For 8 years I was a salesman in a menswear store
That’s where I first opened Instagram — not for myself, but to promote the store. That’s how social media became part of my job.
And yes, my love for clothes comes from there. It never went away.
Mass-following worked back then — and I started trying it for others
At first it was a side gig after my shift. But clients kept coming, and at some point the side gig started earning more than the day job. At the peak — 120–130 clients a month.
I left retail.
In parallel I was going deeper into marketing
Paid ads, funnels, how businesses actually attract clients. I wanted to understand the system, not just sell a service.
So when mass-following finally died in 2019, I already had a client base. I moved them over to paid ads.
*a photo for my first website
But I quickly realized: I don’t want to be a media buyer. I want to build an agency
So my first hire was a sales manager. The second — a media buyer.
Then came SMM managers, a project manager, bigger offices. 70 projects in the works.
Then 2022 happened. The team scattered across the world
Of 70 projects, only two were international. The model I’d built over 6 years stood on a market that stopped in a single day.
The advice I’d given clients for years and never followed myself: “You need a personal brand”
I had the cases. I had the understanding. But I couldn’t bring myself to go public — and hid behind the agency’s page.
2022 left me no choice.
The personal brand opened doors the agency page never could
Today our clients are in Ukraine, Europe, the USA and Dubai. One niche: cosmetology, clinics, aesthetic medicine.
Alongside the agency I’m constantly testing myself as an entrepreneur
Dropshipping. A network of Instagram channels. In 2025 I launched a training course — taught it for a year, it was profitable, but I closed it myself: I realized I wanted to focus on the agency.
Some of it takes off, some doesn’t. But that’s exactly how I find what works.
Polina, with whom we started as a duo, now runs the entire content department
She manages clients and the SMM team. She’s also my wife and the mother of our two daughters.
We’ve been building this together for 11 years.
To keep this pace, I need discipline
So there’s always a challenge in my life: a marathon, a swim across the Bosphorus, and right now I’m training for a half Ironman.
The new challenge in business is AI. I’m embedding it into the agency and building solutions for clients.
That’s my journey over 10 years
Makvin PR today is 10 people, 53 clinics and salons monthly and clients in 12 countries. We deliberately work only with beauty and aesthetic medicine: better to know one industry down to the details than all of them superficially.
