Entrepreneur, product and commercial director
Leonid Zakharov
I have spent twenty-four years turning technology companies into profitable, growing businesses
Wrote avito.ru. Tripled Badoo’s profit. Built a B2B SaaS serving 50,000 sites. Built teams of up to 250 people and turned companies from loss to profit in a month.
- 24
- years in the technology business
- 250+
- people in teams I built and led
- 50,000
- client sites on a SaaS I built from scratch
- 3
- dollar billionaires among people I have worked with personally
Companies I helped build
Projects
Selected work
Avito
2007 — 2008
Founding Engineer, Head of Engineering
Launched “the Russian eBay” from scratch in three to four months
Architecture, database and about 90% of the first version’s code were mine; built the team by launch. Today Avito is one of the world’s largest classifieds platforms.
Badoo
2008 — 2009
Chief Product Officer
Tripled the profit of an international social network in eight months
Profit up 171%, monthly audience up 142%, six million new users. I worked day to day with around fifty people — the managers and specialists of the Moscow office — inside a wider organisation of more than 250, including the London office and distributed teams in other countries. Conceived and launched the “Red Button” — a one-tap instant match: the user got a live conversation at once instead of hours of writing into the void.
Jivo
2013 — 2014
CBDO
Grew revenue fourfold in six months — and the system kept growing without me
Office and sales team from scratch: people, incentives, sales, analytics, forecasting. Revenue ×4 in six months; at the founder’s request stayed one more month to close the year. ×6 over the following three months on the same system, without me. Sales forecast accuracy reached 99.4%: the whole funnel was under control, with no external suppliers.
CartProtector
2014 — 2020
Founder & CEO
Grew a B2B SaaS from zero to 50,000 connected websites
B2B SaaS on a low-cost mass subscription, one of the first cart-abandonment recovery services in Russia: a real-time model detects the moment a visitor is about to leave without buying and makes a personalised offer; those who would buy anyway are left alone. 50,000+ websites installed the product, about 2,000 became paying customers — from online shops to factories and property developers. Idea, scoring model and first version were mine; then hired a CTO and a team. In 2014 passed due diligence by Edison VC, term sheet agreed; the rouble crash closed the round. Ran the company on its own revenue afterwards.
LSA
2020 — present
Co-founder
Built an online education business with my partner — on our own platform
From a blog to a line of 10 courses and 17 trainings on our own platform; 7,000+ clients in 25 countries. Platform, product and commercial side are mine; the programmes are led jointly with my partner. Audience from zero to 40,000 followers. The line is built as a customer journey — hence the retention: clients stay five years and longer and pay a year ahead. Built the platform myself: course and webinar streaming, client accounts, session booking, in-product payments; AI — transcription, subtitles, content search, summaries. 70% of revenue came from clients in the EU, the US and Australia. Speaker at GSOM St Petersburg University; a year and a half as an expert in a Rambler project.
Scale
Facts about me
- Strategist and architect of business systems: I see the company as a whole — product, sales, economics — and rebuild it as one mechanism. I find ways through where others see none
- Not an optimiser but a rebuilder: I work on step-change growth, not incremental gains
- Worked personally with Andrey Andreev, Alexander Chachava and Dmitry Volkov — all three have been profiled by Forbes
- Spoke at the Management of the Future international conference at GSOM, St Petersburg State University, columnist for RBC Pro
Where I write and speak
How I work
Working together
Interim leadership and mandates
I join companies whose sales have stalled, for six to twelve months, as commercial or product director. I rebuild the commercial function and hand it over working. A moderate fixed salary, with the main part as a share of the growth I create. No growth — you do not pay for it.
How a mandate worksStrategy sessions and mentoring
For when you do not need a director for six months, but an outside read and a decision. We work through your situation, set goals without self-deception, and build a plan with concrete steps. The format runs from a single strategy session to ongoing work with a founder or a team.
Formats and pricing