Three startups, three fates: In North Macedonia, founders learn the hard way

A $5M comeback

In 2021, a small team of students from Skopje cracked Reddit’s code. Literally.

Nikola Velkovski, then a 22-year-old coder with a knack for growth hacking, wrote a script that scraped Reddit users based on keywords, matched them to relevant subreddits, and sent personalized messages.

The result? Over 2,000 downloads on Google Play in less than two weeks. That early hack evolved into Howitzer—one of the first tools to treat Reddit not as a chaotic message board, but as a high-performance growth channel. The idea took off quickly, and within months, Howitzer closed a $500K pre-seed round from regional investors like Day One Capital and angels from companies such as Gjirafa and Konk Media.

But that high didn’t last. By mid-2023, Reddit’s API crackdown, user backlash, and monetization headwinds left the team on the verge of collapse. “In July 2023, we were literally two months away from bankruptcy,” Velkovski recalls.

However, their new idea took off even faster, and it transformed Howitzer from a desperate pivot into a $5 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) powerhouse growing 30% year over year.

That company is HeyReach—a LinkedIn automation tool for agencies that started as a side hustle and accidentally became the main course. Originally prototyped as part of a broader outreach tool for multiple platforms, HeyReach was born out of necessity during Howitzer’s pivot.

"I actually hated the idea at first. There were already 160+ tools in the LinkedIn automation space. It felt oversaturated.” Velkovski admits.

The first six months were brutal. Ten VCs passed, and the company nearly folded. But Velkovski credits their survival to a singular obsession: building a product that actually delivered value.

"Everything changed when we hit product-market fit. Before that, nothing works. After that, everything sticks. It’s like gravity flips.” he says.

What got them so far? Persistence, fast learning from mistakes, iteration, more execution of strategies and less planning, and most importantly — urgency. And that sense of urgency is something he believes is lacking in the local startup scene. “We’re dreaming too small.” he adds.

Now in hyper-growth, HeyReach has doubled its team in under a year and has more than 30 employees, become a category leader, and won Startup of the Year in the country. But the pressure is real. “When your company is scaling fast, it forces you to mature with it — or be left behind,” says Velkovski.

Asked if he’d change anything about HeyReach’s journey, Velkoski doesn’t hesitate: “Not a thing.”

I feel it all needed to happen exactly the way it did. Whether in terms of lessons learned or experience gained, everything had its impact. That said, we made plenty of mistakes along the way. If I were to start over, I would definitely focus much earlier on product quality and planning for scaling — in other words, I would prioritize working mainly with senior developers from the very beginning.

The messy middle of the startup evolution

While HeyReach quickly zeroed in on its product-market fit, another Skopje-based startup took an equally turbulent route, but in a very different industry. FinqUp, now evolving into The Fabrica, has spent the last few years slogging through the institutional inertia of the financial industry, its legacy systems, and painful integrations.

Originally, the startup launched as a fintech platform focused on modernizing North Macedonia’s asset management sector. The initial goal was ambitious: automate asset management through AI and help users build diversified portfolios. The startup raised around $50K in its early days from regional VCs such as Vitosha Ventures, setting out to create a tool for smarter investing. But as Dime Galapchev, founder and CEO, puts it, “This is not a ‘move fast and break things’ sector. We’re in the business of trust and compliance.”

Fintech moves slowly for a reason — regulation, integrations, and risk aversion all add up to long development cycles and minimal room for error. “We got pulled into a maze of regulatory hurdles and complex integrations. That kind of friction can kill a startup. Cash flow was tight, and we had to adapt just to survive.” he explains.

Now, the startup is on a different mission. But as Galapchev points out, the original vision which brought the startup to life in 2021, remains intact: to launch a fully AI-managed investment fund. And the road there hasn’t been straight. “Getting to that big vision meant pivoting multiple times,” Galapchev says.

Eventually, FinqUp began to reimagine what its core technology could do outside the constraints of the financial sector. “If fintech requires more time to develop, what if we used our tech elsewhere — customized it for a different sector?” That question sparked a new approach for Galapchev and his team. Industries like trucking, logistics, and HR came into view — sectors where automation needs are high, decision-making is repetitive, and AI can offer an immediate ROI.

That shift led to the birth of The Fabrica — a new identity and operating model based on modular AI solutions for different verticals. Instead of trying to force AI into one high-regulation use case, The Fabrica now functions as a kind of "factory for automation." From logistics and legal to customer service and HR, the team builds AI-managed digital offices tailored to specific workflows.

When it comes to financing, rather than relying on traditional venture capital, The Fabrica looks to build with sector partners who co-finance development and use the products themselves. “It’s better than chasing investors — our clients are now also our business partners,” he adds.

