I Built MyRazom—and Almost Nobody Came. Shut It Down or Start Again?

About a year ago, carried by the first rush of ambition, I registered a company in Ukraine. I believed that a strong intention would be enough: I would create a place where Ukrainians and people willing to help could find one another without chaotic chats, random contacts, and constant uncertainty. That is how MyRazom began.

It was my first real product. So I made a classic first-founder mistake: instead of solving one small, painful problem, I started building an entire world. Requests, helpers, reviews, private messages, trips, services, useful guides, help stories, moderation, safety, several languages, and multiple countries. I wanted to do everything properly from day one.

Only now can I name the central mistake: I built the city before proving that people wanted to live there.

The homepage makes a clear promise: help you can trust. A visitor can create a request, become a helper, search for people and services by country, communicate inside the platform, and leave a review after an interaction. The system has localization, responsive UI, queues, backups, and operational tooling.

The repository contains 214 commits, 70 database migrations, 90 controllers, 59 models, and 93 feature-test files. A release report dated July 30, 2026 records 574 passing tests and 20,372 assertions. That is a historical release snapshot, not a fresh test run performed for this article.

I learned how to design a complex system and think about safety, localization, and real user flows. Technically, the project taught me a great deal. But there is one product test that architecture and automated checks cannot replace: do people return because it solves a problem that matters to them?

On September 21, 2026, the public MyRazom catalogue shows one help request. It has zero responses. The helper catalogue shows one helper—me. There is one question and one service, while no public trips, guides, or help stories are visible yet.

This does not prove that there are no registered users, private conversations, or completed acts of help. I did not inspect or disclose the private database or private analytics for this article. It is simply an honest snapshot of what a new visitor can see. And that matters: the visitor reaches a carefully built expectation of a community, not a living community.

A product can pass 574 automated tests and still fail the only test that matters most: do real people need it now?

• I started with a platform instead of one outcome compelling enough to change how a person already solves the problem.

• I invited help seekers, helpers, services, guide authors, and trip participants at the same time. Every side had to wait for the others.

• I worked on trust, moderation, and scale before finding a repeatable path to the first users.

• The positioning for ‘Ukrainians and Russian-speaking people abroad’ made the audience broader but the product identity and promise weaker.

• For too long, I treated finished code, company registration, and the amount of work as evidence that I should continue. They prove my effort—not demand.

The most expensive part is not money or code. It is emotional attachment. MyRazom preserves the first version of me as a founder: someone who did not yet know when to stop and ask, ‘Who exactly will use this tomorrow?’

UNHCR planning material for 2026 estimates about 5.86 million refugees from Ukraine outside the country, approximately 5.3 million of them in Europe. People genuinely need housing, documents, jobs, trusted services, psychological support, local contacts, and reliable information.

But the audience is already surrounded by government portals, charities, Facebook and Telegram groups, local communities, and new products. There are eDopomoga and Spilno, the I’m Ukrainian and Podiya apps, and the Svitom directory. Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Policy has also launched a Dodomu pilot for people considering return and reintegration.

So my question is no longer ‘Do Ukrainians need help?’ Of course they do. The harder and more useful question is: what single problem can MyRazom solve noticeably better than a familiar chat, Google search, known volunteer, or government service? I do not yet have an honest answer.

Sometimes I want to remove MyRazom from my life completely: shut down the server, remove the project from my portfolio, and never return to it. But next to that impulse stands the company I registered in Ukraine about a year ago, the code, the experience, and my original belief that Ukrainians deserve a safe product of their own.

Continuing the current platform merely because I have already invested so much would be another mistake. Yet destroying everything because the first version did not come alive is also too simple. Closing a hypothesis does not erase the path. The code can be archived, the infrastructure reused, and the company and skills redirected toward something else.

I now see three honest options: close the current product calmly; narrow MyRazom to one country, one city, and one recurring problem; or reposition the company completely and create a different product from scratch, built only for Ukrainians.

‘Only for Ukrainians’ must not mean the old interface with a different flag and more patriotic copy. A new product has to begin with a specific situation in which a Ukrainian loses time, money, or a sense of safety today.

• One city or country and one practical local-help job that can be delivered manually first.

• One category of verified services where trust and a completed outcome matter more than a large directory.

• One narrow return or reintegration flow—but only if conversations reveal a gap not already covered by Dodomu and public services.

These are not features to build immediately. They are directions for conversations. I no longer want to choose a product because it is interesting to program. First there must be a person with a concrete problem, then a manually achieved result, and only then new code.

This article is not an attempt to collect likes and call them validation. I want to find at least ten specific stories that cluster around the same recurring problem. Not ‘build an app for Ukrainians,’ but ‘this happened to me in this city, this is how I solve it now, and this is why I do not trust the existing option.’

If such a cluster appears, I will try to help five people manually—without a new platform or months of development. Only if they achieve the outcome, want to return, or show willingness to pay for a repeat will there be a reason to build. Views and comments alone do not validate demand.

If you are a Ukrainian living abroad, please tell me about the last real problem—not a list of desired features. Which country and city do you live in? What did you have to solve through chats, groups, or personal contacts? What made you distrust the available options? What single outcome would make you return to a dedicated product for Ukrainians?

1. Close MyRazom and preserve it as an honest lesson from my first project.

2. Keep the name but narrow the product to one testable problem.

3. Reposition the company completely and build a different Ukraine-only product from scratch.

I am not asking for polite encouragement. I am asking you to help me see what I missed beneath the layers of my own code. What would you do in my place—and which real Ukrainian problem deserves a second chance?

The public MyRazom state and screenshots were checked on September 21, 2026. Technical figures come from the local repository and the project’s release report. I do not publish private user data or present the public catalogue as the product’s complete statistics.

• UNHCR, Ukraine Situation Regional Refugee Response Plan 2026: unhcr.org/ua/sites/ua/files/2026-02/20260126_RBE_UKR_Sit_Appeal_2026.pdf

• Dodomu platform: msp.gov.ua/en/press-center/news/supporting-return-and-reintegration

• Spilno: spilno.gov.ua; eDopomoga: edopomoga.gov.ua; Svitom: svitom.org

• MyRazom: myrazom.com