SoloHairCut
Online booking for independent stylists in Serbia: dashboard, schedule, three Telegram bots, subscription. In production since 2026.
Nikita Saltykov
- 01 / BaseBelgrade, Serbia
- 02 / ModeSolo or inside your team
- 03 / FocusComplex digital products
- 04 / PrincipleI own the outcome
Independent Product & Engineering LeadBelgrade
You can say to me: “We have a hard problem. Figure it out.” I will — take ownership and see it through to a working system, on my own or inside your team.
18+ years in operations and infrastructure: from first-line engineer to Technical Director, then a company of my own with two data centres. Today I build digital products end to end — through to production.
Scale
- 30+ / 20people and engineers led; budget ~50M RUB a year — Technical Director
- 2 / ~50data centres and clients — a company built from zero without investment; still running after my exit
- 400+ / ~96husers and hours — the email recovery the vendor considered impossible
- 2 in 2026end-to-end products: one in production with subscriptions, one with an external customer in acceptance
How I approach hard problems
- Measure first, argue second.Arguments on assumptions become criteria all sides agree on.
- Find the cause of the flow.If a problem recurs, faster handling only hides it.
- Big changes as short, reversible experiments.Metrics up front; extension decided on data.
- Change the minimum.Usually the rules and how people work together, not the people.
- Do the economics before hiring or buying.The most expensive answers, and often to a different question.
What I have solved
- ~30 → ~4tickets a daySupport split into operations and root-cause elimination; a two-year backlog cleared within a year.
- ~2 h → ~15 minfirst response · SLA ~80 → ~90%Support became a measurable process: levels, severity, escalation before the deadline.
- ~6 / ~12 moMVP and productionA 1C rollout stalled for months: the “code or servers” dispute turned into measurements, no teams replaced.
- ~½of the client base re-pricedInstead of hiring — per-client profitability analysis; economics restored, overload gone.
96 hours
The vendor considered recovery impossible. About 96 hours later, email for 400+ users was working again.
- 0 hAn Exchange update at a regional heat-supply company makes email for 400+ users inaccessible. Microsoft confirms the defect: no standard recovery. The backup depended on the same Exchange.
- The damaged service is stopped. New Exchange infrastructure and an edge server — incoming mail is accepted throughout the outage.
- The data is found in local copies on workstations; a way to export and import them is found by experiment. A recovery team visits workstations in priority order.
- ~96 hSystem and data restored, no new mail lost, the client stayed. Then the causes were closed: update procedure, on-call cover, independent mail storage.
INCO, a client’s infrastructure; coordination and the key decisions were mine. Since then, before any critical change I check two things: is there a copy that doesn’t depend on the system it is meant to save, and who is on call if something goes wrong.
Path
-
INCO
2004 – 2016 · first-line engineer → Technical Director
30+ people · 20 engineers · ~50M RUB budget a year · contractual SLAs met
-
IT Native
2015 – 2022 · founder, CEO and CTO
~50 clients · 2 data centres · ~50M RUB peak revenue · company continues after exit
-
Orion Innovation
2022 – February 2025 · Team Lead, test automation
international outstaffing · up to three teams, ~8 people at peak · inside client processes
NNSTU, bachelor’s degreeBelgrade, remoteRussian, English; basic Serbian
Now
Since 2025 I build digital products end to end — from problem to production. The two largest:
System for a network of sports schools
Head office and branches, 9 roles, diary, medical record, reports, audit log, offline installation. Customer under NDA, acceptance on staging.
Have a hard problem?
Describe it in 2–3 sentences — I’ll reply with how I would approach it. If it’s not my kind of work, I’ll say so straight away.