Nikita Bogdanov

My name is Nikita Bogdanov. I was born in 1987 into a pretty modest family: just my mom, my older brother, and the best grandma ever.

I went to a regular school until sixth grade, then got ambitious and applied to one of the top three gymnasiums. Plot twist: I got in but couldn't keep up and got kicked out. Classic overachiever crash. But somehow I stumbled into a decent physics school, which honestly worked out better anyway.

Around 14, I developed an unhealthy obsession with 80s disco music. I wanted to meet the artists I loved but had absolutely no money for concert tickets. So, like any reasonable teenager, I decided to become a concert promoter. I built a website claiming I could organize shows (I had no idea how exactly), then emailed bands asking if they needed help. Most ignored me. A few replied saying they only needed booking inquiries. Good enough. I started hustling on forums, figuring I'd work it out along the way. Somehow this scheme led me to a real great producer who became one of the most important people in my life. A true mentor, a wise and genuinely kind person, and a dear friend I'm grateful to have. He taught me how to think bigger, gave me my first iPhone, and still helps me navigate life's bigger decisions.

At 16, I passed the entrance exams to one of the top universities and got into the Physics department. Why physics? I loved Back to the Future and thought studying how the spacetime continuum actually works would be amazing. Plus I didn't need concert tickets anymore: my producer friend could get me in to meet the people I admired.

I studied physics, took some entrepreneurship classes, and launched a couple of small projects during university with tiny revenue and zero profit, but they were fun. One was a "social alarm clock" where strangers would call each other to wake up in the morning. It was weird. People liked it. We made $54 when we turned it into a paid service instead of the free social thing it was before. Big money energy.

Before graduation, I worked night shifts at a hotel and watched tourists wander around completely lost. They had no idea what the city was really like. So I thought: what if exploring a city was a game? We started hiding paper clues around the streets and built an SMS system that sent riddles and checked answers. This was before smartphones existed, so yes, we were texting puzzles like it was 2007. Because it was. Eventually we made apps. It became the first automated city quest in Europe. The money wasn't life-changing, but watching strangers run around solving our puzzles? That never got old.

Then we discovered free walking tours in Berlin and thought, "This should exist everywhere." So we launched them in Italy, Hungary, Spain, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Turkey, New Zealand, and Australia. Our guides were passionate, fun, and consistently ranked top three on TripAdvisor. We felt like geniuses. Then COVID happened and reminded us we were not, in fact, geniuses. We shut it down. But before that, we'd given travelers around 9 million hours of guided tours. That part I'm still proud of.

In 2018, I thought it would be cool if everyone could design their own clothes. Choose the length, pockets, fabric, color, size, everything. We started with puffer jackets (why not) and expanded from there. It took three years to make it work properly. Patience is not my strength, and we had to build our own production lines, our own ERP system to track everything, because nobody in European fashion was making 200+ totally different custom pieces daily at affordable prices. We survived two big crises: first technical, then financial. Character-building, to say the least. We've now helped over 170,000 people across Europe and the US create custom pieces with their names on the tags. Which is cool, even if most of them probably can't pronounce mine.

In 2019, we saw subscription boxes everywhere: cosmetics, comics, snacks. We thought: why not entertainment? So we built a service where people paid $9/month and got tickets to city events. Organizers got promotion, users got experiences, we got to feel clever. Around 20,000 people tried new things because of it.

Now I'm building a gamified daily planner. The idea: you earn coins for completing tasks and spend them on rewards for yourself. It makes productivity feel less like punishment and more like a game you might actually win. Plus, you get proof that you deserve that treat you were going to buy anyway.

I'm also nerding out on the science of happiness. I took courses from Stanford and Yale (yes, I'm that guy now), and I'm working on a service that helps people live more intentionally, backed by real research and a bit of AI magic. Whether it'll work? Ask me in a year. :)