"The story of my life" - Rinat Arslanov, CEO of Revain

Greetings, friends!

Finally, I’m launching a project on a truly global scale - a project I’ve dreamed of my whole life. The road was long and hard, but here I am, at last. I’ve never been this close to my goal. What I feel right now is an amazing sensation of clarity. But I’ll talk more about this later. As for now…

My name is Rinat Arslanov. I was born on 29.08.1982 in Sharypovo, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. I remember my first entrepreneurship experience. I was 10, and I worked in a village shop during the summer vacation. My goal was to earn enough money to buy the Nintendo console, which was all the rage back then. And I bought it. This was the first goal I’ve accomplished in my life. I quickly realized that communication with the customer is vital to success, along with things like trust, feedback and being able to deliver a quality product.

By 2009 I had already served in the military for 10 years and held the grade of officer. During my military service, two very important things happened: I met and married my beautiful wife, Elvira, and our son Tamerlan was born.

In 2004, an officer’s salary was barely 4,500 roubles. By the time my son was born in 2009, it had grown to 24,500 roubles. It still was not much, and we were barely able to make both ends meet. I remember shopping for an autumn jacket in Murmansk. We had to search the whole city until we were able to find a good, cheap jacket that cost 4,000. I remember feeling powerless and ashamed, and those feelings stayed with me for years. I thought: “I can’t even afford a quality jacket!”.

This is when I decided to change my life completely. Elvira and I started reading books on business; we visited various courses and played Robert Kiyosaki’s Cash Flow. All of the above allowed me to see the world from a new perspective. I began to see opportunities. In 2009, I left the military and opened my first home electronics shop. It was so small I could barely fit in there myself - only 3, 5 square meters. A year later, I opened another store. This one was bigger - 30 square meters. In 2012, I sold the business and moved to Moscow, where I created a home renovation company. In 2013, I already had 150 employees! In 2015, we’ve done work on over 1 million square meters of walls, floors and ceilings. At that time, I thought I had reached a higher level in my life - both in my understanding of business and goal-wise. I thought I’d achieved financial self-sufficiency…

I worked 20 hours a day and spent 6 to 10 hours travelling 300 kilometres. Every day I would have up to 14 meetings, I had 4 phones that I constantly talked on and I ate only 1 or 2 times a day. My business had consumed my life. I didn’t have time for my family, friends, I didn’t have time for anything but my work.

At the end of 2016, I was taking entrepreneurship courses, and near the end, we were asked a question: “Guys! Have you ever thought why do you even need a business? Does it serve you or you serve it? Do a test: go on a vacation for a month. No, better for two months. Let your business work for you. Do it and see what happens.”.

I was astonished. I’d never thought of this. Without a moment’s hesitation, I set up a call centre and went to Thailand with my family, to the island of Samui, for two months. We had a wonderful time! At last, I have to be with my family all day long!

Before departing for Thailand I visited a trade show in Skolkovo called “Open Innovations - 2017”. There I heard the word “blockhain” for the first time. People talked about it a lot and they would say over and over that this technology would change the world. I wrote this word down in my notepad. During my time on Samui, I opened the notepad and decided to find out the meaning of this word. What kind of technology was that and how could it change the world? I started studying this topic. When I got back to Russia, I started going to conferences and I spoke to a lot of smart people there. 

Once I thought: during my business career, I’ve always put results above all else. Customer feedback had always been very important to me. I valued feedback that was credible, comprehensive, emotional - the kind of feedback only a real customer could give. A satisfied customer would often bring 2-5 new others. I knew how important trust was. People talk about a service, they talk about it to their friends, they talk about it on the internet. Feedback itself becomes currency, an invisible asset that earns a business new clients. 

And then I thought: what if we would give even more value to feedback? What if a review can be neither modified nor deleted? What if there’s a system that would filter out invalid reviews and those written by bots? I spent several days thinking about this. I reached the conclusion that the blockchain technology is the solution to all these issues. I only had to start. And so it started.

Now you are able to witness the unfolding of a brand new technology. A beginning in which you too can participate. I want to create a big, successful international company that would serve millions of people across all continents. This is a great feeling. That sensation of clarity, of being able to see a goal clearly that I talked about in the beginning. 

Join me and together we will create a company that will really turn trust into an asset. We will create Revain! (Revain.org)