What You’ll Learn About Startup Product Strategy in This Episode
Tetiana Kobzar, founder of award-winning software development company Diversido, has helped more than 65 startups go from idea to scale. In this episode, she breaks down the product decisions that separate founders who gain traction from those who stall out. If you are building a product, trying to keep users engaged, or struggling to grow without burning out, this conversation covers the frameworks she uses every day.
- Why your MVP should be “really minimal but valuable” and how scope creep quietly kills first-time founders
- How gamification drives genuine user motivation rather than one-time clicks
- The biggest mistake first-time founders make: building the product instead of planning the distribution
- How Tetiana manages two companies without working 10 to 12 hour days
- Her single piece of advice for entrepreneurs who want to play big faster
Startup MVP Strategy: Why You Need to Start With Why
Stop Building Features and Start With the Problem (01:10)
“I always start with why. Why do you want to build this product? That is either solving some problem or achieving some particular goal.” – Tetiana Kobzar
Tetiana’s process with every new startup engagement begins at the same place: the reason the product needs to exist. Founders who skip this step tend to build wide instead of deep, loading up their roadmap with cool ideas that have no connection to what users actually need. She is direct about it: building something for the sake of it might feel satisfying in the short run, but it does not build a business.
Keep Your MVP Minimal and Valuable (05:00)
“Start slow. Start with something simple and then add new functionality. Look at what users do, how they use your application, because maybe they do something differently than you would expect.” – Tetiana Kobzar
The pattern she sees repeatedly is founders arriving with a huge scope and a limited budget, trying to squeeze everything in at once. Her guidance: identify the smallest thing you can build that still delivers real value, ship it, and then watch how people actually use it. User behaviour after launch almost always reveals something the founder did not anticipate.
Gamification and Behavioural Design for Entrepreneurs
Beyond Badges: What Gamification Actually Means (06:30)
“You need to think about how you want users to feel when they use your application. People remember not exactly the features or something they did. They remember more how they felt when they interacted with the product.” – Tetiana Kobzar
Tetiana has spent years applying behavioural design to software products, and her framing resets what most founders think gamification is. It is not a progress bar or a badge. It is designing the emotional experience of using your product. Curiosity, accomplishment, social belonging, epic meaning: each of these motivational drives maps to specific product decisions, and choosing the wrong one for your audience produces surface-level engagement that does not last.
How to Choose the Right Motivational Strategy for Your Product (08:10)
“We need to think not about functionality, but about why users would do it. The very same action can happen because of completely different motivations depending on the emotion behind it.” – Tetiana Kobzar
She walks through a concrete example: getting someone to fill out a survey. Depending on your audience and your product values, you might drive that action through curiosity and anticipation, a sense of contribution to something larger, the satisfaction of completing a profile, or social proof from their community. Each approach produces a different kind of user relationship, and the strategy has to fit the product and the people building it.
Common Startup Mistakes and Business Development Fundamentals
The Distribution Problem First-Time Founders Keep Ignoring (11:00)
“People tend to think more about how they are going to develop the product rather than how they’re going to distribute it afterwards. Less thinking about user acquisition, monetization, how they’re going to build a profitable business on that.” – Tetiana Kobzar
This is the mistake she sees most consistently. First-time founders are in love with the product and treat marketing and user acquisition as something to figure out after launch. But as Tetiana points out, performance-based marketing requires significant investment before it generates organic momentum, and that surprises founders who assumed distribution would be the easy part.
Human-Centered Design and the Attention Economy (15:30)
“Attention is a new gold. As soon as we get it, we should work very hard on not losing it. Because if users have a moment when they think about checking their Instagram feed, they are very likely not to return back.” – Tetiana Kobzar
She makes a distinction that changes how you think about conversion: efficiency in UX is not always the goal. A sign-up button right on the homepage is efficient, but a short questionnaire that gets users to invest time and data before asking them to register produces far higher conversion rates. The inefficient path works better because it builds commitment through the investment itself.
About Tetiana Kobzar: Startup Software Strategist and Founder
Founder of Diversido: 65+ Startups From MVP to Scale
Tetiana Kobzar founded Diversido in 2013 after working across several startups and recognising where her strengths sat: building great software, designing user experience, and navigating the full product creation lifecycle. The company began in game development and evolved organically toward gamified business applications and now serves startups across HealthTech, EdTech, and IoT. With a Master’s in Computer Science and a hands-on coding background, Tetiana bridges the gap between technical execution and business outcomes.
Building Her Own Startup in Parallel: Curange
Alongside Diversido, Tetiana leads Curange, a HealthTech startup focused on simplifying supplement choices. Running two companies simultaneously is something she addresses honestly in this episode, including the systems she uses to manage her working memory and the mindset shift that helped her stop working 10 to 12 hour days.
Burnout Prevention and Entrepreneur Leadership
The Mindset Shift That Changed How Tetiana Works (22:10)
“At some moment I realized I cannot be perfect. I cannot do 100% of what is expected in every department of my company. And the very important realization was that I am building this company to live the way I want, not to dedicate my life to the success of the company.” – Tetiana Kobzar
This is not a productivity tip. It is a values clarification that changed the structure of her entire working life. She uses a task management approach drawn from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow: clear, specific tasks that reduce the cognitive load on slow, deliberate thinking, so the brain is not burning energy on ambiguity throughout the day.
Key Takeaways: Startup Product Strategy and Entrepreneurship Motivation
- Start with why before you build anything: The problem you are solving has to stay central to every product and go-to-market decision throughout the lifecycle of your startup.
- Keep your MVP ruthlessly minimal: Scope creep is the enemy of momentum. Ship the smallest valuable version, then let real user behaviour guide what comes next.
- Design for emotion, not efficiency: Users remember how your product made them feel. Gamification works when it maps to genuine motivational drives, not when it just adds points and badges.
- Invest in marketing from day one: Building a great product and distributing it are two completely different skills. The founders who grow fastest treat user acquisition as a day-one priority, not an afterthought.
- Protect your energy as a business asset: Sustainable output over time requires clarity about why you are building, not just what you are building.
Essential Resources for Startup Founders
Books Mentioned in This Episode
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Tetiana references this directly as the foundation for her approach to task management and reducing cognitive load. It is the framework behind how she structures her days and how she thinks about user decision-making in product design.
Read the Comments +