Icanpreneurial Story: Daniel Dungyov

Icanpreneurial Stories is a series of interviews with Icanpreneur customers who share their entrepreneurial journeys and how the Icanpreneur platform contributed to their success. Through these stories, we aim to inspire and empower other entrepreneurs to achieve their own success.

In this Icanpreneurial Story, we met Daniel, Co-Founder and CEO of Figmaistor.

Daniel’s digital story began as a freelance web designer, evolved into product design for start-ups like Quantive, and then transitioned into an educator. Currently, he is a Senior product design manager for CleverTap, leads the design team in Agency HYPE, teaches at Softuni, and is a CEO and Co-founder at Figmaistor. Daniel is an example of how more than one thing can happen at a time.

Tell us about your product and your vision.

Figmaistor is here to reinvent how digital education is being taught in Bulgaria. Our vision is to bring affordable and accessible knowledge for digital collaboration. My partner Georgi Balinov and I, both educators, identified a gap in how product design is taught.

We’re focused on 3 different offerings that exist in a synergy:

1. Digital courses
2. Workshops & hackathons
3. Community & events

Bind together, they provide knowledge from the moment you want to change your career to getting initial knowledge, then meeting people with similar interests, and becoming proficient with a step-by-step guide. This allows us to observe, mentor, and guide young talents so we can meet them with our partners—companies that need digital creators.

What motivated you to go after this specific problem?

I’ll take a step back here for context. My purpose in becoming an educator was the intrinsic motive to help people grow. As I did, I observed how existing companies are disconnected from their students. They lack empathy for what it is to be a student and how tough it is to enter such a complex and competitive field like product design. Furthermore, they were pretty much pro-money, which contributed to other mistakes. I’ll add that now, in the emergence of the AI era, the skill set required for entry-level positions has evolved, and people struggle to find their first job by simply passing a couple of courses.

What challenges were you facing before using Icanpreneur?

We had the idea, we had the problem, but we were all over the place. We needed something to help us structure a plan. How do we fight our existing competitors, which are large organizations with a lot of money? How do we stop new competitors from entering our field? How do you count numbers and form a business plan? We are designers, after all, not financial experts.

How did Icanpreneur help you overcome these challenges?

Here’s where Icanpreneur came into the picture. It was a well-structured process that served as a life hack to answer all those and even more! We succeeded in counting precisely the expenses we’ll have to form a competitive advantage and understand our users even better. We had all the pieces, but Icanpreneur helped us solve the puzzle.

What was your Go-to-market strategy?

The strategy that was born out of it was simple. To start our business, it had to be a cause before becoming a business. We had to give before receiving anything to gain positive momentum and sentiment. We did a free course because:

• It gave us a foothold in the market. Other people found the same problem. This way, we discouraged them from competing because we were doing it for free.
• We wanted to build something nice for the community so they could truly appreciate our brand and feel good about supporting it.
• We were new to recording videos, so with a free course we had the freedom to move fast and break things. We needed the space and time to create our content product workflow.

Our unfair advantage was understanding of the user needs. We were about to make simple, easy-to-digest courses from 5 to 10 minutes long because our students so far struggled to listen to 3-hour-long lectures with complex terms and infinite theoretical knowledge which is far away from what they’ll do in their first years as designers. Additionally, those courses had to be fun and filled with jokes and memes because attention is at a deficit nowadays.

Then it was the community. We had to bring everyone together so they could share experiences. Also, we had to bring people from other fields to our events so they could collaborate and potentially hire those people or form businesses together.

What significant milestone did you hit most recently?

We found product-market fit. Within the first month of releasing our first paid course, we made over 100 sales with $0 invested in marketing. Almost ⅓ of the customers gave us feedback and suggestions, and they shared what they’d expect next.

What impact has your success made on your industry or market?

We are still in our early days, taking baby steps. Nevertheless, we have 2,700 users already, from whom 700 completed our courses last year with over 20,000 hours watched on our lectures, improving their qualifications and adding Figma to their toolbelt. We had 9 events in Sofia and are currently expanding to other cities as our community grows to more than 900 active members. Last but not least, we helped more than 30 students to nail their first job or client.

What is one unexpected lesson you learned during your entrepreneurial journey?

If you do what people need, you won’t need to invest a ton of money in marketing and sales. People will show up because you bring value to them. Our customers did our best marketing campaign by sharing their certificates, creating a strong viral effect. One year later, zero dollars were spent on marketing.

What is the one thing that made Icanpreneur an outstanding platform for you?

My partner and I both had jobs at the time. We also had an agency, family, and other responsibilities. We couldn’t afford to spend a couple of months in an accelerator. We needed an alternative. Icanpreneur provided that and even more!

Where can our readers try out Figmaistor and stay updated on your latest developments?

Follow me on social media and on our website, figmaistor.bg, and you’ll learn more. By the way, if you are looking for interns, juniors, or regular designers, reach out to us, and we’ll help for free. Or, if you are forming or having a design team and need advice, teaching, or structuring Design Ops, we know how to help you.

Thank you, Daniel, for sharing your incredible journey with us. At Icanpreneur, we’re proud to support innovators like you as they turn challenges into opportunities and create lasting impact.