Description:
In this episode of The Builders, Matt sits down with Oksana Kovalchuk, founder and CEO of a long-running UI/UX agency with a story that feels like a masterclass in survival, rebuilding, and sheer entrepreneurial grit. Oksana founded her company at twenty, grew it to seventy people, and enjoyed years of booming demand… until a perfect storm hit. COVID wiped out more than half of their clients, and the partner supplying 80 percent of their revenue suddenly stopped paying, leaving her with over $100,000 in unpaid invoices and a team she could no longer support.
What followed was a crash many founders quietly fear: blocked messages, disappearing partners, and the realization that her agency had to shrink from seventy people to only five just to survive. Oksana talks candidly about the emotional fallout, the denial and grief that follow a blow like this, and the moment she accepted that she had to fire people she cared about in order to keep the company alive. Through it all, she frames business as an instrument — something that should ultimately make your life better, not hollow you out.
But the rebuild is where the real builder’s mindset emerges. With a tiny team, she clawed the agency back by taking any project she could find, relearning sales discipline, and reestablishing the fundamentals she’d been able to ignore during the boom years. Her honesty about mistakes, trust, cash discipline, and leadership under pressure offers a blueprint for founders navigating their own storms. This conversation is equal parts cautionary tale and reminder that you can rebuild from almost anything if you stay clear-eyed, humble, and willing to do the work.
Key Takeaways:
- Growing fast is exciting, but relying on one revenue source is a structural risk that compounds silently.
- Crises force clarity — from financial discipline to team alignment to true client loyalty.
- Cash flow rules everything; a profitable business can collapse if payments stop.
- Leadership during collapse requires emotional resilience and decisive action, even when it hurts.
- A smaller, tighter, more intentional team can often rebuild stronger than a bloated one.
- You can come back from almost anything if you stay humble, rebuild your systems, and start again.
Oksana Kovalchuk
I wrote my first line of code at 5 and started my first company at 16. Since then, I’ve been a CEO for over 5,578 days – long enough to learn that “being nice guy” doesn’t pay the bills, outcomes do. As a dev I’ve authored three apps that hit #1 in the US App Store, created the biggest @parseapp based product, and was featured by Mark Zuckerberg on stage at #F8.
Today, I build my UX Design agency and scale products with the same bias for action: ship, measure, iterate. I mentor founders and funds as a @techstars and other VCs, where my advice tends to be blunt: focus the roadmap, kill vanity metrics, and design around activation, retention, and revenue.
THE MEAT OF IT!
1. Early Ambition and the First Build
- Founding her agency at twenty
- “Brave and stupid” energy and rapid early growth
- Running on courage and instinct in those first years
2. The Boom Before the Collapse
- Scaling to 70 people across design and development
- Heavy reliance on one partner supplying 80 percent of revenue
- The comfort that led to pausing sales and marketing
3. COVID, Crisis, and the 100K Blow
- How the collapse of travel and aviation crushed their pipeline
- The partnership failure, unpaid invoices, and total disappearance
- Processing the emotional shock and the stages of grief
4. The Hard Rebuild: From 70 Down to 5
- Firing most of the team to survive
- Keeping only the strongest performers
- Swallowing pride and taking any project at any rate to stay alive
5. The Mindset Shift and the Lessons Learned
- Why loyalty only matters when a client pays
- Separating personal money from company money
- Crisis as a forcing function for clarity and leadership
Check out these related Episodes:
- Episode 251: Damon Darnall – Building Opportunity in a $30B Civilian Drone Industry on the Rise
- Episode 249: Nikita Vakhrushev – Building Smarter E-Commerce Growth Through Email, SMS, and Retention
- Episode 246: Ed Oyama -The Power of Simple Videos: Building Trust and Clarity in Business
