About
Built a few studios. Sold a couple. Still in it.
I’m Alex Halchenko. Born in Ukraine, based in London, and I’ve spent my working life on the commercial end of design studios – co-founding them, running them, and selling my share of one when the time was right.
Two of my own are running today. This is a current problem for me, not a past one.
How I got here
I didn’t read about this in a book. I lived it.
Ester Digital came first – an Estonian design agency I co-founded with two partners. I ran the commercial side of it for eleven years: sales, marketing, getting clients through the door. By the end it was a business that ran perfectly well without me, which is when I sold my stake. Three things stuck. Great work is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. The studio with the better business usually beats the studio with the better portfolio. And the owner is almost always the bottleneck without knowing it.
Then Outreach.Software, an AI startup, where I built the whole business around someone else’s clever technology – strategy, funding, investors, the lot. Acquired before it shipped. Investors paid, founders out.
Now UAREUX, a UX agency built by creative directors, and DNSK.WORK’s commercial half, with Tanya Donska on the design. So when I talk about pipeline anxiety and payroll maths, it’s this week’s problem rather than a war story.
You won’t find client names or figures anywhere on this site. That work is under NDA, and yours would be treated the same way. My own four I can talk about freely.
Not a consultant
The word covers a lot of people doing a job that isn’t this one.
- One operator on the commercial side, working with few enough studios to do it properly.
- In the work — positioning, offer, pricing, pipeline — rather than beside it with a view.
- Willing to take equity when a studio is worth betting on. That focuses the mind, mine included.
- Willing to say no, and I use it more often than not.
- Your designer. That work is your team’s, and they’re better at it than I’d be.
- A growth coach with a framework and a webinar.
- An agency about to introduce you to five juniors.
- Someone who will agree with you to keep the engagement alive.
Why I do this
The same thing, studio after studio. Work I’d be proud to have made, and behind it a business held together with optimism and a spreadsheet.
The owner is doing three jobs badly because there is no time to do one well. That gap – between how good the work is and how shaky the business behind it is – is the most fixable problem I know, and almost nobody helps with it, because the people who could have mostly never run a studio themselves.
I have, four times over. So I would rather close that gap properly for a few studios than have an opinion about a hundred. I also take tea more seriously than is reasonable, and I’d rather tell you something true on a first call than win the work and waste your year.
Ask me the awkward question
Whether I have actually done this, whether it worked, and what it cost. I would rather answer that on a call than make a claim here – and if it isn’t a fit, you’ll know inside the half hour.