Vitalii Dodonov

I’m planning to be more intentional on Twitter in 2026, so here’s who I am and what I do: I’m Vitalii, founder of Stan. - Built a $30M/y profitable company with a small team - 10 engineers power a platform used by 60k creators - Hit $10M ARR in 2.5 years (less than 1% did this) - Processed $200M+ for customers with < 30 people - Built a billion $ trajectory by doing less, not more Some of the biggest milestones happened in the past few years, and they were all achieved by ignoring “best practices.” Here's what I’ll be posting about: - What it actually takes to build something big from almost nothing - What I had to unlearn on the way from a cold Russian winter to a sunny LA - The small-team playbook that took us from an IKEA table to $30M ARR - The discipline required to delete 80% of the work instead of adding more - How hiring top 1% talent (and waiting years for them) changes everything - The execution philosophy that lets 10 engineers outperform teams of 100 - The founder traps that quietly kill companies before they scale I grew up in a small town in Russia, walked 30 minutes in the Canadian winter to buy a $15 frying pan when I first immigrated, and years later paid $15 just for the convenience of donating $200 worth of things I no longer needed. That arc, from scraping by to building something meaningful, is the lens through which I see everything today. If you ask me, so many founders get company-building wrong. My goal for 2026 is to change that. If that resonates, stick around. I’ll be linking every thread I write under this post so you can always find it.

Founders ask me how we move so fast with a small team. Simple answer: We don’t carry dead weight (ideas, projects, or people).

gilfoyle (my infrastructure ai) just cut sierra's (my personal assistant ai) caching bill by 82% with one config change. $7.40/day → $1.34/day on token cost 🤷‍♂️

@shernanjavier is it happening anytime soon?

i dedicated the past few weeks to building out an x growth app after @vitddnv challenged me. after countless chats and refactors, ill be launching my mvp tmr :)

Stanley One launch T-74. hired my first AI product manager today. @OpenClaw, obviously. 12 hours in, his morning update is fire 👇🔥

Stanley One launch T-74. preparing for a big launch on june 1. 74 days out. figured i'd try this one differently. first thing i did was spin up an @OpenClaw agent as my product manager. his job: hold me accountable, track everything, push back when i'm being naive, send daily standups. building the PM before building the product. called him jared. let's see how this goes.

You don’t need more time… you need fewer priorities. Every breakthrough I’ve had came from cutting something, not adding it.

noticed a pattern designing @OpenClaw agent workflows. mechanical steps vs judgment steps are two different problems. agents default to mechanics. scraping, sorting, filtering. no problem. judgment. taste, calibration, knowing when something's actually good. doesn't happen unless you architect it in.

trimmed USER.md in my @OpenClaw — the profile my ai reads before every response. 85 → 47 lines. things it accumulated over time: • thursday boots • gundam 00 • a breathing book i finished • my condo's floor material • eames chair budget guess it doesn't need those every message? it got "smarter" after that by being less distracted. clean up your 🦞 when you get a breather.

I'm Vitalii. I run a $2.5M MRR company, and last year I did something nobody understood. I stopped everything, flew to London and locked in for 14 days. What I built hit $10K MRR before I flew home. Here’s exactly how I did it:

@kofithecreative I did! Everything was posted in real-time on LinkedIn, and I've now turned this into a PDF as well: stan.store/vitddnv/p/the-…

@vitddnv Hey bro! Please tell me you documented this?

If you enjoyed this: 1. Follow me @vitddnv for more breakdowns and behind the scenes as we continue scale Stan far and beyond our current $2.5M MRR. 2. Also, repost the tweet below to share this thread with someone who needs to see it.

The takeaway for you is this: Create a constraint powerful enough to remove hesitation. Then stay close to reality long enough for the product to tell you what it needs to become. Everything else can be learned along the way.