By 2023, Kantara IT Group, under Dmitrii Iuldashev’s leadership, had spent several years creating digital products for outside clients. The company developed educational platforms, user accounts and dashboards, payment interfaces, and content management systems, tailoring each solution to the specific processes of the customer. This custom development brought in about €350,000 in yearly revenue. However, achieving further growth would have meant taking on more projects, increasing the team size, and managing a more complicated operation.
Dmitrii observed that the underlying technical structure for these different services was frequently similar. While the audience, design, and content varied, his team consistently had to integrate payment systems, set up user roles, construct personal accounts, and manage access to digital materials. Rather than expanding the studio, he chose to leverage the team’s accumulated experience to build a unified platform that independent creators and consultants could join independently.
“In custom development, every new client creates a separate cycle of work. You have to study the business processes again, assemble a team, and adapt the infrastructure to a specific task. At some point, I realized that we had already built many of these solutions several times, and I became more interested in turning them into a product of our own,” says Dmitrii Iuldashev.
Why the Company Focused on Independent Creators
By that point, the team already had experience developing platforms for online education. Its attempts to work with large education providers showed that the segment was dominated by companies with substantial investment budgets and mature infrastructure. At the same time, smaller creators and independent experts often had little use for many of the features designed for large educational organizations.
Iuldashev decided to simplify the product and retain the workflows this audience needed on a daily basis: publishing digital materials, managing access, accepting payments, conducting consultations, and receiving payouts. Instead of building another complex platform for large education providers, the company began developing a marketplace for creators who sold courses, digital materials, and professional sessions directly to their audiences.
“By studying user behavior, we saw that large online schools operate very differently from independent creators. A smaller creator does not need a system with dozens of complex modules for multi-level programs, separate cohorts, assignments, and tutors. They often do not have a dedicated technical team to configure all of that. What matters is being able to upload a product, or sometimes simply set a price for an individual consultation, accept payment, and receive a payout. Those were the actions we chose to focus on,” Iuldashev explains.
This decision also changed the company’s user acquisition model. When creators listed a product on the marketplace, or service marketplace, as Iuldashev described it, they promoted it to their own followers and directed buyers to the payment page. The company supplemented this traffic with advertising and participation in industry events, but every new content provider also became an independent channel for attracting users.
How the Business Model Changed
In custom development, each client received a separate product that had to be designed, launched, and maintained. On the marketplace, a new creator joined an existing system and used shared tools to publish content, accept payments, and interact with customers. Product updates became available to all users at once, while growth in the number of sellers no longer required the company to build a separate platform for each one.
Kantara IT Group financed its transition to a proprietary product through accumulated funds and the company’s existing operating income. This meant giving up part of its predictable service revenue in favor of a product that generated costs before it began producing stable income. Iuldashev had already learned that developing an in-house product could be more expensive than delivering a client project. The team revised completed features more often, added new scenarios, and applied higher quality standards because the platform had to serve a broad group of users rather than a single customer.
“After several years in custom development and dozens of major IT products, I thought I had a fairly accurate understanding of what it cost to build a platform. But with your own product, new scenarios keep appearing, and you want to get every detail right. When I build a product for users, I tend to keep refining it until it reaches a standard at which I would be comfortable using it myself. In most cases, I also create products that I use personally, or that people close to me use, because that helps me understand the customer’s needs more clearly. As a result, the actual amount of work turned out to be greater than we initially expected,” says Iuldashev.
Thousands of content providers completed transactions through the marketplace. Peak monthly sales volume approached €650,000. The platform’s transaction volume was not the same as the company’s revenue: the system processed the full value of the materials and consultations sold, while the operator generated income through commissions and related services. According to preliminary estimates, the business was expected to reach an annual figure of approximately €1.1 million to €1.3 million, compared with around €350,000 during the custom development stage.
Why the Marketplace Needed Its Own Payment Infrastructure
The product was developed as more than a software service. The company operated under a Merchant of Record model, in which the operator accepts payments from buyers, accounts for applicable taxes and pays them to the relevant authorities, handles disputes between buyers and sellers, and arranges payouts to sellers who have passed compliance checks for adherence to applicable laws, regulatory requirements, and platform rules.
For creators, this reduced the number of separate tasks they had to manage. They did not need to integrate multiple payment providers, handle international card acceptance independently, or organize payouts through different partners.
For the company, however, this model created additional operational responsibilities. Instead of managing several client projects, the team now had to process a large volume of payments, verify creators, moderate materials, and control payouts. These processes were not the product’s primary purpose, but the marketplace could not serve an international audience and a large number of independent sellers without them.
The transition to a product model therefore did not make the business simpler. It replaced one type of complexity with another. The company stopped rebuilding the same infrastructure for every new customer, but it took on responsibilities related to high-volume transactions, user support, and the operation of a shared platform.
What a Unified Infrastructure Changed for the Company
After the launch of the marketplace for experts in psychology and personal development, Kantara IT Group’s growth was no longer tied to the number of separate client projects. A new creator or expert could join an existing system and use ready-made tools to publish materials, accept payments, and receive payouts, while every product update became available to the platform’s entire user base. Instead of distributing resources across multiple independent development projects, the team could focus on improving a single infrastructure.
This did not make the business any simpler. Managing several client projects was replaced by serving end customers across every EU member state, while export sales expanded the platform’s reach to more than 150 countries worldwide. The company also took on user support, content moderation, and seller account monitoring. What changed was the economics of growth: adding more creators no longer required the company to launch a corresponding number of new development projects or expand separate project teams. This became the main outcome of Kantara IT Group’s transition from a development studio model to its own marketplace.
