Free Playbook · The Advantage № 002

The Stan Playbook

How Stan reached $30M ARR with 30 people, zero transaction fees, and no marketing budget.

Vitalii Dodonov co-founded Stan, deleted the transaction fee at roughly $1M in revenue, and watched the business grow 8.5x the following year. This playbook breaks the run into five decisions — with verbatim quotes from the episode, what actually happened at each step, and a run-this-week checklist.

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Cover of The Stan Playbook

What’s Inside

The five moves — plus one on how he chooses what to do next.

  • №01

    Delete the middleman's cut — the spreadsheet that killed the commission.

  • №02

    Be your own first customer — the intimacy that beats marketing copy.

  • №03

    Sell the easiest thing first — lower the setup cost and the market gets bigger.

  • №04

    Build something worth repeating — word of mouth as gas in a tank.

  • №05

    Solve the real problem — distribution, not monetization, is the bottleneck.

  • №06

    Optimize for the room — rooms over salary, compounding over linear.

About the Author

Mike Wystrach

Mike built and sold Freshly, a direct-to-consumer food brand, to Nestlé for over $1.5 billion. He is the co-founder of Petfolk and managing partner at Cutting Horse Ventures, where he invests in early-stage consumer brands. He writes weekly in The Advantage on what it actually takes to build — beyond the highlight reel.

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