At one point, ten different industries were asking for custom versions of what we were building. Most investors would’ve told us to focus on one product. But in our case, that would’ve been a death sentence. Europe is cautious with AI — and the financial sector is even more so.

Today, Finqup/The Fabrica's team of 12 is working across multiple sectors, testing six-month implementation sprints to automate everything from document processing to call centers. It’s not a classic startup pivot, but a layered evolution, Galapchev says.

The Shazam for developers that never was

At one point, Task’N’Go was pitched as the “Shazam for developers” — a sleek automation layer designed to sit on top of platforms like Microsoft Azure DevOps, simplifying bloated project management stacks for engineering teams.

The Skopje-based startup was launched by seasoned entrepreneur Ariton Zanev and his team as a spin-off from Vorhol, a small but successful IT services company they had built over several years. As Zanev recalls, in the early days of Task'N'Go, Vorhol already had a steady revenue stream and a dedicated team of five to nine people working on digitization projects.

In fall 2021, Task’N’Go gained early momentum through Business Accelerator UKIM (BAU), one of the three accelerators set up and funded by the country’s Fund of Innovation and Technology Development (FITR). The accelerator, also backed by the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, had already invested half a million euros in ten startups. As Zanev explains, the $75K investment was supposed to give them validation, structure, and access to mentors—but instead planted the seeds of deeper issues.

“The accelerator asked us to keep Vorhol on standby. That was our first big mistake, because all the initial funding for Task’N’Go actually came from Vorhol,” Zanev recalls.

Instead of splitting the team between both ventures, the full focus was now on Task’N’Go. “I didn’t manage to keep half the team on Vorhol and the other half on Task’N’Go. And that decision crippled both,” he admits.

The first few months after the investment saw promising developments. Task’N’Go launched a freemium version, followed by its first commercial product. They pitched to VCs, courted interest from a US-based consultant with access to over 5,000 investors, and tried every channel they could think of. “We were close,” Zanev says. “But we needed a green light from BAU to move forward. And that’s where everything started falling apart.”

According to Zanev, BAU contributed to a slowdown in the process. “They asked for all our documentation, then started going into unnecessary details. They ignored emails from the consultant, held one meeting where they asked pointless questions, and then went silent for a month and a half. We weren’t even asking them to negotiate—just to give an opinion. But there was no answer. Not even a phone call.”

That silence marked a turning point. “We were stuck in limbo. Vorhol lost its clients, Task’N’Go couldn’t move forward, and the team began to fall apart.” The timing couldn’t have been worse, as North Macedonia’s IT sector hit a downturn.

Zanev and his co-founder and CTO Filip Kerazovski were left emotionally and financially drained. “It was hard to accept that Task’N’Go was failing. We wanted closure from BAU but never got it.” By January 2024, with shifts in DevOps and AI tooling, the team decided to put Task’N’Go into a moratorium. “We couldn’t develop the product. We couldn’t get closure. That’s why I say it entered a purgatory mode.”

They spent the next six months rebuilding Vorhol from scratch, finally stabilizing the company. “All our problems started when we agreed to a partner who had a deciding vote in all matters. I tried to find logic in all of it, but I still can’t.”

He’s now working on a new venture—but with a radically different philosophy.

We won’t chase investors. We’ll focus on building a profitable product first. Now we know how to choose partners, and what conditions we need so we don’t relive the previous situation again.

As for Task’N’Go? “I have no hope left,” Zanev admits. “If all your energy goes into survival, not the product, not the marketing or sales, you’re done. We needed half a million to make it work. We got less—but we still tried everything. And it just didn’t work.”

Thrive, stall, or pivot—but always learn

These three trajectories — the fast-growth pivot of HeyReach, the methodical deep-tech slog of FinqUp, and the painful unraveling of Task’N’Go — show that startup success in North Macedonia doesn’t follow a single path.

Some, like HeyReach, sprint toward hypergrowth and manage to break out globally. Others, like FinqUp, quietly grind through slow, research-heavy development. And some — like Task’N’Go crash too soon, never even glimpsing the sunlight.

Despite being fully bootstrapped, HeyReach now stands on the hard-won lessons from its predecessor. “If we hadn’t raised money back then with Howitzer, made every mistake possible, and pivoted at the edge of failure, HeyReach wouldn’t exist. Bootstrapping taught us discipline, but VC gave us the permission to learn the hard way.” Velkovski reflects.

Zanev, drawing on his own experience with Task’N’Go, offers a sobering piece of advice: go after investors, network relentlessly, and don’t overlook legal help when signing contracts. “There are small clauses that can ultimately change the fate of a startup,” he warns — a lesson born not from theory, but from the everyday realities that founders face.