Growth Strategies for Fintech Startups – Interview with Bohdan Hlushko, Head of Growth
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Bohdan Hlushko built his product perspective across multiple disciplines, from software development to managerial leadership. That cross-functional background continues to shape how he approaches strategy today.
Bohdan Hlushko, Head of Growth
Who is Bohdan Hlushko?
My official title is Head of Growth at INSART, but if you ask the founders I've worked with, they'd probably describe me differently. I'm the person they turn to when they're building hard but not growing, and can't figure out why.
What that means in practice is that I help startups untangle the things that prevent good products from becoming great businesses. A roadmap that's grown too complex to execute with focus; a value proposition that makes sense internally but doesn't land with customers; a product that gets impressive demos but doesn't convert; users who sign up, don't find what they came for, and leave. These are the problems I spend most of my time on.
My background sits at the intersection of product strategy, solution architecture, and the product narrative that connects the two. I work across all three deliberately, because in my experience, you can't solve a growth problem by looking at any one of them in isolation. The product, the architecture, and the story you tell investors all have to form one coherent system. When they don't, something eventually breaks.
What inspired you to focus on product growth in fintech?
Honestly? Frustration.
I kept watching brilliant founders with real vision, talent, and backing repeatedly hitting the same invisible wall. They'd done everything right on paper to secure funding, hire strong engineers, build out a roadmap packed with features. And still, growth would flatline with users not sticking around or revenue not compounding, while nobody could quite explain why. From where I stand, I can see how it all happens because nobody had really stopped to question whether they were building the right things at all.
Fintech makes that problem particularly costly. When you're building products that people trust with their financial lives, the margin for confusion is extremely thin. What drew me to INSART specifically was finding an environment where I could address that at a structural level, rather than just patching symptoms.
What sets your services apart from others in the industry?
To answer that properly, I need to challenge something most people in this industry take for granted.
There's a very understandable obsession in the startup world with shipping fast. Speed is genuinely valuable, but only when it's pointed in the right direction. When it's not, you're not building momentum, you're building debt. Technical debt, product confusion, monetization gaps that compound until one day growth just... stops.
Most companies compartmentalize with product strategy happening over here, architecture decisions happening over there, and fundraising preparation being a separate conversation entirely. We treat all three as one interconnected system. Pull on any one of them without understanding the other two, and you'll feel it eventually.
So instead of asking founders "what features should we build next?", we ask a more fundamental question: what must exist for this business to compound?
That one question reshapes almost every decision that follows. It means we'll sometimes recommend cutting features rather than adding them. Simplifying a value proposition rather than expanding it. Rebuilding monetization logic before scaling acquisition. You get the logic.
We slow founders down before we speed them up, and that's entirely intentional. Sustainable growth comes from building something structurally sound enough to survive real scrutiny: from users, from regulators, and from investors who've sat across the table from hundreds of products just like yours.
That's why INSART operates as a fintech startup studio rather than a task-based vendor. We stay accountable to outcomes, even when that's harder than what was originally asked, and founders tend to feel that distinction pretty quickly.
What are the biggest challenges your clients face?
It depends on the stage, but the root cause is almost always the same.
Early-stage founders typically come to us overwhelmed. There are too many ideas competing for attention, an MVP that's either trying to do too much or isn't defined clearly enough, and this nagging sense that they're working incredibly hard without actually moving the needle. That feeling is exhausting, and it's more common than most people admit publicly.
Scaling startups present a different version of the same frustration. They're shipping constantly, but the metrics won't budge and growth flattens.
What connects both of those experiences is that the product isn't structured around a clear growth architecture. There's no through-line connecting what gets built, why it matters to the customer, how it generates revenue, and whether the technical foundation can actually support scale when it comes.
That's the work we do. We help founders get clear on all four of those things, and not just in a strategy document that sits in a shared folder, but in actual execution. In the decisions made on Monday morning.
What misconceptions do people have about your industry?
The biggest one (and it causes enormous damage) is the belief that growth is fundamentally a marketing problem. That if you just get the acquisition channels right, the targeting dialed in, the spend optimized, growth will follow.
It won't. Not sustainably.
Growth is a product clarity problem. If your product is confusing, misaligned with a real and urgent pain, or architecturally fragile under load, no amount of acquisition spend will save you.
The second misconception is one that's particularly seductive in the current funding environment: the idea that fundraising equals validation. It doesn't. What fundraising validates is your ability to tell a compelling story to sophisticated people in a high-pressure room. That's a genuine skill, but it's a different skill from building something people need and return to.
Product-market fit validates real value while fundraising validates narrative. And the two absolutely must converge at some point, because when they don't, the market has a way of correcting that gap, and it's rarely a gentle correction.
What should founders know before working with you?
The most important thing to understand before we start working together is that we're here to pressure-test rather than to validate.
That distinction matters, because a lot of advisory relationships are essentially structured around making founders feel good about decisions they've already made. That's comfortable, but it's not particularly useful when you're trying to build something that lasts.
What we do is different. If your onboarding flow loses half your users before they reach the core value, we'll redesign it. If your product is solving three different problems for three different audiences and excelling at none of them, we'll help you make the hard choice about where to focus. If your activation metrics look healthy but retention tells a completely different story, we'll find where the product is losing people and why.
None of that is meant to be harsh. There's an important difference between an advisor who tells you what you want to hear and a partner who tells you what you need to hear.
The founders who get the most out of working with us tend to share one quality: they're confident enough in their vision to question their own assumptions about how to get there. That intellectual honesty, that willingness to hold the goal firmly while staying genuinely open about the path, is what makes the hard conversations productive.
So if you're looking for reassurance, there are plenty of people who can offer that. But if you're looking to build something structurally sound, something that grows because it deserves to, that's a different kind of work. And that's exactly what we're here for.
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