Michael Korneev

Please introduce your company and describe your role within the organization.

I’m the founder and CEO of Elastcode Limited, the company behind the Elastic Platform and our flagship product, BusinessOS. We’re based in Cyprus and have been building software for over a decade — delivering more than 100 complex projects for clients, including Fortune 100 companies and NASA subcontractors. Our team includes engineers who’ve worked at Salesforce, IBM, Yandex, and Parallels.

But what we’re doing now is fundamentally different from client work. We took everything we learned building enterprise systems for others. We channeled it into a single product: BusinessOS — the first business operating system designed from the ground up for the AI era. It’s a platform where any business can manage its entire operations — projects, invoicing, payments, team management, workflows — and then extend or reshape any part of it using natural language: no code, no developers, no IT department. Just describe what you need, and the platform builds it.

My role is leading the product vision, technology architecture, and fundraising strategy. I’m also the first user — we run our own company on BusinessOS, which means every feature gets tested in production before it reaches anyone else.

What is your company’s core business model – do you use an in-house team, third-party vendors, or a hybrid outsourcing approach?

Our development is entirely in-house. The Elastic Platform is built on proprietary technology — an AI-optimized programming language, a hierarchical database engine, and a modular component architecture that we designed and built ourselves. This isn’t something you can outsource or assemble from open-source pieces.

For BusinessOS as a product, we follow a freemium subscription model with usage-based scaling. Free for small teams with core functionality, paid tiers for AI generation capacity, advanced modules, and enterprise features. We’re also building toward a module marketplace where users can share and sell business applications they’ve built on the platform, with us taking a revenue share. And eventually, enterprise licensing for organizations that need self-hosted deployments.

The key insight in our model is that our costs don’t scale linearly with the value we deliver. As more users build on the platform, the AI learns from patterns of successful business applications, improving it for the next user without requiring a proportional engineering investment from us.

How does your company differentiate itself from competitors in a crowded market?

The market is approaching our problem from two opposite directions, and neither has arrived at a solution.

On one side, you have established platforms like Monday.com, ClickUp, and Asana adding AI features. They can now generate summaries, suggest automations, and even create lightweight apps. But their core architecture was built before the AI era. The AI works within the product — it can’t rebuild the product. Users can ask it to create a task, but they can’t ask it to build an entirely new business module that operates as a first-class part of the system.

On the other side, you have AI app builders like Replit, Lovable, and Base44. They can generate full applications from a prompt. But every app starts from zero — no business context, no shared data, no organizational backbone. You end up with 10 disconnected apps that don’t talk to each other. And with platforms like Replit, you’re also managing 5-8 separate service subscriptions — Stripe for payments, SendGrid for email, OpenAI for AI features — each with its own billing, API keys, and dashboard. You haven’t simplified your business; you’ve become your own IT department.

BusinessOS is the only platform that combines both: a rich, production-ready business system and the ability for users to reshape that system using natural language. The critical architectural difference is that our platform is built on the same foundation that it exposes to users. Our built-in features — file management, invoicing, payment tracking — are constructed from the same composable blocks that users have access to. The distinction between “the product” and “what you build on it” dissolves—one platform, one subscription, one unified data model where everything shares context.

What are the primary industries or sectors you serve, and how has that focus evolved?

Our background is in enterprise software development — for over a decade, we served clients across defense, aerospace, technology, and financial services. That gave us deep experience with the operational complexity that large organizations face and the limitations of existing tools.

With BusinessOS, we’re starting with a deliberate focus on SMBs and startups — businesses between 5 and 200 people that are drowning in SaaS subscriptions and don’t have the IT resources to integrate everything. The average mid-size company uses over 130 SaaS applications. These businesses need a unified platform, not another tool to add to the stack.

Our architecture is industry-agnostic by design. An outsourcing company needs time tracking, contractor payments, and milestone management. A restaurant chain needs inventory, shift scheduling, and supplier ordering. A law firm needs case management and billable hours. Each of these is a different configuration of the same composable building blocks — and in BusinessOS, each can be generated from a natural language description. We’re starting with the horizontal platform, and our roadmap includes industry-specific module packages as the user base grows and the AI learns from real usage patterns.

What are the most in-demand services or solutions that clients approach your company for?

What we hear most consistently is: “I need one place to run my entire business, and I need it to work the way I work — not the way the software forces me to work.”

