Investor and Tokarev Foundation founder Serhiy Tokarev sees using the products he invests in as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the businesses behind them. This approach often provides insights that reports alone cannot offer. However, it also has limitations that can be easy to overlook when an investor is enthusiastic about a startup, its team and their own investment decision.
Using technology in everyday life provides a clearer understanding of the role it plays for customers. Tokarev and his colleagues use BitePal, a calorie-tracking app. While a demonstration can show what a service does, regular use reveals considerably more:
The same principle applies to workplace tools. For example, the group’s PR team uses ElevenLabs, an AI-powered service for creating voiceovers and dubbing videos in more than 70 languages. Working with the tool has revealed how long it actually takes to produce a finished result, which tasks still require human intervention and whether the service genuinely saves time.
For investors, these details are just as important as conventional reports. They help establish which tasks customers are willing to hand over to technology and how much they are prepared to pay for it.
When people encounter a problem themselves, the value of a new solution becomes easier to recognise. For example, Serhiy Tokarev’s team previously spent considerable time preparing presentations and reports. Rollstack helped address this issue by automatically transferring data into slides and documents. As a result, the team significantly reduced the amount of repetitive manual work.
“However, understanding a problem does not necessarily establish the market potential of the proposed solution. First, you need to find out how often the problem occurs, what prevents users from changing their workflows and how much they are willing to pay,” says the founder of Tokarev Foundation.
Sometimes, a business emerges from the need to solve a specific problem. One example is Toogeza, a recruitment agency established from scratch to meet the group’s hiring needs.
Initially, the agency recruited specialists exclusively for Serhiy Tokarev’s team. Feedback from real recruitment assignments helped it improve the quality of its services. Today, Toogeza handles recruitment not only for the group but also for external clients.
According to the investor, this approach makes it possible to provide more specific feedback on a service’s strengths and weaknesses. It also helps companies communicate their value more effectively to potential customers.
Serhiy Tokarev believes that investment decisions should be continually reassessed, even after acquiring a stake in a company. Regularly using a product helps investors determine whether it continues to deliver practical value, whether updates are genuinely useful and whether new problems have emerged.
“If a particular product feature becomes frustrating, it is worth checking whether other customers have encountered the same problem,” the investor notes.
No report can fully replace first-hand experience, as it helps reveal what customers are willing to pay for, where difficulties arise and whether there is room for improvement. However, if new evidence challenges the initial assumptions about a product’s market value, investors must be prepared to reconsider both their assessment and the investment decision itself.