In this episode of Listening with Leaders, host Doug Noll interviews Stan Suchkov, founder and CEO of Evolve Platform, an AI‑driven learning management system. The conversation traces Stan’s unconventional path from a modest start in Russia—living on a railway station while building a construction company that grew into one of the country’s largest—to an exit and a series of failed SaaS attempts focused on soft‑skill B2C apps. After receiving candid feedback from seasoned founders, Stan pivoted to a B2B model that converts any corporate content (videos, manuals, webinars, podcasts) into structured courses using ChatGPT and proprietary AI. The platform automatically generates assessments, evaluates open‑ended answers, creates visuals, and can even produce videos, delivering a complete training package in as little as 24 hours. Evolve Platform now serves enterprises across Europe, the United States, and Asia, operating with a largely offshore team in Manila and achieving 30‑40% month‑over‑month growth without any paid marketing, relying on word‑of‑mouth and rapid demo calls. Stan attributes his success to discipline, consistency, resilience, and a constant fear of failure that drives him to work 12‑14 hour days. He also discusses the importance of soft‑skill development, the challenges of listening, and the personal support from his wife, a former GM marketing leader. The episode ends with Stan sharing his lingering anxieties about staying ahead of younger competitors and the necessity of personal savings as a safety net for entrepreneurs.
Chapters
Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Dan Sukov, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of a company called Evolve Platform. Which can be found at evolveplatform.ai. And you have developed a learning management system, which you're offering as a software service to organizations who have a need to train employees. And it looks like it's AI-based and you're just going for it. Welcome to the show.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And I'm the founder of this platform and it's actually based on AI. And we have launched like a year and a half ago, but we continuously grow and we present ourselves in Europe, United States, and Asia.
And right now you're in Thailand.
Yeah, right now I'm in Thailand and I do love spending winter in Thailand and I do some business, some sort of business development here as well. So I've been to Indonesia. 0 weeks ago and we've signed several contracts there.
So tell us a little bit about your backstory. I know that you went to business school at Berkeley, but tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Actually, I was born in Germany and then we moved to Russia. So I'm originally Russian, but I started the entrepreneurship journey, I guess, 10 or 12 years ago. And I do remember myself. When I decided to build my company and moved from a small city to our capital, to Moscow. And I lived on a railway station because I was out of money and decided to go and to build a construction company. It was the easiest way to develop yourself because you don't need any assets, you just need to find any contracts you can. And I started to find first contracts, hired new employees, and building a company. And we actually succeeded a lot. My company, for in 6 years, we become one of the biggest companies in Russia. So we built several unique buildings and I presented them in Europe, the most unique buildings of the century. It was like—
and this was a construction company that you started?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is that still company still operating?
I've exited. So I've made exit and I always dreamed about IT startup and I decided to focus it. So I exit the company and started to build my first product, which I haven't succeeded.
So what got you started into doing your own platform, SaaS, services as software, software as a service?
Long story short, since I wanted to build a global startup, like international product, and I didn't know anything about startups and I didn't know how to build them. So I started to invest my own money and I've hired a small team and we started to make our own first product. It was like soft skills development platform for B2C users, but I haven't talked to any clients and I decided to build it on my way. It was like, I know what do people want, so I will do it by myself and I will not talk to customers. And as you can predict, something bad happened. So no one started to use our platform and they invested a lot of money in marketing. So people installed the app, then they use it for several days. I didn't want to pay and it was round and round. And then actually I've logged in LinkedIn and I found many competitors and I have reached the founders of these huge companies like unicorns, the companies at tech, and I've decided to ask them for the help. So I said, hey, I'm Stan, I moved from Russia to Europe and I started my own startup, but it doesn't go well. Can you just have a look? And suggest me something. And 9 out of 10 entrepreneurs answered me and they said, okay, let's help. And I had several meetings in the United States and I had meetings in Europe with all these founders, the founders who have sold their companies for like hundreds of millions. And all of them advised me different things, but first of all of them said that I'm going to the wrong direction. And I need to change everything. And it was actually the truth. And I had a really great meeting with a guy in Barcelona, Scott Whitaker, and he spent 4 hours with me offline and he analyzed all my platform. He said he has pointed all the mistakes I've made and he helped me to rebuild completely rebuild the startup to make the pivot. And it was like the company named EdApp, it has been bought by another company like 3 years ago. And he said, actually, companies, they don't need courses like for the soft skills development. They don't need any courses which they can purchase from libraries. They need their own courses. And I said, what do you mean? It's easy. Uh, when we decided to focus on B2B, we have hired 30 people and have placed them in Manila in Philippines. And when we had a call with any potential client, we stated that we can convert all their content into the courses in one day. Clients, of course, they agreed to do it. We have— we took all the content, we've sent it to Manila, and 30 people just started to do conversion work in 24 hours. And they said, Scott, but now there is an AI features which can help. He said, exactly. And that's how our platform transformed. We understood that people do need like trainings to be built fast, and they want to have their own trainings based on their own content. And that is why we started to do this product. And I do remember that me and my wife, we found our first lead. We had no platform at all. And we said, we can convert all of your trainings in 24 hours. They said, okay, let's do it. So we had a subscription to ChatGPT and we spent 20 hours with ChatGPT to convert this content into the 3 courses. And we have converted them, we have sent them, and this company decided to buy. Oh my God, so it works. Then there was another client, again, through ChatGPT, and it was like 5 clients more. And then we decided to build the company, we decided to hire more people from machine learning specialists and etc., etc. And now we have like almost 30 people.
