The Selfmade in Belarus project aims to inspire young entrepreneurs who are just starting out.
We share the challenging yet fascinating story of a programmer-turned-entrepreneur from Navapolatsk who has been creating his own products for over 20 years, continuously investing in development, and never backing down during crises.
At the end, we include recommendations «to his 25-year-old self» that we hope will be useful!
Alexey Rudak is 39 years old. Born in Navapolatsk, he dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur since childhood. His career as a developer began with creating simple mobile applications for the iPhone.
For a long time, while working at IT companies, he tried to develop his own projects in parallel—creating educational and travel websites, accounting software, and mobile games. But none of these projects took off.
After discovering that translation apps were among the most downloaded in the App Store, Alexey decided to focus on them. He concentrated on neural translation and achieved notable success. Currently, Lingvanex’s machine translation service is used by 80 companies, including Rolls Royce, Liebherr, and Opera.
«You were born in Navapolatsk. This unusual city is hardly 'provincial,' but geographically it’s still the countryside. Did your childhood affect your career?»
«Among the benefits: growing up in Navapolatsk taught me to negotiate with difficult and troubled teenagers who were plentiful in my neighborhood. This skill proved useful in life for conducting negotiations.»
«Living in Navapolatsk, I didn’t understand how important it was for business success to be in the right environment, in the right social circle. I didn’t know where I could learn something useful or who to ask for advice. This became clear later when I moved to Minsk to study.»
«What else was useful during my life in Navapolatsk? My father took me on business trips and used them to explain how business works. He was working for a commercial company at that time.»
«Did these conversations shape your attitude toward business?»
«My father’s influence was strong in this regard, and it really formed the right attitude toward business. He emphasized the importance of connections for solving problems and wanted me to be more sociable and make more friends instead of sitting at the computer. He himself had a large social circle, and I saw how it worked.»
«You mentioned that you were 12 when your family got a laptop. Getting to know this rare device for the '90s probably had an impact too?»
«After that first encounter with a laptop, I really wanted my own computer. That laptop was very expensive, so I started saving for a regular PC. In a year, I saved enough for a Pentium 1. It was already outdated then, but it was mine.»
«It couldn’t handle good games, so I thought about how to overclock and modify it. And eventually, I succeeded. After overclocking and upgrading it, I played games for a while and planned to become a cybersportsman. But my father said you couldn’t make good money with that, and it was all nonsense. Then I got bored with games on my own.»
«By 11th grade, I decided to gather a team and make my own game to earn money from it. But nothing came of it: only one of the eight team members could program.»
«I experienced similar feelings again later when I first saw the iPhone 3G. I was so amazed by this device that I immediately decided to switch to a related project and learn a new programming language. It impressed me like the laptop in my childhood. Many ideas for games and applications immediately came to my mind.»
«When I came to Minsk at 18 and attended a Linux users meeting ('Linuxovka'), I learned that there was a different world out there. A world of smart and interesting people. That there was a nighttime book fair where you could buy IT books inexpensively. And there was a large selection of these books. The radio market in Zhdanovichi really surprised me when I saw such a large selection of PC components. Even earlier, the PTS computer technology exhibition on Kupala Street made a strong impression on me.»
«And a special impression was left by September 1, 2003, when the head of the IT department at BSTU gathered our group and told us what technologies they would teach us. This really inspired me.»
«At one point, over five or six years, you went through a difficult cycle several times in a row: employment → your own project → failure → return to employment. Do you remember which moment was the most painful?»
«It’s hard when you have few savings left and realize that soon you’ll have to look for a job to live. That’s when you understand that the idea didn’t work.»
«You created around 500 mobile applications in two years. At first glance, that sounds incredible. What did your typical day look like? How did you manage not to 'burn out'?»
«I worked 8-10 hours a day plus weekends. I really enjoyed this activity because I immediately saw the results of my work. In a couple of days, I made an application—a few days later it was in the store and immediately started bringing in money from advertising. It’s not stressful at all when you see that it’s working.»
«But when it doesn’t work—even working a couple of hours a day is very exhausting.»
«Users wrote that your early applications were cluttering the App Store.»
«Yes, I read those reviews. And I still read reviews about current products. At least it affects me. And it motivates me to constantly improve quality.»
«Do you remember the moment when your translation apps reached the first million downloads per month?»
«At that exact moment, I didn’t feel anything special.»
«But I remember well the moment when passive income from applications exceeded $600 per month. I realized that now I didn’t need to look for a job, as the money was enough for rent and food.»
«And now I could focus on developing these applications to earn more.»
«You talked about a personal crisis in 2019. In two and a half years, you invested $600,000 in development, money was running out, and you were in panic. And then your computer 'cooked' an English-Russian translator model all night, and in the morning you saw a quality result.»
«I constantly had thoughts that I should have continued making old mobile applications instead of venturing into Data Science, trying to do something large-scale and cool. And that everything turned out to be much more complicated than I thought.»
«At one point, I told an acquaintance about earnings from simple mobile applications. He succeeded, and his earnings from simple applications exceeded mine by more than 10 times.»
«But I continued. Because I wanted to finish what I started, not abandon it halfway.»
«Your app Phone Call Translator became Product of the Day on Product Hunt in October 2019. This service is a combination of speech recognition, neural translation, speech synthesis, and VoIP telephony. Even now, that looks cool.»
«That was the long and painstaking work of our team. We asked Chris Messina to post the product under his name. He’s the most popular person on Product Hunt. This decision gave us a lot of audience and votes. Besides, the Belarusian startup community supports each other’s projects on Product Hunt.»
