Max Gutchenko

From One Customer to Over 1000

Max joined Rayobyte exactly at the time when we were discussing building the residential vertical and had the opportunity to work on this product from the ground up. Fast forward almost a half-decade, and he is now the product owner of Rayobyte’s residential proxies. 

Reminiscing, Max recalls the first clients for the product, which was essentially the proof of concept that the product works! Although the product has thousands of customers now, the first customer was the proudest moment for him, personally - and made him really excited about the future of the product! 

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The Future of Proxy Technologies

Max wants to keep building - partly because he wants to solve more problems but also to get back to feeling that same sense of excitement. He’s recently helped the company launch web unblocker - where the product guarantees results every single time, and the customer doesn’t have to worry about the management of proxies separately or spend time defining which properties to use. 

He actually attended the Zyte Extract Summit as part of the Rayobyte Leadership team this year, and discussed at length the future of proxy technologies with his peers in the conference. Max is thinking of exploring the data extraction vertical a bit further as a natural next step in building the web unblocker, as he believes that is where the future is headed as well. 

The conference brought Max to the United States for the first time, and so he did some sightseeing in Arizona & Utah as well. Hiking the Grand Canyon was an amazing experience, but Max was first bewildered by the vastness of Bryce Canyon. He thinks he saw Bryce first, leaving him with a more lingering impact. 

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Max When He’s Not an Engineer 

Outside his work as an engineer, Max likes to engineer other stuff. He’s into soldering and 3D printing, and in fact, he built a knife organizer all by himself using Fusion 360 because the other knife organizers available in the market weren’t suiting his needs. 

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So, Max is an engineer even when he’s not! In his previous job, he even made cool hardware that flashed do-not-disturb above his office door when he was taking calls. In his mind, Max wouldn’t exist in a parallel universe if he was not into some kind of engineering!

However, Max still wants to expand his known universe beyond engineering and is currently learning different marketing and business strategies on the job. He has a knack for startups and entrepreneurship and wants to build his own SaaS products in the future. An engineer knows how to build the product, but doesn’t know how to make it better based on customer feedback, how to sell the product, and scale the business. That’s why this learning curve is important to Max, despite it being outside his zone of interest. 

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Life Advice: Be A Combination More Complex Than 0 or 1 

Max leaves us with a coded philosophy (pun intended) in his final remarks. In the matrix, Max believes that it is important to be a more complex combination, where we go out and explore more of ourselves and the world around us, and pay our role in the universe, instead of simply accepting our fate as zero or seeing us as the one.