Wow.
We have a really incredible product because we grow 30% each month. We have acquired big enterprises just in one year and everyone just say, wow, oh my God. That's what almost all of our clients say when they try our product.
So when, so in your product, people, what they upload their content, whatever it might be, could be manuals, training manuals.
You can upload even this podcast, by the way. So you can upload this, you can upload the record of this podcast.
Okay, so video, you can do videos, video, any kind of digital data you can upload and you've got an AI platform that will take all that digital information, analyze it, analyze it, recommendations about how, what kind of a core, what kind of courses you can structure and how to put it together. And then you can say, okay, I wanna do this and then it creates it for you.
Yeah, it creates it for you using your own content. It doesn't lose any information from the content uploaded. It creates course, it creates tasks, it creates interesting facts, it draws images, it can generate videos, etc., etc. And companies do love it because they have lots of inner webinars, they have lots of regulatory documents, and they want these documents to be converted into small comprehensive courses just to give to their employees. And we have companies which generate like dozens of courses per one week. So they just pay and pay.
Wow. And so they, companies pay a subscription to the platform?
Yeah, they pay subscription for the platform. They pay one-time payments for course conversion and they pay subscription for employees. But our platform does differ from other platforms because it evaluates open-ended questions. It generates open-ended questions and then it evaluates them. It provides pros and cons about each employee. It has a knowledge base and so many features. So we just developed— I just can't stop developing new features and companies do buy them. It's really cool because you have reached the opportunity to build a startup which is needed by other people. It's so great. It just— I just can't even explain it.
You're pretty excited about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're really excited that you're, you've got a platform now that people love and they keep asking for, and you keep thinking of new features and you keep, it just gets bigger and more expansive and more responsive to people's needs. And like you said, you're growing at 50% per month, which is phenomenal.
Yeah. Actually between 30 and 40% per month. But yeah, it's abnormal because we just, and we don't do any marketing at all. So just company.
Oh, word of mouth.
From word of mouth and we have like from 5 to 8 demo calls per day. So every day we have 5 to 8 demos and we do not, we don't, we don't spend money on marketing at all right now because we don't have time for this and we can't even take all the leads who come to us and because we give actually a first try for free and for example if I have a call with you tomorrow, I say, hey Douglas, can you just send me anything you want? And then I'll show you the course literally tomorrow on our first call.
Wow.
And, and you just come to the call and you see your content converted into the course on the first call.
And people are blown away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's great. I can tell you this really gets you excited and you work, you're a nomad, so you're, you live all over the world. What is it that really gets you excited and gets you up in the morning, you go to work.
I've spent 2 and a half years without revenue. When I started to build the first startup, we couldn't generate revenue for 2 and a half years. And I started to lose the belief in myself and actually in like, I started to think that I cannot build the startup.
You were having self-doubts.
Yeah. And that's what happened. We have started to get our first clients. These clients stated that this product is great. And every day I wake up and go to work because I do know that something great will happen today. And every day it happens.
Something great happens to you every day. And that's what gets you excited. Yeah. That's really cool. So Stan, what is it you think about yourself? Personally that makes this also successful?
You're the— you are not the first person who asked me— asks me this question, and I always say that discipline, consistency, and resilience.
There you go.
These are the factors.
Yeah, because discipline, consistency, and desire. Yeah. Where do you— where do you— where do you pick up those attributes?
I do understand and I do believe that soft skills are the most important skills you can acquire.
You're reading my new book.
