The roundup's author, Alexey Kharchenko, selected projects that received financing but never became visible to audiences. The other five projects on the list are mentioned without detailed analysis, while Mail.ua stands out because its story ended in a sale rather than a shutdown.
A Million-Dollar Mail Service
Mail.ua was launched by Alexey Mas, one of the founders of the Ukrainian Banner Network. Together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich he created it in January 1999: the network was written in Perl in three weeks, and expenses came to about one hundred dollars. Later Mas headed the Ukrainian Portal, and in 2008 he became the architect of a new mail service.
Mail.ua entered closed testing on August 22, 2008. The project was run by the Internet Invest group, and Alexander Olshansky participated in its investments. According to, by August 2008 the investment already exceeded one million dollars, and it was this sum that became the project's main financial bet.
Olshansky admitted that the project found itself at the point it should have reached by 2008. In his words, "Initially, the idea of competing with Gmail was a bit crazy." Gmail, Google's mail service, had by then become the main benchmark for any mail project, and competing with it on its own turf was almost impossible even with money.
Money Without Advertising
Mas explained one of the reasons for the failure, which AIN.UA cites as the version of one of Mail.ua's founders:
"of the $1 million in investment, only $20 thousand was spent on advertising the project."
A mail service that needs an audience gets almost no new users without advertising. A resource that cost a million dollars effectively lived on its own inertia and on what it had managed to attract in the first months.
In those same months Mas ran into problems with another project as well. In December 2008, Ministry of Internal Affairs officers seized the servers of Infostore, Mas's file-sharing service, and the search lasted 12 hours. This was not directly connected to Mail.ua, but it meant that the team's main resources came under pressure at the same time.
A Sale Instead of Takeoff
In July and August 2012, Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group, the largest Russian internet holding, which owns the mail service of the same name. According to unofficial data, the deal went through for approximately five hundred thousand dollars, and about three hundred thousand users were transferred to Mail.ru. The purchase was confirmed by Mail.Ru Group vice-president Anna Artamonova.
Mas himself continued to work in the industry after that. He was one of the organizers of the iForum conference, in 2016 he became an advisor to Kyivstar on digital technologies, and according to he headed the operator's innovation laboratory for three years. In 2019 he launched "craft social networks" with money from donors.
Alexey Mas died on October 6, 2021 in Kyiv at the age of 47 after an illness. His death was reported on October 8 by his brother Viktor Mas.
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