Dmitry Gurski: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health|E1205

Smart people, they work in McKinsey. And founders, they're crazy. For consumers, simplicity is much more significant than number of features, is m- much more significant than anything. What many people don't understand, that retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. It means that you may create the perfect app for gym and will have terrible retention. Why? Because gyms themself have terrible retention. Never take general advice. It's always bullshit. If you look on history of any company or any CEO, you would see that everything is so nuanced, everything is so unique. Thousands of ways to be successful and you just should choose your way.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Dmitry, I am such a fan of the incredible journey with Flow. So first off, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, thank you for you for inviting.

Not at all. Listen, I wanted to make this happen for a while. I would love to start, I- I read actually, uh, an interview you'd done before, and I heard that you had a single mother who worked as a librarian, uh, you got your first job at 16. Take me to that. How did those early years shape you as an entrepreneur?

Mm. As we- as I see you, I'm not so young. I'm 41 years old and, uh, uh, my childhood was in '90s in Belarus. Difficult times. Like the world, Soviet world, was destroyed. Like everything ruined. People didn't have salaries, uh, shelters were empty. The salary of my mother was maybe 30 bucks and nothing to buy because, uh, shelters in shops were empty. And, uh, we were growing our own food. We had potato field, vegetables in this field, we had a garden. We were making like hundreds of jars of, uh, pickles and mostly we were feeding ourself by, uh, this production. Like I still don't like potato, honestly.

(laughs)

I can't eat anymore. Uh, but it was a good life lesson. It was a lesson of farming and the lesson of farming teach you just can't fake farming. It means that you should, uh, take potato, not eat- eat it immediately, even if you're hungry, and you should put this potato to ground. And, uh, then you must eat this potato next day and even one month after, you should wait. And then you should work hard and you should- you can't f- uh, fake this job. And then, uh, it's like you never have, uh, 100% of chances that, uh, you would get your potato back because... I don't know. It might be hail, it might be frost, it might be bugs. But then if you are lucky and you work hard, so then you will get your harvest. But also it's a lesson of, uh, diversification because you should have not just potato, you shou- also should have vegetables in the garden because like if, uh, it's like bad, uh, harvest of, uh, potatoes, then vegetables or apples or something and, uh, like something you will have to eat.