The specific pain points vary, but they cluster around three themes. First, workflow unification — people are exhausted from toggling between Monday.com for projects, QuickBooks for invoicing, HubSpot for CRM, Notion for documentation, and Zapier to glue it all together. They want one system. Second, customization without developers — every business has unique processes, and the moment you need something your tool doesn’t offer, you’re stuck. People want to describe what they need in plain language and have it work. Third, AI that actually understands their business — not a generic chatbot bolted onto a product. Still, intelligence that knows their clients, their projects, and their financials, and can act on that context.

BusinessOS addresses all three simultaneously, which is why the response from early conversations has been so strong.

How do you personally stay ahead of industry shifts when most data is already yesterday’s news?

I treat this like an intelligence operation. I’m tracking three layers simultaneously.

The technology layer — I follow what’s happening with foundation models, not just the headlines, but the actual capability jumps. When Claude or GPT gets meaningfully better at structured reasoning, that directly affects what our AI can generate. I test new model capabilities against our use cases weekly.

The competitive layer — I watch what Monday.com, ClickUp, Replit, Lovable, and Base44 are shipping. Not to copy them, but to understand how the market is validating our thesis. When Monday.com launches “vibe coding” or ClickUp adds AI agents, that tells me the market sees the same destination we do. The question is who gets there first with the right architecture.

The user layer — and this is the most underrated one. I’m on our own platform every day, running our actual business. When something is clunky or a workflow is missing, I feel it immediately. That tight feedback loop between builder and user is irreplaceable. Most CEOs in our space either only build or only use. I do both, and that dual perspective is a significant advantage.

Do you have a significant percentage of repeat clients? If so, what strategies contribute to that loyalty?

From our software development services background, absolutely — our repeat client rate was exceptionally high. When you’ve delivered over 100 complex projects for Fortune 100 companies and NASA subcontractors, and they keep coming back, that’s the strongest validation of execution quality.

For BusinessOS as a product, we’re early-stage, so we’re building the foundation for retention through architecture, not just features. The key retention mechanism is data gravity — once your business operations, workflows, client history, and financial data live in BusinessOS’s unified data model, switching costs are substantial. Not because we make it hard to leave, but because no other platform offers the same integrated context.

The deeper strategy is that the platform gets more valuable the more you use it. Your AI-generated applications, your custom workflows, your business data — they all compound. A user who’s been on the platform for six months has a system that deeply understands their business. That’s not something you walk away from.

How do you measure and ensure high customer satisfaction in your operations?

We dogfood relentlessly. BusinessOS runs our own company — file management, payment tracking, invoicing, employee data, and project management. If something isn’t working well, we hit it before any external user does. That’s our primary quality gate.

Beyond that, we’re building satisfaction measurement into the platform itself. Usage patterns tell you more than surveys. If a user generates a custom application and actively uses it daily, that’s a satisfied customer. If they generate something and abandon it, we need to understand why. Our AI can track not just whether features are used, but whether they’re generating value — are invoices being sent faster, are projects being completed on schedule, is the user creating more custom workflows over time?

The metric I care most about is expansion — not just retention, but whether users are building more on the platform over time. If they’re creating new applications, adding more data, and describing more complex workflows, that’s the strongest possible satisfaction signal.

What kind of post-project support do you provide to address client queries or ongoing needs?

BusinessOS fundamentally changes the support model. In traditional software, something breaks, and you file a ticket. In our architecture, the platform is self-healing — there’s no AI-generated code that the user needs to debug, no API keys to troubleshoot, no third-party integration that fell over.

When users need help, it’s typically “how do I build this?” rather than “why is this broken?” — and increasingly, the AI handles that directly. You describe what you need, and the platform generates it. If the result isn’t quite right, you refine the description and iterate. The AI is the support layer.

For more complex needs, we provide direct onboarding support, platform-integrated documentation, and template libraries for common business configurations. Our roadmap includes a community marketplace where users share modules and best practices, creating a peer support ecosystem that scales beyond what any support team could provide.

Describe your pricing and billing structure – is it fixed cost, pay-per-milestone, or another model?

One subscription covers everything. That’s one of our strongest differentiators.

We use a freemium model with tiered subscriptions. The free tier gives small teams core functionality — basic business management, standard modules, and limited AI generation. Paid tiers unlock more AI generation capacity, advanced modules, enterprise permissions, and priority support.

There’s also a usage-based component for AI generation — building complex custom applications consumes more computational resources than simple ones, so heavy builders can purchase additional generation credits. But critically, the services that other platforms charge separately for — email, payments processing, file storage, integrations — are all built into the platform. There’s no separate Stripe bill, no SendGrid subscription, no OpenAI API charges. One bill, one dashboard.

We’re also building toward marketplace revenue sharing, where users who create and sell modules on the platform share revenue with us. This creates a true platform economy.

