Kateryna — founder and CEO of SKERRY
We start with one question — how your clients find you. Then: competitor analysis, hypotheses, copywriting, design, build and launch. The price and the deadline are named before the start, the domain is registered in your name, and the 60-day warranty is written into the contract.
The path
Started studying marketing
Enrolled in marketing at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Not about websites yet — about how a person chooses and what moves that choice.
First projects
First paid marketing projects. That same year I wrote a paper on how content marketing shapes buying behaviour, and in January 2021 I interned as a marketer at the Lviv ice-cream plant: walking the aisles of Silpo, Metro and Auchan, looking at where our ice cream stood, where the competitor stood, and why people reached for theirs. The first screen of a website solves exactly the same task — explain in three seconds why this and not the thing next to it.
Mobile apps, 300+ projects
Then marketing for mobile apps: icons, screenshots, descriptions, keywords. Over 300 projects. That work is not judged by taste — it is judged by an A/B test: two versions are shown to real people and you see which one won. Four years in that environment leaves a habit you cannot shake: if I cannot show a number, I do not call it a result.
First websites
At first for people I knew, and as part of marketing work. It turned out most of a client’s problem is solved not by the ads but by the page those ads lead to: the traffic is there, the enquiries are not.
SKERRY
Opened a small development studio in Lviv: the full cycle built by hand, price and deadline named before the start. Up to five projects a month, no more than two of them large. A skerry is a small rocky island visible from the water: almost invisible on a map, yet sailors use exactly that to check their course. A small-business website works the same way — it is not the biggest who wins, but the one noticed first.
Attention is the most expensive currency there is. No ad budget pays for itself if what meets a person is a website like a thousand others. A business wins in the second when someone catches on to you and feels: these people know their craft.