Yeah. And it's really difficult to get them. It's really difficult to train them. And many things happened around us and many bad things sometimes. Happen with us. And if you don't have resilience and desire to move forward, you cannot overcome them. If you don't have discipline, you cannot achieve the results. And if you don't do different actions consistently, you will not achieve the results as well. That's why I state that this is— these are the most important skills for the entrepreneur you need to develop in yourself. And I guess I've developed them, but I've had lots of like bad behaviors like in myself. For example, I shouted a lot at people who work with me. Years before, or I wasn't interested in company culture, etc. And these are like second level of skills you need to develop in yourself. You need to like respect people who you work with. You need to build the culture, the culture of trust between each other, etc., etc. And when I started to develop all these things, I learned that people do want to work with me and people do believe in me and they don't even care about the money you pay to them because they think that you can lead them to a better place. You can help them to achieve their personal results, and it's really great.
Good for you. I'm working on my fifth book called Leadership Empathy, and I start off in the first chapter talking about where soft skills came from. And most people don't know this, but it came from the US Army Training Command in 1973. And Army— the United States Army developed the term soft skills to describe the skills that you need to control a battle space other than driving a tank or shooting a rifle. Isn't that interesting?
Yeah, really interesting. You should definitely share the link to Amazon when you will publish this book.
If you want to, if you want to read the manuscript, I'm happy to send a copy. I'm asking people to read it now.
I would love to.
So let's talk about listening for a second. The— in my— as I pointed out in the book, the mo—
the—
some of the most important skills in that a leader can have, and you've already taught, you just mentioned this, is having empathy, being able to listen, and being able to listen. And how did you learn how to listen? How did you learn about this?
Actually, I'm still learning because for me, this is the hardest skill, to listen to people. I'm always in a rush. I always want to do something. And when you start talking, I want to interrupt you and say, I know it, or you want to go to early problem solving. Yeah. And still I receive the feedback from my colleagues that, Stan, stop interrupting people. And I know that it's really bad actually, and you're completely right. It's really important for the leader to listen. And I've read on your website that it's easy to calm the person down if you just don't react to the words he says, or ignore, interrupt him. And still, for me, it's really hard work.
It's just practice.
I understand that it's my weak side, right? And to develop it, it's really important.
Good for you. So one more question, I'll let you go, Stan. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?
Can you just repeat it? I just haven't understood the question.
Pardon me?
Now, can you just repeat it?
Yes, of course. So tell us one thing about yourself that we wouldn't know about. We wouldn't know about it. You would— we would never have a clue about it unless you told us about it.
Oh, sorry, guys who will listen for this. Actually, I do it. I do afraid that I will not succeed, and I'm not sure whether our startup will be like something big. And I'm afraid every day. For, for me, there was the easiest thing to go from zero to one. When you don't have clients when you don't have product-market fit, you just have different ideas, you just generate new hypothesis and you just test something. And then you have zero clients, then you have dozens of clients, then you receive investments. And this is another road. And you just, if you cannot succeed with zero clients, it's okay. But if you cannot succeed with dozens of them, with investors invested in you, with people on board. That's another case. And I'm really afraid that I will not succeed. And that is why— this is the second reason I wake up in the mornings and go to work. Actually, I work between 12 and 14 hours a day and 6 days a week because I always think that I haven't done enough to get the best for our product, for my employees and colleagues. And I always think that I have launched my startup at 35, but many people have launched it under 30 or under 25, and they have— and they're already ahead of me. They have— they worked on their products for 10 years and they have more experience and I don't have enough time. I need to develop myself every day because they have developed themselves for years and I really afraid that— So, so one of—
this is so interesting to me that one of the things that really drives you is fear. You're afraid of failure, you're afraid of not being able to keep up, and you recognize that you've got to continue to self-develop, and it's a lot of work.
Yeah, and a lot of work. You, you have asked me and I have answered, and again the fear came to my throat, and I already started, and I'm already scared that maybe these clients we have right now, they have bought the product under other circumstances. And maybe we don't have a product, a perfect product, and we need to do more and more to develop it, to make it better, to make it better, to make ourselves better. And it's, it's really scary actually.
It's being an entrepreneur and being a CEO of a startup is a scary business. Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if you ever, I don't know if you ever get over that. I guess I suppose at some point you get over it, but it's a long, dangerous road. With a lot of pitfalls, but it sounds like you're doing really well on it and you're doing a great job.
Actually, my wife worked for General Motors for 10 years and is responsible for marketing in a huge region. And she works with me right now. She supports me. She does a lot of work in our startup. So she does it for me, actually. And she always said that entrepreneurship and working in the enterprise differs a lot.
Very different.
You, you are safe there. You receive your salary, you receive your growth year over year again and again. But when you're entrepreneur, you just cannot predict what will happen in like 6 months, and you don't have a safety net underneath you. Yeah, yeah. You— so you should count on your savings, and you should understand that these savings will save your life and your family's life if something will go wrong. So it's only the only floor you have.
There you go, Stan. It's been really a joy chatting with you, and I know everybody will love learning from you. So thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this call.
Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show. And include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.
