Sergey Bykhovets: Our Team Has Developed and Maintains Our Own Messenger – A Social Network

Our team has developed and maintains our own Messenger – a social network. According to the results of our work, such applications as are released in the play market and appstore stores:

• UAround – Meet & Chat & Date ,
• Wolf Elite Dating,
• iBabe Chat, Flirt, Meet Girls,
• Ton Privacy Messenger
• UAround Private & Secure chat

Our task is to unite people from all over the world in one application, and to give the opportunity to get acquainted for free and communicate safely as in a regular messenger!

Tell us about yourself?

My name is Sergey Bykhovets, I was born in Moscow (Russia), I have been fond of computers since childhood. I remember how happy I was when my father gave me a 286 computer, it was a powerful computer in 1990, and now the simplest smartphone for $ 20 is more powerful and more productive than such a computer! In my childhood, there were no mobile phones, but over time, I watched as smartphones conquer the market, and computers fade into the background.

And already in childhood, I understood that there were great prospects behind the software for smartphones. After finishing school, I entered the university. After receiving the first diploma of a lawyer, I decided to get a second higher education in the specialty

“Marketing”, at that time Russia was moving into a market economy and marketing was in great demand. Companies produced goods, but did not know how to properly present it to the end consumer.

Over time, our smartphones have become more powerful and applications for sending short messages such as: (WhatsApp, Skype, Viber) and dating applications like (Mamba, Mylove, Badoo) have appeared. I, like the rest of the youth, actively used these services.

But there was a problem, each application was somehow not convenient or some functionality was missing. Inspired by the success story of a Belarusian developer who created Viber and sold it a year later to an Israeli company for 900 million dollars, I gathered a team of like-minded developers and in 2015 started creating my own messenger – a social network for dating UAround (abbreviated You are around).

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

As Winston Churchill said. “Success is the ability to move from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm.” My motto is “Success will come, you need to work hard!”

It should be noted that the coronovirus pandemic has brought us a positive trend. The number of downloads of our applications has increased significantly. Monetization has increased. People are on self-isolation, but I want to communicate!!

We did not miss this opportunity and in addition to our first product UAround Dating, release a series of new Wolf Dating apps for Android. In iOS, we have released the iBabe app for beautiful girls. As a result, by the beginning of 2022, there are 6 mobile applications in our case.

In the current situation, it has become a little easier for us to compete with our big competitors like: Badoo, Tinder, Mamba, etc., although of course, due to lack of advertising funding, we cannot yet equal our competitors in key indicators.

We are not upset and just continue to work to improve our services!

What problem does your business solve?

The idea of ​​our product was to combine the most requested features from dating applications into a full-fledged messenger like WhatsApp. As a result, we got a full-fledged messenger with user search functions not only by phone number, but also by: age, gender, city, who is nearby.

We were one of the first instant messengers to add the ability to create and administer their own thematic group for each user. We implemented audio-video calling in our application half a year earlier than WhatsApp did.

During the development of our messenger, our team carried out parallel projects, one of them was a corporate secure messenger for a bank. During the implementation of this project, we have developed and implemented in the messenger data encryption equal to a 15360-bit RSA key.

This feature would be implemented for free in a dating app. Now in our applications it is not only interesting to get acquainted, but also to communicate safely.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Our inspiration is the success of similar projects and millions of happy users who could find their love!

What is your magic sauce?

We provide communication to different people / countries in one place. Acquainted, find their love, create a family.

We do not promise the privacy of correspondence, as the popular messengers WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber  – we give it to users.

We have implemented an online data encryption mechanism based on a symmetric key, on the principle of the German Enigma encryption machine. The security level of the key is equal to 15360 (fifteen thousand) bit keys.

Our encryption can be easily verified using two mobile devices.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

Of course we are working on improving our product! We add new features. There are plans to bring new interesting products to the mobile application market. For large countries, create personal local messengers. And of course we are waiting for new users for our applications!

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Of course, the coronovirus pandemic has made adjustments to the work of our office. Since the beginning of 2020, “work from home” has become a mandatory measure (for everyone whose position, in principle, implies this), interviews have also switched to video communication. Startups are generally flexible, but still, when switching to remote work, at the beginning, KPI (key performance indicators) of developers decreased.

I had to look for and implement software products for remote setting of work tasks and their acceptance. Such software products were found: Bitrix24 and Atlassian Jira. After the correct implementation of these software products in our work, KPI was restored to the level of work in the office again.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

We are always glad to meet and work with high-quality android, ios, and back-end developers. We are looking for companies that want to use personal secure corporate messengers in their work. Based on our developments of highly loaded and fault-tolerant systems, we can create encrypted and secure corporate messengers for both private corporations and public services!