Besides the need for SaaS, we saw the market insight in the simply deployed solution. We’ve been working under the asynchronous communication channel for business communication for enterprises, putting the data transmission security predominant. It’s called Aimchat.
Companies go through the hassle, but all ingenious is simple: you just got to think strategically rather than complicate. Aimchat solves a big challenge in a simple way. It is open-source, which means no backdoors. It matters for those who are obsessed with the issue of security and privacy.
The telephone totally revolutionized the way we could communicate with people all over the world. But then came email and took it to the next level. And then came text messaging. And then came video calls. And so on…What’s next? What’s just around the corner?
In this interview series, called ‘The Future Of Communication Technology’ we are interviewing leaders of tech or telecom companies who are helping to develop emerging communication technologies and the next generation of how we communicate and connect with each other.
As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Maxim Ivanov, CEO & Co-Founder of Aimprosoft, a Ukrainian software development company, one of the leading technology providers according to Clutch rating for 2020. In his role, Maxim leads the company helping businesses in retail, eCommerce, automotive, telecom, healthcare, real estate, education, manufacturing, and other domains to succeed in attaining their business goals due to innovative software solutions.
Having a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and strategic vision, he helps SMB and enterprises profit faster based on his belief that technology is the best communication means in business. Maxim is trying to be helpful to the community by sharing valuable industry insights within the media space.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Sport helps many to develop a sense of purpose, a thirst for victory, to become the best, and I did it because I liked it, which is probably why I do everything in my life, so that I take pleasure in it, and as a result, I get what I like.
I’ve been helping to improve communication from business to business for over 20 years, 15 of which while leading my own company Aimprosoft. It is not an easy job when you always have to be at the peak of innovation to do everything of the highest caliber to deliver the goods.
I grew up in the most beautiful city Kharkiv of the most beautiful country Ukraine being around the spirit of survival with not so easy historical events as I would want. If there were not so many obstacles in my life associated with gaining my first professional experience and the first steps in my career, maybe I would not have become what I have become. I seized a single opportunity to start back at the break of the сenturies. Feeling progress in meaningful work motivated me early in my professional areas and continues to excite me today.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
As I mentioned, since childhood I have been involved in a lot of sports, in different types: skating, cross-country and mountain skiing, cycling, ping pong, swimming, many things turned out well, but I’ve never gone to professional sports as well as I’ve never taken myself as an entrepreneur too much seriously.
This is a paradox: favoring individual sports, I’ve never seen myself as a sole proprietor. I created my own “aim” team but did it together with my business partner Igor. In such a way, our entrepreneurial partnership opened me up that moving together with associates can bring more fascinating things.
I wasn’t in search of someone. It came naturally when Igor hired me for my first position as a Java developer. Now the two of us take the helm of Aimprosoft, building a business that demonstrates two heads are better than one.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Where there is a will, there’s a way” to me this proverb is always to date. It’s about the tenacity of purpose. Our life requires creative productivity every day, whether it’s working tasks or day-to-day matters. I’m just reminding myself of these words to ignite my emotions and fuel my motivation.
Sure, self-doubt is common to everyone. Getting rid of it helps me manage ebbing motivation and intensify the desire to achieve something. I set my mind to cope with tasks, and I do it moving forward. I even catch sight of how people surrounding me follow my example of behavior through the progress and setbacks of the work. You know, it’s inspiring, really.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My wife, Marina. “Marina,” in this case, is my safe place to renew energy resources. We got married right after graduating college; she is a steady source of inspiration and backing, she has been still close from the very beginning, and I am very grateful to her for being in my life. Far beyond her love and faith, I owe a lot to her. She is next to me during the most extreme adventures and the most profound grief.
She understands me like no one else, but she does not understand anything about my topic)) That is one more thing that keeps us close.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Youth is the future potential of society.
Young Ukrainians live in a society in which creating sustainable career opportunities is complex. Entrepreneurs are responsible for motivating for work the young generation and giving an impetus to the career. We created a Trainee Program for young people studying at colleges to support their willingness to bring value from the early years. After a mentor course of theory and practice into the ratio of 20 to 80, trainees get a deep immersion into live programming tasks.
I sincerely believe when you have succeeded in something, you can share a piece of it by mentoring and helping the upcoming generation in their first job. You know how incredible these guys are! They learn on the fly despite everybody talking about their absent-mindedness, passivity, and lack of ambition.
An increase in psychological pressure due to cultural life complications now entails the need for a more competent distribution of time and effort. My personal task by mentoring is to create the next generation of critical thinkers turning into conscious doers.
Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Can you tell us about the cutting edge communication tech that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
We’ve seen how people have been increasingly called upon the emerging communication technologies to get connected for the last year. During my entrepreneurship, I’ve been observing a massive shift in communication, both private and business.