«The main problem there was making the application work in two channels simultaneously. For transmission and reception, like a phone. Technically, it was time-consuming and difficult to do then. In 2020, we didn’t solve it, so the application works on the principle of a walkie-talkie [as a simplex communication system, where information is transmitted in only one direction]. In 2021, we put this project on pause and moved to the B2B market.»
«How many people are on your team now? How has the company and its culture changed during growth?»
«Now there are about 40 people. Everything is as usual. When the company grew, we divided people into departments and assigned managers to teams. We do financial planning. We try to automate everything possible and add analytics to all products to make the right decisions.»
«What’s harder—selling applications to regular users or convincing Rolls Royce to use your translator? How did the first negotiations with major clients go?»
«Convincing Rolls Royce is harder! The deal cycle can stretch to a year or more.»
«We gave the server version of the translator to our first client, Vivaldi, for free, just to test the sales model and integration into their product. And even that took more than a year.»
«And were the year and a half of negotiations and the process of integrating your product with Opera a big stress for your small team?»
«After we made a deal with Vivaldi, it was easy to negotiate with Opera. After all, the founder of Opera, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, is also the founder of Vivaldi. Opera saw that everything was working successfully in Vivaldi and began to trust us.»
«You once said: 'I’m 5,000 times behind Google—so what?' Is the IT giant still your direct competitor?»
«When we opened the company and were only making mobile applications, Google was indeed our direct competitor.»
«Now we’re focused on corporate solutions that can translate large volumes of text, audio, files without internet access, so that no one knows what you’re translating. If you translate through Google or ChatGPT, you’re giving them all your data. And it’s unclear where your data will go next.»
«For big businesses, it’s critical that data doesn’t leave the company. Especially for banks, insurance companies, factories, medical institutions, and so on. The Lingvanex translator works without internet access and is installed on your computer.»
«Besides, the cost of translation through Google depends on the volume of translated text, while our solution can translate an unlimited amount of information at a fixed price at a speed of 100,000 characters per second. With Google, translating 1 million characters costs $20. With us, it can cost 10 cents. For example, we can translate a million web pages/files in a couple of days for $100.»
«Do you have any products besides translation?»
«We started with a translator, but now we have speech transcription in 90 languages. It also works without the internet and can transcribe several people simultaneously, as well as create subtitles. It’s used in call centers for speech analytics.»
«How do you see the ideal buyers of Lingvanex?»
«A product company that deals with Natural Language Processing. Just larger than us. So that after the sale, there would be synergy between the companies.»
«In 2016, you were earning $25,000 a month, traveling to 15+ countries, and then you said: 'Everything became boring; cities all looked alike.' Was this some kind of existential crisis?»
«There was no crisis. I just wanted to create a serious, quality project. One that the whole world would know about and that would be useful.»
«My social circle is mostly startuppers. Looking at them, I saw what cool products they were making. I measured myself against them. In 2016, I went to the big international startup exhibition Slush in Finland for the first time (a whole bus of startuppers, 40 people, went then). On the way, we also stopped at a startup conference in Riga. There I saw the level of projects and wanted to do something of the same scale.»
«Did you have to sacrifice anything for Lingvanex? How has your personal life changed over the years of constant project development?»
«There weren’t any major problems. I try to maintain a balance between work and rest, otherwise, you can burn out, and my productivity will suffer. If you prioritize correctly and plan your time, you can find time for family and friends. It’s also important to take care of your health.»
«Do you often return to your hometown? Have you noticed any change in how your fellow townspeople relate to a successful local IT entrepreneur?»
«I rarely go to Navapolatsk, as I’ve already spent most of my life in Minsk. I communicate with those I was friends with in school and university, just as before.»
«And success—it’s all relative.»
«At this point, I don’t think I’ve achieved everything I wanted.»
«Why did you decide to release your Belarusian language translation model to the public?»
«I’m very grateful to my university Belarusian language teacher, who taught it so well and interestingly that he inspired me to study the Belarusian language on my own. And then he also inspired me to do a major research project on Belarusian ornaments and win a competition with it.»
«I also observe how people make YouTube channels in Belarusian. And a programmer friend participates in the Corpus.by project. I also wanted to contribute to the popularization of the Belarusian language. It’s going through difficult times right now.»
«Your salary is €5,000 with annual revenue of almost a million. Don’t you want to spend more on yourself after so many years of effort?»
«It’s worth noting that revenue is not the same as profit. The million is earned by the entire company per year. And we have about forty people on staff. After expenses for salaries, server rentals, various services, advertising, little remains. And what remains, we invest in improving the quality of products.»
«On the other hand, €5,000 is a very comfortable salary. My goal now is business development. So that revenue grows, and with it profit, from which dividends can then be paid.»
«You said that after selling the company, you want to 'go to the forest, catch fish.' Is this a metaphor or a specific plan?»
«I was joking about 'catching fish' when I gave an interview to Forbes. Knowing myself, I think I definitely won’t want to rest after selling the company. My plan is to continue working on language and speech processing technologies using AI. This drives me, I find it interesting.»
«What would you say to your 25-year-old self who was just starting out in business? What mistakes would you definitely avoid?»
«First. With money earned from applications, you should first secure sources of passive income. Make investments in various assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, buy a share in another business, and so on). And not invest everything in the development of one business in machine translation.»
«Second. Be more public, use all opportunities to promote your project.»
«Would you like to be remembered for something in the IT industry? What mark would a programmer from Navapolatsk like to leave on it?»
«I would like to make the best translator in the world for at least a few languages, the results of which would not need to be edited by a human afterward. So that world media would write about it.»
«I would also like to gather a large portfolio of clients from global companies. Become a recognized expert in my industry, write scientific papers on the topic, defend a doctoral thesis at a leading international university.»
«Ideally, I want to become a scientist in the field of Natural Language Processing using AI. Like the scientists on the team that created ChatGPT.»
