Oleksii Mas began on the internet in the late nineties. In 1999, together with fellow student Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he created the Ukrainian Banner Network, which sold advertising on Ukrainian websites. In 2000, the Ukrainian portal UAportal, backed by investor Alexander Soroka, launched ‘Tree of Friends,’ the first social network of the Ukrainian portal. In 2007, UAportal was sold to the holding.
The next project was Infostore, a photo hosting service that operated from 2003 and 2004. Its history ended in December 2008, when police seized its servers and the project closed. In 2009, Mas became co-organizer of iForum, one of Ukraine’s main internet conferences, and in 2012 Mail.ua, co-founded by Alexander Olshansky, was sold to Mail.ru for about $0.5 million.
In 2015, Mas joined Kyivstar and became IT & Digital Advisor to the company’s president, Peter Chernyshov. Later he headed the operator’s Innovation lab. In April 2016, the company announced the telecom accelerator ‘VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar,’ and in December of that year four startups from the accelerator went into production. At the end of July 2019, Mas left Kyivstar and took up his own project.
The Third Social Network
He calls ‘Craft Social Networks’ his third experience in this field. The project promises privacy, the ability to move a community along with its audience to another domain, open source, gamification and expert ratings. Newcomers first enter a ‘sandbox,’ that is, a closed zone where they can get comfortable before gaining full access to the platform.
Mas frames the main task not in terms of reach but in terms of quality of communication. In his words, ‘Our business is to cultivate expertise.’ In this logic, expert ratings should show who in the community truly understands the subject, and gamification should retain participants who would otherwise quickly leave.
Syndicate and Rounds
Financing is built on a syndicate. It has about 280 members, mostly opinion leaders, and contributions range from $100 to $1,000. The plan envisages rounds of $100,000, $1 million and $10 million, after which the project should reach a capitalization of one billion dollars. Mas formulated this goal directly:
‘We want to be a “unicorn,” we want to achieve a capitalization of $1 billion’
The term ‘unicorn’ denotes a startup valued at a billion dollars or more. Some of the project’s mentors advise starting with a first round of $250,000, but the plan Mas outlined assumes a more modest start.
The project does not yet have a lead investor. Negotiations are ongoing with five large companies, and participants’ shares will be distributed only after legal formalization. The difficulty is that at the time of the interview, the law on crowdinvesting in Ukraine was still being drafted, and the legal framework for such a model remained incomplete.
Market and Gamification
Mas estimates the market at about 100,000 communities in Ukraine with a potential of up to one million. He names gamification of small business loyalty programs as a key direction. As a benchmark, he cites estimates of the American gamification market, which range from $3 to $20 billion.
Mas describes the competition harshly. Without distinctive features, a new project drowns among lookalike groups, and he warns about this directly:
‘You won’t be able to stand out against another community, you’ll simply be one more community on Facebook’
That is why the bet is on tools that ordinary Facebook groups lack: their own rules, ratings and moving an audience to one’s own domain. Mas himself ties the project’s success to whether it can lure opinion leaders away from existing communities.
At the time of the interview, the syndicate numbered about 280 members, negotiations with five large companies were ongoing, and the shares and the crowdinvesting law were awaiting legal formalization.
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