What is the typical price range for projects you’ve handled in the past year, and how do you balance affordability with value?

For our software development services, we’ve handled projects ranging from $50K to over $1M, working with organizations from startups to Fortune 100 enterprises. Our track record of 100+ delivered projects across that range speaks to our ability to scope and deliver reliably.

For BusinessOS as a product, the economics are entirely different and radically more accessible. Instead of a $50K custom software project, a business can subscribe to BusinessOS and have AI generate custom applications tailored to their exact needs for a fraction of the cost. That’s the whole point — we’re democratizing access to bespoke business systems.

The value equation is straightforward: the average SMB spends $5,000-15,000 per month across Monday.com, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Notion, Slack integrations, and Zapier automations — all siloed, all requiring manual synchronization. BusinessOS replaces that stack with a single platform. Even at a premium subscription tier, we deliver more value at a lower total cost of ownership.

Have you turned down projects based on budget or scope? If so, what are your minimum requirements?

In our services business, yes — frequently. When you’ve built systems for Fortune 100 companies and NASA subcontractors, you develop a very clear sense of what’s feasible within a given budget and timeline. We’ve turned down projects where the budget didn’t match the ambition, because delivering mediocre work damages everyone involved. Our minimum threshold was always tied to scope realism, not a dollar figure.

For BusinessOS, the question becomes different. We’re building a platform, not taking on custom projects. The platform is designed to be accessible at every level — from a solo founder running their first business to a 200-person company replacing their entire tool stack. The free tier lets anyone get started. The question isn’t “can you afford it?” but “is this the right solution for how you work?” — and for most SMBs drowning in SaaS fragmentation, the answer is yes.

What key challenges has your company faced in the last few years, and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge was the leap from services to product. For over a decade, we were an elite software development firm — delivering complex systems for demanding clients, generating revenue from day one on every project. The temptation to stay in that comfort zone is real. Custom development is profitable and predictable.

But we saw the tectonic shift coming. AI was about to change how software is built, and we realized we were in a unique position — we had enterprise engineering expertise and firsthand experiencerunning a business on inadequate tools. We decided to build the thing we wished existed.

The technical challenge was designing the architecture from scratch. We couldn’t use existing frameworks because none supported what we needed: a self-referential system where the platform and user-built applications share the same composable foundation. That meant building our own programming language, our own database engine, our own component architecture. It took years of R&D, but the result is something that cannot be easily replicated — which is exactly the kind of moat you want.

The ongoing challenge is timing. We’re in a race. Monday.com, ClickUp, Replit — they’re all moving toward our destination. Our advantage is that we started with the right architecture. They’re trying to retrofit AI into systems designed before the AI era. We built it from day one.

How do you foster innovation and adapt to emerging trends in your industry?

By building on an architecture that treats change as a feature, not a threat.

Most software companies innovate by adding features. That’s linear — every new capability requires engineering investment, integration work, and testing. BusinessOS innovates by expanding the vocabulary of composable blocks. When we add a new component type, it becomes immediately available for AI-generated applications across the entire platform. When the underlying AI models improve, every module — built-in or user-created — benefits automatically.

We also innovate through our users. Every custom application that gets built on BusinessOS teaches the AI about new business patterns. When a construction company generates a materials procurement workflow, that pattern informs what the AI can offer to the next construction company. The platform gets smarter with use. Innovation isn’t just top-down from our engineering team — it emerges from the ecosystem.

And frankly, dogfooding is our most potent innovation tool. Running our own business on the platform means we constantly encounter friction points. That friction is innovation fuel. I experience our gaps as a user every single day, which means our roadmap is always grounded in real operational needs, not theoretical feature requests.

What role does company culture play in your success, and how do you build and maintain it?

Our culture is rooted in one principle: we build what we use, and we use what we build. That sounds simple, but it has profound implications.

When every person on the team operates inside the product they’re building, there’s no gap between “the team that builds” and “the people who use.” Quality isn’t an abstract goal — it’s personal. If the invoicing module is clunky, our finance process is clunky. If the file manager is slow, our daily work is slow. That creates an ownership mentality that no amount of OKRs or Agile ceremonies can replicate.

We also cultivate what I’d call architectural thinking. Our team doesn’t just write code — they think about how the pieces compose, how users will extend them, how AI will interact with them. That requires a different kind of engineering mindset, and we hire for it specifically. The people we’ve brought in from Salesforce, IBM, Yandex, and Parallels — they chose us because they wanted to build something foundational, not just ship features.

