From $1M on Instagram bots to an AI revolution in HR: the story of Arsen Ibragimov
No Bullsh!t, July 2, 2025, 75 min, 1,222 views. The guest is Arsen Ibragimov, co-founder of Topliner, a startup in executive search that applies artificial intelligence.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 75 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,222 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
An engineer by training, Arsen describes his path: from teenage programming and a grey-area tool for inflating likes on a social network, which grew into a business turning over around a million dollars a year, to two failures, a fitness application built with a famous athlete on venture money and a three-sided marketplace for knitting. The result was Topliner: together with a partner from executive search, Arsen automated the search for candidates at chief executive, finance and technology level, work that used to take researchers 6 to 8 weeks by hand, and cut it to a few hours. He explains a sales model built on jobs to be done rather than a classic software subscription.
Key ideas
- Executive search for chief-level candidates, which takes researchers 6 to 8 weeks by hand, can be cut to a few hours once the search and screening are automated.
- A jobs-to-be-done sales model, where you do the whole job with AI and a human in the loop, sells better to a conservative business market than a classic software subscription.
- The AI roll-up: buy a classic business at a low earnings multiple, automate its processes with AI and sell the company later at a technology multiple.
- A product is best built around a problem where the founder is the end user: a business in someone else's niche without personal expertise is far harder.
- First cold sales and real deals test a market hypothesis faster and more honestly than customer development interviews: feedback from a paying client is unambiguous.
- In the European market the ability to work with AI is quickly becoming a hiring requirement even at executive level rather than a desirable extra.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript