Vitalii Sydorenko has spent over a decade building tech products, first for his own startups and now to support other founders. His journey started with little knowledge about B2B SaaS, but through trial, error, and persistence, he built a market-leading platform, went through an exit, got a Google grant, and gained deep insight into what makes a product succeed.
Today, Vitalii Sydorenko is the CBO at Gearheart, an AI-powered product development studio. Since his arrival, Gearheart has taken a new direction, rethinking what development services should look like in a world of rapidly evolving SaaS and AI. The studio is no longer just writing code; it's building products with a founder's mindset.
This shift is especially relevant as the SaaS and startup landscape in the US and globally demands more than just execution. Founders today need development partners who understand product strategy, who can adapt to the AI shift, and who bring structured, startup-native processes to the table.
This is the story of how Vitalii helped restart a traditional dev agency, turning it into a product-first, AI-powered studio—and how Gearheart now sees its mission as building tools that "create time" and supporting founders in growing the next generation of SaaS.
"I still see and introduce myself as a serial entrepreneur building tech products. The only difference is, today I'm building a service business and helping other founders build products while avoiding the mistakes I once made. That matters to me."
From LOOQME to CBO of Gearheart
Vitalii began his journey at 22, right after graduating from university. As he recalls, his mindset back then followed a simple, logical pattern: finish school and university, gain some experience working for someone else, and then start your own business.
That's exactly how it went. He started working at a media monitoring company that provided PR and marketing departments with reports listing brand mentions in the media. He quickly developed deep expertise in this niche, rising from a junior role to managing multiple key departments.
But youth and ambition kicked in. There were too many things Vitalii didn't like, both in terms of internal processes and how the industry operated. Most media mentions were still gathered manually, partially automated at best, and someone had to compile them all into a Word document.
Vitalii wanted to build a consolidated system that would automatically collect mentions from all media types—TV, radio, print, online, and social—and generate a report for the user. Back in 2012, nothing like this existed in Ukraine.
"I guess I had a sort of childlike resistance to how everything worked. I really believed I could do better. So I set out to build my own platform, without even knowing what B2B SaaS really was or how to build a startup."
That's how LOOQME was born, a media monitoring platform. Within five years, it became the market leader in Ukraine with 40% market share and expanded to Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Romania. Clients included McDonald's, Lenovo, Deloitte, Samsung, and in total, 300+ companies used the product.
But the path wasn't easy. Vitalii went through serious ups and downs: building a product nobody wanted, falling out with co-founders, merging with another company, scaling to 100 people and then cutting back by half, and finally releasing 37 versions before things clicked.
"Some things feel funny now, but back then, I didn't get it. Like, of course, it's the user who knows what the product should be. I kept trying to move clients away from manual reports (which we still did as a separate service) and onto the platform. I thought they were just old-school. The company was growing 300% a year, but no one wanted the platform—just Word reports. So I kept adding features, waiting for that one that would make it take off. Until I sat down with some clients and watched how they used what we gave them. It turned out they could get insights from our manual reports in 5 minutes, while using the platform took them at least 30, and still didn't give them what they needed. In version 37, we redesigned the UI, removed everything extra, and 50% of our clients immediately switched to the platform."
Despite LOOQME's success, Vitalii stepped down as CEO and later made an exit. At a certain point, he and his partners had very different visions for the business.
"That was another crucial lesson. Choosing the right co-founders is everything. But it's not just a one-time decision. You have to realign regularly on your mission, vision, and goals. It's a long road, and things change. You've got to keep checking: are we still looking in the same direction?"
After LOOQME: Hunting for New Ideas
After LOOQME, Vitalii knew he wanted to keep building products. He still saw himself as a founder. So he joined a startup studio and a VC fund to explore new ideas and grow his experience in the startup ecosystem.
"That was a really eye-opening experience. I had to research ideas that could become unicorns. I built a whole process around it—collecting and analyzing product ideas, doing market research, talking to target users. Basically doing what early-stage founders do. Just on a bigger scale. I also analyzed startups that came to us for investment. That's how I quickly learned to see if an idea was worth investing in. I saw a lot of startups."
That period also gave birth to his next big idea, aside from a handful of smaller attempts that never made it past the idea list.
This time, he entered the e-commerce space. The goal: help online stores make mobile shopping faster and more intuitive. Mobile conversion rates are still significantly lower than desktop. So Vitalii built a module similar to Instagram Stories that e-commerce sites could easily add to their store. Brands could record videos and engage users almost like on social media.
Eventually, the idea evolved into Jiffsy, a mobile-first storefront with AI recommendations. Think TikTok-style shopping. Customers swipe through video-based product stories. The AI tracks what they watch and recommends more.
