INB.bio: 6 Years of Chaos, Mistakes & Wins

6 DISASTERS WE'RE WILLING TO DISCUSS PUBLICLY

There are more. We're not ready to talk about those yet

Zambia. We're opening operations. We hire a local CEO. We rent an office. We hire two operators. We're ONE DAY from launching.

The CEO has a realization: the parent company doesn't know what it's doing.

His solution: sue us for four hundred thousand dollars so HE can manage the company properly.

We hadn't made a single sale yet. We had an office and two people. He wanted $400k to "better manage" the operation.

The confidence. The audacity. The complete misunderstanding of what was happening.

We hired lawyers. Spent a quarter of our budget on legal fees. Eventually realized this was going to cost more than just cutting our losses.

We walked away. Zambia remains the one that got away. Or the bullet we dodged. Depends on the day.

What we learned: Some people see "investment" and think "that's all profit and it should be mine." Check for this BEFORE giving someone control of an entire country operation.

Picture this: You're a customer. You ordered a product.  You're waiting.

You look around. No package. You check outside. Nothing.  You call us.

You: "It's not here."

The courier, currently eating lunch with your package in the van: "Yeah I still have it."

The tracking system, absolutely vibing in its own universe: "DELIVERED. SUCCESS. EVERYTHING IS FINE."

This went on for WEEKS. Customers were confused.
Couriers were baffled. The tracking system? Living its best life. Zero notes. Full confidence.

Evgeniy, our CTO, describes this period as "formative."
The rest of us describe it using words we can't put on a company website.

The tracking system didn't have a bug. It had a personality disorder.

What we learned: Your tech stack should not have lore.  If people are telling stories about your software like it's a cryptid, rebuild it.

Tunisia opened. Tunisia closed. Tunisia opened again.

Tunisia closed again.

Then we opened it a third time, because apparently, we needed to be really sure. And yes, we did actually open it. Every time felt like this is the one. Sometimes it was. Mostly… not quite.

Mostly… not quite.

What we learned? Sometimes you have to fail at something twice before you spot what’s wrong. Sometimes three times. We’re not proud, but we’re definitely more precise now.

We had DATA. We had RESEARCH. We had a product that crushed it in other markets. We had approval from everyone. Someone made a Slack emoji to celebrate.

Launch day. Confidence: maximum.
Week one: okay, ramping up.
Week two: uh.
Week three: so this is not working.

Turns out we had hired people who spoke the language perfectly. We had written a script that was technically flawless. We had everything right except the ONE thing that mattered: we didn't understand how people in that market actually TALK.

The operators were following the script perfectly.
The script was for a completely different conversation.
It was like we'd written instructions for a wedding and they were at a funeral. Technically in the right language.
Completely wrong vibe.

Iryna, our Head of QC, listened to HUNDREDS of these calls.
Her conclusion: "We knew the language. We didn't know the conversation."

We spent three months rebuilding everything. The product relaunched. It became a top performer.

The original launch? A very expensive masterclass in cultural competence.

What we learned: Speaking the language is step one. Understanding what people mean when they talk is the actual job.

We had a courier. Let's call him... creative.

His relationship with our delivery schedule was best described as "theoretical." He had developed his own system. A personal philosophy, if you will. It made perfect sense to him and absolutely zero sense to physics, logistics, or anyone else.

Deliveries happened at times that could only be described as "surprise."

When we brought this up: complete shock. Genuine confusion. "What do you mean?"

When we brought it up AGAIN: renewed shock. Like we'd never discussed this before. Ever.

Every single conversation was the first conversation.
He experienced time differently than the rest of us.

We're pretty sure he's still out there somewhere, delivering packages according to a schedule only he understands, eternally surprised that anyone has questions.

What we learned: "Vibes-based logistics" is not a sustainable business model, no matter how committed someone is to the vibes.

Nepal almost broke us. Not bureaucracy – us.

We tried to fix the office internet… and accidentally took out a whole street. Lights off, routers dead, one very confused landlord.

The technician knew what happened. He was just laughing too hard to explain. Somehow, it all came back.

Every week someone asked "should we just work from a café?" Every week we said yes, ordered another coffee, and kept going anyway. Then it worked. The internet came on. The street came back. Nepal became one of our strongest GEOs. The blackout? Completely worth it. Probably. We've agreed not to touch any cables again.

6 WINS THAT HAPPENED

The part where we stopped breaking things long enough to build things

After the tracking disaster, Evgeniy looked at everything and said "absolutely not" and deleted it all.

He rebuilt the entire tech stack from scratch.

What we have now:

A CRM that integrates with telephony and actually knows where packages are
A delivery platform managing couriers across 15 countries with real-time tracking that reflects reality
An affiliate dashboard that doesn't require a PhD to understand
A database that has never once claimed a package was delivered while it was in a van

The tech went from "the problem" to "the reason we can scale."

People ask us how we manage operations across 15 completely different markets. The answer is: Evgeniy fixed the thing that was broken and then built it right.

We worked in the red for MONTHS while we figured out Pakistan.

Native operators. Cultural training. Delivery infrastructure. Product adaptation. The whole operational playbook.

It was expensive. It was slow.
People questioned whether it made sense.

Then it clicked.

Now Pakistan is the market we use to prove the model works.

21% approval rate. Stable, not spiky. 1-5 day delivery that catches customers in the motivation window. Twice-weekly payouts. Eleven dollars per confirmed order.

When partners say "I don't know about exotic GEOs," we show them Pakistan and they stop talking.

We've survived so many revolutions, coups, and assorted national emergencies that we stopped counting somewhere around the third one.

At this point it's less "crisis management" and more "Tuesday."

We have never lost a single day of operations. Not once.

Current status: completely unbothered, fully operational, and mildly impossible to rattle.

If anyone ever questions our commitment to keeping the lights on, we have photographic evidence of a sales team closing deals while a revolution happens outside the window.

Conversation over.