We were lucky to catch up with Julia Goncharov recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Julia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

Success, for me, means recognition and being part of something that changes everyday life or shifts the way millions of people think. People who share this mindset often gravitate towards science or founding startups, which, in essence, have a lot in common. Driven by the desire to create the Next Big Thing, we are constantly searching for worthy ideas and the resources to bring them to life. But beyond having a great idea and a solid team, there are two other key components to achieving success: motivation and funding.

A lack of motivation is the reason why most startups fail. I know firsthand how overwhelming it can feel, when it seems like you have no strength left and you start yearning for an ‘easier life.’ In moments like these, I catch myself thinking: ‘Maybe I should just quit and go back to being a designer—it’s so much simpler, why do I need all this?’ Meanwhile, the startup from the outside looks perfect: successful client stories, and thousands of supporters watching and cheering you on. But inside, you’re sitting there contemplating walking away. I’m certain many founders who read this will relate. Week after week, problems and failures can overshadow past victories and the ultimate goal. In such circumstances, it’s all too easy to lose the motivation to keep going and tackle challenges.

This is why Unicorns Club is fundamentally focused on motivation: it’s crucial to offer support, highlight strengths, and celebrate wins, even the small ones. Many founders underestimate their own achievements; they look at bigger companies, read about startups making millions, and, much like staring at retouched photos of models on Instagram, think, ‘I’m not good enough; I should be doing something else.’ But they don’t realize just how remarkable they are because they’re comparing themselves to the wrong benchmarks!

The second key component for a startup’s success is funding. A startup is akin to a research endeavor: you see a massive market and a problem within it, and sometimes you even know what the ideal solution would be, but you’re not sure how to get there. You need to try again and again, running hundreds of experiments before finding Product-Market Fit. This work takes a long time and can end in failure. You could spend years studying your chosen niche from every angle, so big ideas can’t be tested with just a few thousand dollars. Your savings, support from friends, and credit card limits won’t suffice. To reach great heights, you need venture funding.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have worked in startups for more than 10 years, as an employed product manager, designer and as a co-founder. Yet, throughout these years, I never fully understood why some founders manage to attract millions of dollars based solely on an idea, repeating this cycle with new concepts over and over, often without even releasing an MVP, while others struggle to find funding with a tangible product in hand.

The current statistics are grim: less than 1% of startups will receive venture funding. There’s a common belief in the industry that deeply frustrates me: ‘A founder must be skilled at raising capital.’ Supporters of this idea claim that if a founder can’t sell their vision to investors, they won’t be able to sell their product to customers either.

It sounds logical, but this neat theory falls apart when you go on X (formerly Twitter) and find thousands of startups that are successfully selling their products and growing through a bootstrap model. Many of them chose this path because they weren’t willing to spend time performing at pitch sessions or simply couldn’t find funding. But these founders are truly skilled at building tech companies, and customers love these products. Unfortunately, due to a lack of capital, their ability to take risks and test bold hypotheses is limited, so only a few of them achieve significant success.

Knowing how to attract funds is certainly a valuable skill that can extend a project’s lifespan, but it’s not a direct guarantee that a startup will become the Next Big Thing.

Understanding this problem, we created Unicorns Club to give startups focused on building and promoting their products the opportunity to attract capital. This is done through growth metrics and dedication to their mission, not by creating a FOMO effect.

Unicorns Club is a place where founders receive motivation, and support, attract funding, and achieve success faster.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When you become an entrepreneur, you make a career pivot: trading a job with a clear career path and market-level compensation for complete uncertainty.

Taking on this new role was very challenging for me. In the spring of 2020, during the peak of the pandemic lockdown, I quit my position as a Product Director to support my husband’s idea and launch a startup with him. I packaged the idea into a pitch deck and submitted an application to a startup studio. We were fortunate, and within a few months, secured our initial funding from an accelerator. For the next two years, we developed the project using venture funds.

Even though we didn’t have to rely on credit or deplete our savings from the beginning, the stress was immense. Psychologists say that an employee’s performance is significantly influenced by stress related to approval or disapproval from management. For a founder, the stress is far greater—they worry about the entire team. The constant need to meet high growth targets and the anxiety that funds will run out before achieving meaningful results is something founders and entrepreneurs never part with.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Initial investors in my first startup told us, ‘Turn your business into a machine as soon as possible; delegation is key.’ The idea that delegating tasks and stepping back from doing everything yourself sets an experienced entrepreneur apart from a novice sounded ideal—but it doesn’t always work in startups.

Startups often don’t have not only traditional business models but also standard company processes, which means there aren’t ready-made specialists for the tasks that need to be done. So, to find the right person, you have to spend dozens of hours reviewing resumes and conducting interviews. Add to that the cost of training and onboarding.
Time and again, we encountered the same story: an employee would start to show results, quickly burn out, and leave. There was a period when we were taking on four interns a week. One or two would stay, but nearly all would quit after a month. After this series of departures, I experienced total burnout and fell into depression.

Eventually, we realized that hiring full-time employees during turbulent periods, while the product is still changing and there weren’t extra funds for extensive trial and error, wasn’t the right approach. It’s better to delegate routine tasks to freelancers and automate repetitive processes.

The advantage of freelancers is that they’re more likely to complete tasks, as they don’t get paid otherwise. Full-time employees don’t always have that same drive.

Hiring full-time employees too early in a startup can ruin your business. The longer you and your co-founders can handle the workload yourselves, the more you’ll learn about your market and the needs of your customers. Only then can you create a product that exceeds client expectations—the key to becoming a unicorn.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.unicorns.club/
• Twitter: https://x.com/yuliyayugo
• Other: https://wefunder.com/unicorns.club