Dancing Entrepreneurs from Ukraine
In late October, Kyiv became the venue of the Ukraine Ye! Boost Training & Hackathon where a number of talented young entrepreneurs shared their ideas and learnt more about business. 26-year-old Tetiana Zadorozhniuk, the CEO of ‘where2.dance’, was among them. ‘Where2.dance’ is a web-platform that helps people find dancing schools all around the world.
Tetiana was born in the small village of Vinnitsa, Ukraine, studied in the capital and graduated from Kyiv National University of Economy and Trade with a diploma in Organization Management and Trade.
The idea of the ‘where2.dance’ project belongs to Tetiana's partner, Fedor Karalenko, because he could not find a dancing school next to his hotel during a stay in Brazil. After some research, Tetiana and Fedor discovered that this problem exists in many different cities. They conducted market research to validate their idea, and finally decided to take on the challenge and create a new business because there was sufficient demand.
It was sometimes difficult for Tetiana to have faith in the idea, especially when something would go wrong. However, Fedor always believed in ‘where2.dance’, and this helped Tetiana to keep going and continue on her business path. She says that if you, as CEO or product owner, believe in your brand and show people that your team is strong enough to build a global company, you can put yourself in a position to succeed.
When ‘where2.dance’ was first created, Tetiana hardly had time to sleep and communicate with her family and friends because she was busy organizing the international team from four different countries which meant coordinating different mentalities and time zones. She discovered that the world of entrepreneurship is full of unknown words for her, such as Trello, Jira, Kanban, Scrum, Redmine, and many others . The most important lesson for her was that an entrepreneur should always stay within budget and time constraints.
Of course, Tetiana met many obstacles on her business path that, in her opinion, are common for entrepreneurs from many countries. These challenges included finding good mentors, keeping clients for a long period and dealing with country's tax systems. Nevertheless, together with her team she worked hard and managed to overcome them.
‘Where2.dance’ only started less than a year ago, but it already has a web-platform. You can access it worldwide just using ‘where2.dance’. The team today consists of 12 people, nine of whom are younger than 30 years old. There are three developers, two QA-specialists, a database operator, two content managers, a sales manager and three co-founders. Now, they are working on global coverage and marketing activities and by the way, they are looking for a marketing manager.
In the future, Tetiana envisions ‘where2.dance’ as a company that will change the structure of the dancing market, connect dance businesses and dance lovers, and help people to share dance culture worldwide.
"Dancers can be good or bad, but everyone absolutely can dance!”
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