You know, cutting edge does not always mean nano-, neuro-, or other consonant phrase-baits catching our attention in concern of something futuristic. The future of communication technology goes far beyond the technology itself. It means changing, first of all, the communication concept. An apt example of it is the pandemic-hyping free-flowing conversation via Clubhouse. Until we go over all the possible communication methods in social networks and messengers, not saturate with them, we won’t be ready for digital telepathy.
I will not tell you anything new by saying that a communication style akin to social networks is actively used in business. Often, entrepreneurs themselves are the initiators of emerging products having data and market insights.
Besides the need for SaaS, we saw the market insight in the simply deployed solution. We’ve been working under the asynchronous communication channel for business communication for enterprises, putting the data transmission security predominant. It’s called Aimchat.
Companies go through the hassle, but all ingenious is simple: you just got to think strategically rather than complicate. Aimchat solves a big challenge in a simple way. It is open-source, which means no backdoors. It matters for those who are obsessed with the issue of security and privacy.
How do you think this might change the world?
Technology has gone too far, take it from me, the person who actually creates these very technologies. It affects the culture of communication, going far beyond the familiar live conversation pulling out our society from its natural evolution forever.
Tech-dependent communication engenders new habits in a person. Instead of the previously usual mode of waiting and patience, a lightning-quick response from the interlocutor becomes natural. If earlier we were not lazy to go to the telegraph office, send a telegram to invite for a call, now we dream by one thought in our heads to provoke the interlocutor’s response. Look, indefatigable Elon came up with the idea of sticking a chip into the neocortex of the human brain. Doing it is half the battle, but how to control it?
You know, creating the technology of future communication, a human is in a race to unravel the essence of existence or beat the laws of the universe. Evolving, man has found a way to solve an incredible number of his problems — with the help of technology.
We are on the cusp of technological telepathy. To communicate with the power of thought, for example, colossal expenditures of energy are required. Responsible for this will be our large and voracious brain that consumes a quarter of the energy of the human body. Am I personally ready for this? It’s obvious for me to say “yes.” If we use technology, we will be able to escalate contactless communication without violence to the body quickly. At the same time, we still have spheres of life to apply straightforward solutions to cope with global problems.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Oh, that’s a tough question.
Of course, it is fantastic that we would keep everything in the head and live free of devices one day. The thing that hits me there is if technology enables us someday to reach each other via “brain to brain communication,” will this not be a total violation of personal boundaries when we do not have a single opportunity to stay alone? Seamless communication in the future means a violation of our privacy, don’t you think so?
A flip side of the matter is that increasing information volume, both private and business, floats away into the network. Social media algorithms know a lot more about us than we know ourselves. My point is we should keep things in the middle here. We are more vulnerable than we think. People should take responsibility for their mind control and digital hygiene.
Talking about business, there are some things that you can’t grasp with your brains: business intelligence, for example. In cases when you need to process a large amount of data and analyze it, you need to bring graphics into a human-readable form to make certain decisions, you can’t rely on your brain only. I’m highlighting two concerns related to technology usage: seamlessness and privacy. When comes the first, the second is violated.
2020 threw us into technology’s arms. Yes, due to alternative communication methods, many of us really survived and didn’t go crazy being isolated. However, if we go beyond and let our fears push ourselves around, we can forget that we are human with souls.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
Business communicates by documents. The central part of our work is delivering solutions to streamline business relationships. Our customers are our drivers most of all.
The business information leaves your side and is used by third parties uncontrollably. The idea to deliver messenger for large enterprises that put data transmission security at the forefront was born in an environment full of corporate chatting. At that time, there were no similar solutions that allowed us to have a controlled information space. Our guys made an application for themselves and then got carried away, so we decided to get down to business more seriously.
Data transmission channels are encrypted there as well as access to the server that is severely restricted also. So, you set up the application on your local server and have total control of your data. Our parallel data science division already has good groundwork, and the day is not far off when the guys will surprise me with new business communication opportunities.
Clients often inquire about the data protection of their business from threats of information breaches. I adhere to the same opinion. And by my own example, I wanted to show a simple way of how to do this.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
Leadership consciousness and awareness of technological advances.
Here we should take into account the upcoming generation. Today’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders. Sharing their thoughts via social networks, they form a fundamentally different conception of privacy than people of my generation. They will project their way of thinking when coming to run a company.
Sure, oral messaging is still the most controllable way of communication. Humanity started to invent trackable solutions to record messages, which was caused by oblivion, distrust, lies, willing to save heritage, and we wanted to communicate across generations. Communication is one of the essential parts of socialization and even survival in the world. With technologies here to stay, we are able to coordinate communication at scale, and it’s really great.
We must mentor young people, get them on the right track, and instill eternal values to our children, helping our society evolve while preserving heritage.