The other cultural anchor is urgency. We’re aware that the market window is open, but it won’t remain open indefinitely. That shared sense of timing keeps everyone aligned without the need for heavy management overhead.

Where do you envision your company in the next 5-10 years? What are your boldest long-term goals?

In five years, I want BusinessOS to be the default operating system for SMBs — the way Shopify became the default for e-commerce. When someone starts a business, they shouldn’t have to evaluate 20 SaaS tools. They should describe their business to BusinessOS, and the platform generates their entire operational infrastructure from day one.

In ten years, the vision is bigger. We plan to release the Elastic Platform as a standalone development environment — making our AI-optimized language, hierarchical database, and component architecture available as a general-purpose development tool. That expands our addressable market from business operations into custom software development broadly.

The boldest goal? Eliminating the concept of “business software” as a category. Today, businesses buy tools. Tomorrow, they describe outcomes, and intelligent platforms deliver them. We want to be the platform that makes that transition happen — where the question isn’t “which CRM should I use?” but “what does my business need right now?” and the platform just handles it.

The numbers tell the story: we’re sitting at the intersection of five markets worth over $100 billion combined — project management, low-code platforms, business process management, enterprise application platforms, and AI in enterprise software. We’re not competing within one of these categories. We’re building the platform that makes them converg

How has your leadership style evolved throughout your career, and what influences it?

It evolved from execution-focused to architecture-focused.

Early in my career, leading an outsourcing firm, success was measured by delivery — on time, on budget, to spec. That demanded a detail-oriented, hands-on leadership style. You learn to manage complexity, set realistic expectations, and build trust through consistent execution. Delivering 100+ projects for Fortune 100 clients and NASA subcontractors teaches you that nothing matters more than follow-through.

As we transitioned to building a product, I had to shift. A product company needs vision leadership — not just “what are we building this sprint?” but “what should the architecture look like in five years?” The decisions we make about our programming language, our database engine, our component model — those are 10-year decisions. They require a different kind of thinking: more patient, more abstract, more willing to invest in foundations that won’t pay off immediately.

The biggest influence on my current style is being both a builder and a user at the same time. It keeps me grounded. When I’m designing the platform’s architecture, I’m also the person who has to use it to track payments tomorrow morning. That duality prevents the kind of detachment that kills product companies — where leadership loses touch with what users actually experience.

What emerging technologies or market shifts are you most excited about for your company?

Three things keep me energized.

First, the continued improvement of foundation models. Every significant jump in AI reasoning capability directly amplifies what BusinessOS can generate. We designed our AI-optimized programming language specifically so that AI models can read, write, and reason about business logic with high accuracy. As models get better, our language becomes even more powerful — it’s a compounding advantage.

Second, the “vibe coding” movement is going mainstream. Base44 hit 2 million users and a $50M ARR run rate within a year. Monday.com launched AI app generation. ClickUp added AI agents. The market is validating the core thesis that people want to build software through natural language. But nobody has combined that capability with a rich business platform. Every player is approaching from one side — either established tools adding AI, or AI builders adding features. We’re the convergence.

Third, multi-modal AI. Our roadmap includes scanning images, photos, and video streams with automatic data extraction. Imagine photographing a stack of invoices and having them automatically parsed, categorized, and integrated into your financial system — all through the same composable architecture. When multi-modal capabilities become reliable and affordable, the range of what users can do on our platform expands dramatically.

What advice would you give to aspiring leaders? Can you share one lesson from your journey that resonates with the business community?

Build on your own foundation. Literally.

The single most transformative decision we made was running our own business on the platform we were building. It changed everything — our quality standards, our priorities, our understanding of what users actually need versus what we assumed they needed.

Too many founders build products they don’t use. They rely on user interviews, analytics dashboards, and feature request lists. Those are valuable inputs, but they’re second-hand information. When you’re the user — when your invoices fail if the invoicing module is broken, when your team can’t collaborate if the workflow engine is down — you develop a completely different relationship with quality.

My advice: whatever you’re building, find a way to depend on it. Use your own product for something real, something consequential. Not a demo, not a sandbox — your actual operations. The friction you discover will be the most valuable product insight you’ll ever get. And the credibility you earn — being able to tell investors and customers “we run our business on this” — is irreplaceable.

The broader lesson is that the best moats are architectural, not feature-based. Features can be copied. A programming language designed from scratch for AI interaction, a self-referential architecture where the platform and user-built applications share the same foundation, a hierarchical database optimized for how businesses actually structure their data — those take years to build and cannot be retrofitted onto existing systems. Choose the harder path early. It compounds.