Today’s episode is a classic tale of rags to riches, with Denys Zhadanov, VP of Marketing at Readdle. Readle is a successful app company with over 100 million downloads and a legacy that extends beyond the launch in the App Store, all the way back to the beginning of iPhone.

Having only just turned 30, he is so young given his accomplishments and his early adoption as one of the first creators of Apps, some that have gone on to inspire the technology we take for granted today.

We dive into Denys humble beginnings, raised in a small village in the Ukraine, his father worked as a communications engineer for the KGB and moved around from country to country until it’s collapse in 1991. He gathered huge inspiration from his mother's determination to accomplish something great, as she went from consulting farmers to becoming governor of the region where they lived. This would set him and his brother up with the right mindset for creating their business later in life.

In 1998, him and his brother got their first pc and got to work almost immediately, geeking out on the potential of this new technology and learning to code, by the time the first iPhone dropped in 2007, they’d be one of the first people in the Ukraine to own one and set about making it easier for others to use it, by offering a cloud based solution for things that the iPhone couldn’t do as standard. All the things our phones now do off the shelf but back then didn’t, including apps similar to what we see in DropBox and Google Docs now.

Their creativity earned them a prize place on the front page of the App Store on the day of its launch, and as a personal invite directly from Apple, they have been a huge help in the Readdle’s success. In the first few months they had 60,000 downloads and made their first $20,000, which they invested straight back into the company. Bootstrapping their way to the staggering success they’ve achieved today.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• From a shared room in Odessa to becoming a Silicon Valley tech giant
• Hard work, intelligence and a whole lot of good luck and good timing
• How positivity and high energy keeps connected with the right people
• Redesigning how we email with Spark Email app
• Innovating fast is the only way to stay ahead, the real David and Goliath story.
• How to become an early innovator that inspires industry leaders like google and apple.
• The correct way to think about the future - with 100 life goals.
• People will share when you offer something with real value
• Why it’s much harder to find peoples problems than most think.
• How you can accomplish half of your life goals in 1 single year!
• The correct way to cold approach a business connection

Hope you enjoyed this week’s episode with Denys, you can find out more about him here:

Denzhadanov.com

Readdle.com/

Twitter

Denys’s Instagram

Readdle Instagram

Full show notes: https://www.ikonns.com/podcast/episode40

Produced by Jason Sanderson - Podcast Tech