The pandemic has changed so many things about the way we behave. One of them of course is how we work and how we communicate in our work. How do you think your innovation might be able to address the new needs that have arisen as a result of the pandemic?
I should think so! Since early 2020 a need for simple and secure corporate messaging solutions that can help shift online quickly to reach each other is on the hype. Thus, Aimchat can help you tune up corporate communication.
Speaking about communication by documents, I have something on the issue also. According to our study, a lot of healthcare businesses still rely on a paper-based document workflow as the primary communication form. Electronic document management can significantly speed up communication between doctors and patients that is more relevant than ever given the rise of an online messaging style. Technologies give quick access to information when needed, cataloging, processing information, and obtaining statistical data, reliability in storage, information, roughly speaking, will not burn.
Later, personalization in customer communication will become the main driving force behind marketing. Companies have to invest in analytics to lead the trend, as I’ve accentuated, and be able to work with data now.
Fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
1. It is necessary to delegate. You know, when you were able to create your own, it is very intimate for you, and no one can do your job better than you. You want to sit on two chairs, and the business grows, and the responsibilities accumulate. Hence, at one point, we stopped keeping up with the company’s growth rates. Here I realized that the time has come for delegation, and it turns out there are PMs, Scrum Masters, HRs, marketers, sales specialists who can do it more professionally than me, having only two hands. They became my complementary hands and bright minds. You can’t create strong leadership without delegating a part of your responsibilities. Now we keep the first-class hierarchy of team leads and the open door policy at the same time for everyone.
2. That I want to quit. Many times. Because being a CEO means that more often, you will be approached with a problem than with the phrase “Maxim, we did it and succeeded.” When your team members come to you day after day and your day consists of the fact that you have to sort out something regularly. It was not easy for me, young and not ready enough to withstand such a pressing pile of problems, but I am not timid and am not used to giving up. I learned how to bend around trees going down a steep hill on a snowboard and extended this skill to the business.
3. The work will take too long. Many people think that being CEO in an IT company means taking a vacation at any time, driving cool cars, having business trips, VIP lunches, and getting unlimited money flows. No, guys. Being a CEO is, first of all, a huge responsibility that goes beyond being solely responsible for yourself. Once you get down to business, you must fulfill obligations to clients, employees, set everything up, and react to time changes opportunely. This is far from an 8-hour working day. In my case, this is more than half of my life. If someone had told me before I started, I would not have believed, maybe even answered that it would be different for me. During the past 15 years, I have had to revise my business time, and again, the IT industry itself implies the fastest pace that needs to be kept. Am I satisfied? Rather yes than no. Nothing in my life will give me more pleasure than what I do.
4. Start organizing processes within the company early. It’s funny to say that we were engaged in helping clients save people from routine tasks from the very beginning, giving them more time for creativity. When we started, I was concerned about delivering the work on time and completing the client’s tasks as accurately as possible. Together with my partner, we engaged great developers, released projects one by one, sometimes forgetting to even have lunch. Building processes seemed to be, in my opinion, a monotonous and infinitely long task that can be postponed because we are already coping with it, I thought. Funny thing, we put the foot in it ourselves.
We started with the one that affects the business results the most. I realized how vital effective communication is, be it verbal or non-verbal, to hear and be heard.
5. I need to analyze a company’s activities more to be more successful. If you let everything take its course, get carried away only with successful cases, you can lose your business. Focusing on victories alone inspires and motivates, but don’t forget about bottlenecks. Based on my experience, the CEO position assumes 80% of the time to analyze performance. When we implement automation systems for our clients, I emphasize our PMs have to ping them up regarding the analysis of implementation results. I got burned when I overlooked it in my business. Now I’m very particular about it in Aimprosoft and taking care of the clients as well.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Sport. I am for a healthy lifestyle, that’s why we at Aimprosoft promote sports and provide sports activities for employees in the network of fitness clubs. Some time ago, we even had yoga in the office gym. Mainly girls went there, and even one Java developer who meditated and did asanas in the morning. Ping-Pong is a must-have to balance the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle. Many aimprosofters were even keen on tournaments within the company, which definitely had a good effect on productivity. I love sports, and none of my vacations have looked like a couch potato rest throughout my life.
I would recommend changing and trying different activities to diversify the experience, get new experiences for the body and brain. You can afford a pack of chips, but this day, you must definitely go in for sports)) More often, ventilate your rooms and clear your heads!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can reach me on Linkedin @MaximIvanov, where I share my opinions and insights on B2B-related topics, and check out our blog aimprosoft.com/blog/ with stories on business and technology.
Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.
About The Interviewer: David Liu is the founder and CEO of Deltapath, an award-winning unified communications company that liberates organizations from the barriers of effective communication. Liu is known for his visionary leadership, organic growth strategies, and future-forward technology. Liu is highly committed to achieving a greater purpose with technology. Liu’s business insights are regularly featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Tech Crunch, and more.
