What I’m doing now

Last updated: September 30, 2024. Swampscott, MA.

Looking for my next marketing career opportunity

It has been 13 months since I moved to the United States. I worked remotely at Mbicycle, a global software development provider, for most months. I highly appreciated that the company provided me with a flexible work schedule. Despite my managing role with a team located in the CEST time zone. Yes, 5 AM work meetings were the norm for me. However, I raised the challenge of finding my next role in Massachusetts companies. July was my last month as Digital Marketing Manager at Mbicycle. So many hardships I have in front of me. The oversaturated job market, back-to-the-office trend, and higher competition with locals.  It will be a great race!

Making an AI-powered tool for easy recipe extraction from TikToks / Reels

My wife Iryna is not only a great former HR generalist and current payroll specialist. She is also a marvelous cook who feeds her family with healthy meals. Since TikTok and Instagram food bloggers made a trend with short recipe videos, Iryna started to attack my social DMs with them. I already knew what to expect for breakfast, lunch, or dinner usually according to it. Indeed, our DM might look like a folder with bookmarked recipes.

Honestly, I also use these convenient short guides to prepare meals by myself. However, I met a huge pain during the process. Stopping the video, taking notes of ingredients, and repeating it again and again is annoying. Quite often those videos might disappear. The icing on the cake was Ira’s message: “The last recipes I opted to cook are unavailable! It drives me nuts!”. So, there I came up with the idea to make our cooking approach easier and build the app that will:

• analyze short video recipes,
• extract a list of ingredients,
• cut screenshots,
• prepare a short guide,
• and synchronize with Mialie (recipe management software).

Mastering English and preparing for TOEFL

I'm sure that anyone can learn the ropes of any subject nowadays. Internet access, a device (smartphone or laptop), and a desire to learn - only need to achieve that. I didn’t go to school to learn web design or data analytics. Meanwhile, I can handle that scope as I’ve done online courses, learned from web articles, and practiced a lot. I got my Bachelor's degree studying on-site while working as a freelancer. My knowledge was gained during self-practice, working with mentors (tutors), and less from academic programs.

As I turned on job seeker mode, I realized that an MBA might be a stepping stone to C-level positions. My BS diploma doesn’t make my resume strong enough. That is the reason why I decided to go back to school soon. The first step will be to score high on the TOEFL test because English is not my first language.

Building and updating this website

The shoemaker's children going barefoot is exactly what happened to me. I launched dozens of websites and landing pages for clients and companies where I worked. Unfortunately, I hadn’t allocated time to my digital presence. Portfolio projects, case studies, and articles all landed in Notion and Google Docs as drafts. It made me think that right now is the best time to make them public.

I’m not a programmer, but I'm tech-savvy. My basic knowledge of algorithms, data structures, HTML, CSS, SQL, and Git enables me to handle updating the theme of this website. Also, I enjoy the time I spend utilizing web-dev tools, writing user stories, setting tasks, and conducting manual testing.

Launching a local ad agency

I heard from successful entrepreneurs that every person who brings home the bacon should have at least one side hustle to be confident in paying bills. As direction of side hustling they suggest choosing something that is not close to your profession to diverse efforts and evolve your new skills. Although it sounds logical and appeals to me (I had furniture assembly experience and worked with wood) I’m motivated by Kaya, a small tech ad agency that uses AI and automation in their processes. So, I decided to launch a similar one for North Shore SMEs.