connection quality is less than ideal.
So today our main task is no longer simply to prove that AI can speak naturally. Technologically, we have reached a level that allows us to deploy voice AI agents in the live environments of large corporate clients. The next barrier is to change the market's perception itself: from the image of "a robot that spams" to an understanding of the AI agent as a full-fledged tool for sales and customer support that can hold a natural dialogue, scale communication and significantly reduce its cost.
Salesdep.ai solves a pain point familiar to many startups in the Techosystem cluster: abandoned CRM databases and slow processing of inbound leads. If you were to give a short piece of advice to founders in our community: which single basic sales automation should they start with right now to reactivate "dormant" customers without burning the database with a dry robot?
The most important automation actually doesn't start with automation. If we're talking about reactivating a database of former customers, the first question to ask yourself is: what value proposition are we coming back to them with?
It shouldn't just be a "reminder that we exist," but a specific offer that is relevant and genuinely useful for the customer — an offer that's hard to refuse. And it's around this offer that we build the entire reactivation mechanism: we choose the right communication channel — a call, a messenger or a combination of both — design the dialogue scenario and automate the follow-up steps.
At Salesdep.ai, we have already worked out the technical side of this kind of reactivation quite well. But even with technology that can automatically process thousands of contacts, before every campaign we work separately with the business on the value proposition. Because that is what significantly shapes the final result.
So my advice to founders is very simple: don't start with the question "what can we automate?" Start with the question "why should this customer be interested in talking to us again?" Only then automate the delivery of that value and the dialogue around it. That is how you can reactivate a "dormant" database instead of burning it with dry, robotic communication.

You have said that your real competitor is outdated SMS campaigns and robocalls that everyone is tired of. Looking a few years ahead: will the classic role of the junior sales representative (SDR) disappear altogether, and what do you see as the ideal synergy, where the Salesdep.ai AI avatar takes over the routine and a human closes the deal?
I don't think the SDR profession will disappear as such, but it will definitely transform. And this isn't even a question of a few years. If we look at a horizon of the next six to twelve months, we can already see that artificial intelligence is technically capable of doing a significant share of an SDR's work.
AI can already find potential customers based on set criteria, collect and analyze information about them, prepare personalized messages, make the first contact, qualify the lead and bring them to the point where they are ready to talk to a sales manager. The only thing AI often still lacks is that very "human touch." Emails or LinkedIn messages written by AI are still fairly easy to recognize, especially when they follow typical templates.
At the same time, the very mechanics of customer acquisition are changing. Smarter approaches are coming to the fore. For example, a business builds a database of potential customers based on very specific criteria and then creates a kind of marketing "bubble" around these contacts: the person starts seeing the company and its product across different channels. Gradually, the cold contact warms up and at some point responds to an ad or another touchpoint.
This is where speed is extremely important. If a person has shown interest, AI should contact them almost immediately — ideally within a minute. From there, it can continue the conversation by text or voice, ask the necessary questions, understand the need, qualify the customer and bring them to the point where it makes sense to hand them over to a live manager.
That is how I see the ideal synergy between humans and AI in sales. Artificial intelligence takes over scale, speed and routine: prospecting, first contact, follow-ups, reactivation and qualification. The human steps in where a human is truly needed: in complex negotiations, building trust, handling non-standard situations and closing large deals.
And this model is available to businesses right now. Going forward, it will only grow stronger: AI will gradually take over more and more operational functions, while the human role will shift to where human relationships, empathy, negotiation and the ability to make non-standard decisions matter most.