The most costly mistakes in business begin not with the wrong answers, but with a problem that was framed incorrectly.
A company searches for a new marketing tool, complains about a changing market, and tries to build a complex “digital ecosystem”—practically a hadron collider. Everyone is busy; everyone is working hard. But how effective can all that activity be if the actual objective is much simpler: attract more customers and increase sales?
“My first question is usually simple: What is the actual ask? What exactly are we trying to achieve? Without that, you can work very hard and still move in the wrong direction,” says entrepreneur Stanislav Dykhanov.
This question has followed him through projects that, at first glance, seem difficult to place side by side: technology products, government digital initiatives, and real estate development in Kazakhstan.
Not a Solution for Its Own Sake
It did not begin with a legend about a flash of inspiration, an investor, and a company built over a weekend.
He was eighteen or nineteen, studying at university, wanted to earn money, and had a perfectly straightforward thought: if you know how to build websites, why not build them?
That is how the Adart agency came about. Its first projects quickly revealed the difference between a solution that appeals to the client and one that helps the client’s customers. A business owner might want an extensive company history, photographs of the team, and a message from the director. Visitors usually needed something else: to understand quickly what was being offered, how much it cost, and what to do next.
At the same time, his entrepreneurial work intersected with applied mathematics. At Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, he earned a PhD in applied mathematics and studied discrete models and methods for analyzing website structures, treating pages, connections, and information flows as elements of a single system.
In 2022, the article Analysis of the Structure of Web Resources Using the Object Model was published in the Scopus-indexed Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies. Later, the objects of analysis shifted from pages and links to users, products, business units, and commercial data.
When a Website Stops Being a Storefront
One of the first serious tests of this approach came in the real estate market. In the mid-2010s, many developers’ websites were still little more than digital brochures. They described reliability, infrastructure, and comfort, while analytics showed that buyers were usually looking for a specific apartment—its floor plan, floor, and current availability.
That led to the idea for thefloors.io: a product combining an interactive apartment selector, a unit database, and sales department workflows that could be integrated into different websites without building a complex system from scratch.
In 2017, thefloors took first place at the 95th Startup Battle in Dnipro with an average score of 3.55. The product was later used in more than a hundred projects, and the Ukrainian media outlet TSN reported that, at some developments, the relative increase in conversion following its implementation reached 75%.
thefloors did not transform the industry single-handedly, but it became part of a transition in which a developer’s website stopped being an advertising storefront and became a practical tool for apartment selection and sales.
The Market Is Not a Given
The most tangible test took place in Petropavl, in northern Kazakhstan. By then, Dykhanov had considerable experience working with developers and digital products, but advising a business and being personally accountable for its commercial results are two very different things.
The residential development was selling approximately two apartments per month. The explanations sounded familiar: a difficult market, cautious buyers, and local peculiarities. Yet none of them answered the question of what, specifically, was preventing people from buying.
Together with a business partner, he founded Nova Development and took responsibility for building the project’s commercial model—from market analysis and product concept to marketing, sales, and customer service. Construction, permitting, and commissioning the development remained the responsibility of the construction partner. During the first three months, while simultaneously assembling the sales team, Dykhanov personally closed the first 25 sales.
The work began with the product itself. The team changed the mix of apartment types, moved parking outside the gated courtyard, redesigned the building entrances, and introduced layouts with combined kitchen and living areas.
Not every assumption worked immediately. The team initially expected the advantages of the new layouts to be self-evident. Buyers, however, did not always perceive a combined kitchen and living area as added value: a familiar “large living room” felt more reassuring than an unfamiliar format. The team had to change not only the product but also the way it was presented—explaining the layouts through everyday family scenarios, training sales managers, and testing customers’ reactions in real conversations.
“People often treat the market as something there is no point in arguing with. But the market is people—the people who create the product, explain its value, and make the decision to buy. In a sense, we are the market.”
Sales increased from two to twelve apartments per month. According to Nova Development, over the same period, the average price of comparable new developments in Petropavl rose by approximately 10%, while the price per square meter in the project increased from 260,000 to 440,000 tenge—approximately 70%.
Nova Ribat was followed by a second project, Nova Family. The experience showed that even in a relatively conservative local market, changing the product itself and the way it is presented can affect the pace of sales. Assessing the impact on the broader market of the North Kazakhstan Region, however, would require more comprehensive industry data.
When the Scale Changes
Imagine a simple action: a teacher corrects a grade. For the teacher, it is a single click. On a government digital platform, however, that change must be reflected in the gradebook, the student’s profile, the parents’ application, reporting, and the notification system. An error in a single connection—and different people will see different versions of the same reality.
As part of a contractor team working on a Ukrainian government digital initiative in cooperation with the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Dykhanov served as lead product architect. His responsibilities covered user roles, processes, and data-handling rules—the layer of design that precedes software code and determines how a system will behave in real-world scenarios.
Instead of several independent versions of the same grade, the proposed model relied on a single source of data. The grade was stored once, while the system displayed different views to the student, parent, teacher, and administration according to their access permissions.
The work produced a set of architectural deliverables that included a model of core educational objects, user scenarios, access rules, and a matrix linking each decision to the roles and data it affected. This allowed the consequences of changes to be considered before development began, rather than discovering inconsistencies after launch.
Here, his academic background found a practical extension: the objects in the model were no longer web pages, but people, permissions, actions, and data within a government platform.
Repeat the Method, Not the Solution
These projects do not prove that a universal formula exists for every business. Rather, they point to something more useful: what can be transferred is not a ready-made solution, but a standard for making decisions.
A hypothesis should have an owner, a success criterion, and a condition under which it must be abandoned. For thefloors, the criterion was buyer behavior on the website; in Kazakhstan, it was sales and customer response to the new product; in the government project, it was data consistency and the integrity of scenarios for different roles. The methods differed, but the results could be tested rather than defended through a persuasive presentation.
In 2023, Dykhanov received the European Business & Finance Award in the Crisis Leader of the Year category. In 2021 and 2022, he served on the jury of the XM Leader Awards, and in 2023, he evaluated international startups in fintech, insurtech, and blockchain at the Astra Global competition.
The United States is the entrepreneur’s next market, with AI-powered service products as one area of focus. For now, this is not a proven result but the next hypothesis. For a method built around testing assumptions, it is perhaps the most logical continuation.
Success answers the question, “What worked?” A method explains why it worked and under what conditions the result can be replicated. Judging by this entrepreneurial trajectory, it is the second question that interests him more.