"With Jiffsy, my journey was very different from LOOQME. LOOQME was bootstrapped. With Jiffsy, we raised funding, joined Europe's top accelerator Startup Wise Guys, and got a Google grant. I got first clients and sales even before we started building. We onboarded over 30 clients from the US and Canada. But unfortunately, we never found product-market fit. We needed a big pivot. And by then, my co-founder and I were already exhausted. So we decided to shut it down and come back later with a new, better idea."
From Founder to Partner: Joining Gearheart
At this point, Vitalii moved from Ukraine to San Francisco. He started rebuilding his network, talking to founders, and searching for his next move.
"As I was adapting and talking to more and more founders, I realized something. I had experience and insight that could really help. Around the same time, my brother, who owned a development agency, asked me to help him rethink its positioning. Outsourcing was in crisis. It was clear we needed a new approach. That's how I became a partner at Gearheart. And that's when we started a major shift."
Building Processes Rooted in Founder Experience
By that time, Gearheart had already been on the outsourcing market for over 10 years, with a solid US client portfolio, 70+ products delivered, a strong full-stack team, and large custom projects, like SmartSuite, a work management platform named 2024 SaaS Startup of the Year in Silicon Valley.
"The first thing we did was reposition as a product studio. What's important for me—we help founders build products, not just sell dev services. That's why we picked the startup type we know best: B2B SaaS companies focused on operational efficiency. That's what I understand from the founder side. That's what our engineers know from the tech side. And I'm glad my path and experience can help other entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes I made."
For Vitalii, those mistakes often boiled down to inefficient use of time and money. The classic critique of outsourcing agencies is that they profit from stretching hours and don't really care about product success. While that's a generalization, bad examples do exist.
Gearheart operates differently. Their success depends on the client's success. If a product fails, it hurts them too, even if the original estimate was delivered on time and on budget.
"Even before I joined, the processes were very solid and transparent. But the focus was mostly on engineering. It was more like: show us what you want to build, give us a basic spec, and we'll handle the rest—tech stack, team, delivery. That's still valid. But now, for example, if I see that the founder hasn't done enough research, we pause and explain why it's too early to code. We help them take the right steps first."
Beyond Code: Working Closely with Founders
Vitalii emphasizes that founders who come in with a great but raw idea, strong niche experience, but no clear product vision, need a special process. That's what Gearheart offers now.
Vitalii mapped out the founder journey: idea & problem, research, user interviews, prototype, feedback, MVP, sales, scale. And built Gearheart's process around that.
"When founders approach us, we figure out exactly where they are in that journey. At the research and validation stage, we act as mentors. We teach how to calculate market size, how to do user interviews, and we build a prototype. During MVP development, we work like a technical co-founder, just without taking equity. We handle everything a CTO usually would: roadmap, team, delivery, with no micromanagement from the client."
For growth-stage startups, the approach changes. Most already have in-house teams focused on core functionality.
"Series A+ startups have different needs. Their core product is handled in-house. But there's always secondary work or urgent tech bottlenecks—scale, performance, architecture. That's where we step in with senior engineers who can integrate seamlessly and solve high-priority issues fast."
Gearheart as a "Founder-Friendly Dev Studio"
Gearheart brands itself as "built by founders, for founders." The culture is centered on trust, shared goals, and long-term relationships.
Vitalii's partners—his brother Volodymyr Sydorenko, founder of Gearheart, and Mykola Voronkin, the studio's COO share the same vision and values. Together, they're building a service focused on founders' needs, worries, and challenges.
"Just selling code is boring. What matters is product expertise. Engineering value is going down in the AI era. Of course, our developers use Cursor, Copilot, Lovable to speed up prototyping and reduce costs. We integrate complex LLMs. Our team evolves with the tech trends. But product thinking—that's becoming even more valuable. And we want founders to know they can count on us for that. We understand their journey. We're here to support them. Our mission is 'We build time machines to get more life out of life.' Like the founders we work with, we want to build meaningful products—ones that help people live, work, and create real impact."
Supporting Local Communities & Startup Ecosystems
Since moving to San Francisco, Vitalii has made it part of his mission to support the local startup ecosystem. Gearheart now sponsors and co-hosts events every month. Vitalii often speaks, mentors, and shares his experiences.
"We're especially active with pitch competitions where founders can connect with investors and get real feedback. I regularly post about these on LinkedIn; if someone wants to attend, they can just message me. We're also planning to launch our own events soon, more like masterminds, with honest conversations, pain points, failures, and lessons. The goal is to build a kind of founder club—a space to make the journey easier."
In the Near Future
Today, Gearheart is developing several large-scale products—including a global HR platform for managing international remote teams, a HIPAA-compliant referral platform for dental clinics, and an analytics solution for e-commerce businesses.
Looking ahead, Vitalii and the Gearheart team are doubling down on their focus: working with startup founders. They're actively building AI-powered components for internal use and helping clients integrate AI into their products, from smart features to full-scale AI agents.
In the next few years, Vitalii says Gearheart will launch its own products while continuing to help other startups grow.
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