ABOUT / RAY SVITLA
curiosity, made useful
FOUNDER · STRATEGIST · FRACTIONAL CMOI’m a Belarusian founder, strategist and Fractional CMO in Lisbon. I help teams turn a good but scattered product into a clearer story, usable marketing and a working operating rhythm.
01 / START / R&D
Curiosity is probably my defining trait. My life has been one long R&D project.
I’m a Belarusian founder, strategist and Fractional CMO in Lisbon. I help teams get their product, story and day-to-day marketing into one working shape. Sometimes that means a new brand. Sometimes a community that has to become real. Sometimes it means putting AI workflows into marketing and CRM without making everybody’s job worse.
I did not get here in a straight line. At university, I co-founded a logistics company, launched a skate brand and sold gadgets online. I have always preferred making a small version of something to talking about it from a safe distance. You learn faster when the thing has to survive contact with people.
02 / BDC / RESEARCH
In 2016, I joined BDC Consulting as a strategist and one of its first three people. I worked on agency promotion, senior client conversations, strategy and putting together the teams that could deliver it. We made seven original studies. They led to more than eighty earned-media publications and helped clients take us seriously before the first sales call. That is where I learned that research is not decoration. It can help somebody decide what to do next.
I studied at IKRA before that. While I was at BDC, I earned an Executive MBA at Kozminski University. Much later, I joined the John Smith Trust. All useful. Most of what I know still came from trying to make things work with other people.
03 / KYIV / WAKA
In 2020, Belarus made staying put less possible. I crowdfunded and designed a new national coat of arms, and did marketing work around Valery Tsepkalo’s presidential campaign. It was a response to a country closing in around people who wanted it to be different. I left for Kyiv.
In Kyiv, I founded WAKA, a Telegram-native social and dating product. We built creator rooms and quiz mechanics so people could bring their own audience into the app. Creators brought traffic, we shared revenue 50/50, and the product lived or died by whether people invited their friends.
WAKA reached 100,000 registrations. People made around 200 rooms, with roughly 50 active at the same time. We closed $220k in angel funding and secured another $80k in growth grants from EBRD and NEAR Protocol. One of our first investors, Gabil Tagiev, met his soulmate in the app. Better than a dashboard, honestly. Then the full-scale invasion started, and that phase ended.
04 / DIASPORA / 404
I moved from Kyiv to Lisbon. Two forced moves in two years changed which questions I could take seriously. I started working more with diaspora infrastructure, digital sovereignty and a very practical problem: how people organise when the institutions around them do not quite hold.
That became 404 Embassy. Across six cities, I worked on public formats around self-governance, networks and the future of communities. I did the programming, partnerships, production, moderation, visual language and distribution. The rooms included conversations with Vitalik Buterin, Lou Kerner, Patri Friedman, Kimberly Adams and Mark Lutter. The point was not the guest list. It was to make a room useful enough that people left with a better question than the one they came in with.
05 / NOW / SYSTEMS
The same thing shows up in my current work. At Stay, I helped roll out a new brand and build a Slack-native, human-governed AI layer for marketing and CRM. The point was not to replace people with a magic bot. It was to make campaign work, content, search, lifecycle communication and CRM easier to see in one place.
At AI Mindset, I built the visual, communications and community system around the labs, led events, and helped make the offer easier to understand and join. Across three paid cohorts, enrolment moved from 85 to 100 to 150. The next cohort reached 200+ participants after my mandate ended. Good. It meant the thing could keep moving without me standing next to it.
I also write. My piece for the Foreign Policy Centre, From paperwork to digital protocols: how exile rewrites citizenship, came out in July 2025. A book chapter on Ivan Illich and AI is coming in 2027.
I keep a public R&D and publishing system called self.md. It is where I test how I work, what I publish and what kind of personal AI I can live with. The tools should stay close enough to argue with.
Outside work, I live in Lisbon, make music and pay too much attention to clothes and objects. I once wrote and performed a 40-minute set on Kyryllivs’ka. I’m divorced. Still curious. Not always an efficient combination.