Tea and robots

In March, Natalia and I bought a small tea shop — our first joint business. We split roles right away: she handled sales and purchasing, I handled the technical side, the website, and advertising.

That summer I went to business training — thinking it would help grow the tea shop. It turned out differently: the idea came that new knowledge should be applied not to one venture, but to two at once. Tea was an offline story, and I wanted something online to pair with it. Then a friend told me about home robots and introduced me to a supplier — and I knew immediately that was it. We started moving in that direction together: I was building the website and ads again, including contextual advertising, only now for the new direction, and we took small steps.

But the main thing that year was not the shops themselves — it was the people. At the business training I met interesting folks — future and current entrepreneurs from Orenburg. Some of them I am still friends with more than ten years later.

More about the projects themselves — Home Robot and the tea shop — in the Business section.