Founder · Est. 1990 · Engineer, Information Systems
RomanPodvalny
A note from RomanAo Luek, Thailand
It's time to send this world a different kind of joy.
That line opens my SELFemote deck, and it's the shortest honest summary of my work. I started out delivering telegrams in Stavropol, hitchhiked 60,000 km to Singapore, and built the same company three times. Each time it confirmed the same thing: nobody is really sending the paper. They're sending what's wrapped in it.
I build products that carry feeling — a delivery service that ships photographs instead of parcels, a voice diary, a data universe you walk through, and English games for kids who hate homework. Three of them are live. I run all of it alone, with an AI for a co‑founder.
Batumi, Georgia — running deliveries for JoyMail, the second version of the idea.
60,000km hitchhiked
14countries overland
2+years slept in a tent
11%repeat order rate
3generations of the idea
4products running now
Istanbul → Singapore → here
The route
Every business I've built came from something I saw on the way, not from a market report.
2010 — Stavropol, Russia
I was in line to be the youngest telegraph chief in Stavropol
A dying profession, and I had a front-row seat. Even in 2012 the Stavropol office still pushed up to 1,000 telegrams a day into a city of 400,000 — half congratulations, half court summons — carried by two people in a car and four on foot. In the 1980s the region handled a hundred thousand a day.
What struck me wasn't that the technology was obsolete. It was that people were paying real money to have a stranger hand-deliver a feeling. The wire went obsolete. The need underneath it never did. I left the job with the thought still nagging at me, and four years later it became a company.
That observation is still the thesis of everything on this page.
2013 — Beeline
Night shift manager in three months
No connections, no favours — just the shift nobody wanted. It taught me operations: how a small team behaves at 4 a.m. when something breaks and the customer is still waiting.
2014 — Stavropol State Agrarian University
Engineer, Information Systems & Technologies
Five years, full-time, specialist's degree. It's why I still write the code myself instead of waiting to hire someone who will.
Before the delivery service
Four things I built before this one — and none of them failed
An apartment-renovation firm in Gelendzhik. Oyster mushrooms grown in a garage. Textiles brought in from China through Ivanovo. And a riding stable, where I ran sales and development: I built that department from nothing, set up the system for renting out horse boxes, and wrote the marketing strategy for both halves of the business — structured lesson and training programmes on one side, one-off recreational rides on the other. I left over a lack of common ground with the owner.
People expect me to call the mushrooms a failure. They weren't. I carried that business all the way to its first sale, proved the thing worked, and then closed it. That's a decision, not a defeat — and it's the same decision I made later with DreamPost. I have never had a project fail on me. I have had projects I chose to stop.
The road — 60,000 km
Istanbul to Singapore, overland, almost broke
Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia — Istanbul to Singapore in a single year, on almost no money. Across my life I've spent more than two years sleeping in a tent. I call myself a fierce traveller, and it's the part of my history that decides how I build everything else.
FromHitchhiked 🛣️👍🏕️ from Istanbul 🏔️ to Singapore 🏝️ without money
toFounded 🎁🎈💌 an international company
Left: Batumi. Right: Batu Caves, Malaysia — somewhere near the far end of the route.
2017 — Version 1 — DreamPost, Stavropol
Ten orders a day by the third month
A courier service that delivered printed photographs in hand-stamped kraft envelopes. It grew fast and I closed it on purpose: orders were arriving from all over the country and I could only deliver in one city. Rather than disappoint people at scale, I stopped.
The lesson cost me a working business and was worth it: a delivery company needs a federal model from day one, or it caps itself in month three.
2021–2022 — Version 2 — JoyMail
Tbilisi, Batumi, and a franchise in Dnipro
Two years, a real team, branded vans, our own plush toys, roses and balloons as add-ons. The couriers filmed the moment of handover, so the sender got the receiver's face back. Out of everything delivered — paid and free — 11% of recipients turned around and ordered one themselves. That number has now held across two separate companies in two countries.
Then I handed the finances to a co-founder and stopped watching them. The company died of that, not of the market.
Never let go of the financial artery, no matter how much you trust the hand.
Never compete on price. The product is the emotion; the paper costs nothing.
The courier-to-recipient conversation is the logistics. Good ones deliver in half the time.
It was always about photographs. Postcards are what you sell when you've forgotten why.
The JoyMail crew, Georgia.
Now — Thailand
I teach English to Thai schoolchildren
It pays for the servers, and it turned into a product. I kept building small games to get a room of thirty kids through a vocabulary unit — then packaged them. That's SchoolGames: 25 games, no sign-up, no email, nothing between a child and the game. It's the most-used thing I've ever made.
Ao Luek, Krabi Province — the original user research.
SELFemote Holding — one founder, one server
What I build
Four points of contact with the same idea: capture a moment, understand it, learn from it, put it in someone's hands.
