First interview with Notcoin co-founder Vladimir Plotvinov

Notcoin is a web3 project based on Telegram that attracted 35 million users in just three months through a viral tap-based mining mechanism. The token was listed occurred on major exchanges on May 16, with the market capitalization reaching $1 billion at the start of sales. 80% of the total issuance was distributed among miners, making it one of the largest airdrops in crypto history. The successful launch of Notcoin inspired a wave of projects with similar user engagement mechanics, influencing popular games today like Hamster Kombat, Blum, Dogs, TapSwap, etc.

Media Headline on Notcoin’s Listing Day

The idea of tapping tokens without leaving Telegram belongs to the Open Builders team, which includes Alexander Plotvinov, his brother Vladimir Plotvinov, Sergey Chikirev, and Maxim Dimov. Unlike Alexander and Sergey, who have given interviews, little is known about the CEO of Notcoin and backend developer Vladimir, who is also Alexander’s brother.

As a large community of like-minded individuals and members of the Notyou club, we conducted the first interview with the co-founder of Notcoin. This interview provides insights into the internal workings of launching the first unicorn startup on TON, the events leading up to it, and the role Vladimir personally played in it.

The interview was conducted and prepared for you by @Notyou, JpegMillionaire, and TON Persons.

Contents

• Before Open Builders
• The Idea of the Memecoin. Beta Version
• Notcoin Listing
• Bugs
• “Nice to Meet You!” — Vladimir
• Closing Remarks

Before Open Builders

Let’s start with a text from a five-year-old GitHub profile posted by Vladimir:

“Responsible, communicative, stress-resistant, timely work completion. From 15 dollars/hour.”

Hearing this quote, Vladimir laughed. He didn’t expect to hear it again after so much time.

Before becoming a freelancer, Vladimir graduated from 9th grade and enrolled in college, specializing in “Programming in Computer Systems.” However, he was unable to complete his diploma due to attendance issues caused by his parallel work at the company Wrike. It was there that the young engineer met future Open Builders members Maxim and Sergey.

“I realized it was a long journey and it could be accomplished independently by starting to work. You could say that Maxim Dimov was my trainer and teacher, explaining everything to me from the basics and acted as my education,” said Vladimir.

As a result, the college administration had to expel Vladimir. Since then, he has not studied anywhere else. However, the absence of a diploma not only did not hinder but, in a way, helped Vladimir master practically all areas of development: frontend, backend, devops, process setup, etc. Despite his broad skill set, his primary focus has remained on backend development, which he continues to this day.

Wrike is a corporate online service for collaboration and project management used by more than 20,000 organizations in 140 countries worldwide

After working for 5 years at Wrike, Vladimir moved to freelancing, doing everything from website layout to writing smart contracts and programs. Leaving a promising startup for freelancing was due to physical and moral exhaustion from the fast-paced work:

“I was really exhausted,” said Vladimir.

However, he didn’t freelance for long. After some time, Vladimir, his friend, and brother Sasha launched the startup Yougood — a solution for large companies with an internal motivation system.

“The concept is cool, heartfelt. Engaging stuff,” said Vladimir.

The essence of the idea can be briefly described as: each employee received points that could be used to purchase branded products in the company’s store. Despite the founders’ enthusiasm, the product did not gain popularity among customers. The team had to temporarily disband, and the development was halted.

Interestingly, the experience of development, working in a large company, and launching a startup negatively impacted Vladimir’s future employment. Employers were reluctant to hire him, understanding that he would soon leave to create his own project.

“At one interview, I was rejected, with the argument that my mind was too poisoned by entrepreneurship,” said Vladimir.

A similar situation probably happened to the other team members, so gathering their strength, they started launching their projects: “Tonstarter” (formerly “Rocketon”), Community Bot, Notcoin, and continue to do so.

“Tonstarter used to be called Rocketon. RockeTON was a scam project of some sort, so we changed the name,” said Vladimir.

Tonstarter attracted $1.5 million in investments and launched a new initiative, Open Builders.

What particularly surprised us was that most of the time, team members are in different countries, cities, and time zones. Setting up a unified connection and creating successful products is invaluable experience. Currently, Vladimir is in London, and before that, he lived for a year in Turkey and another year in Georgia. Now he is considering where to live next year!

The Idea of the Memecoin. Beta Version

Many facts about the creation of Notcoin have been shared multiple times by the team members. However, beyond the general numbers, we were curious to learn the “behind the scenes” details. How did the development of the game unfold from the team’s perspective, and what were the levels of excitement and tension at key moments?

The idea to create a game to attract users to TON emerged in July 2023. Vladimir noted that there were no grand plans at the time. It was then that he bought the username @Notcoin for a Telegram channel on Fragment.com, with the transaction costing around $145 based on the 2023 exchange rate.

“The goal was ‘just to have some fun,’ to make a memecoin on TON,” said Vladimir.

Purchasing the username @Notcoin cost Vladimir 104 TON.

The beta version of Notcoin appeared unexpectedly not only for the entire community but also for the creators themselves. Expecting 500 people on the first day after the release on The Gateway, the game attracted about 10,000 people. As a result, instead of a leisurely game test, every day during this period was filled with complex tasks, serious refinements, and new ideas.

Alexander Plotvinov’s speech at The Gateway conference in 2023

“It just happened that we started the beta somewhat unexpectedly for ourselves. After the announcement at The Gateway, users started appearing. We were like, interesting. They slowly began to grow, and we realized we needed to launch the beta. We just weren’t really ready for the launch at that time,” said Vladimir.

Interestingly, a few hours before Sasha’s speech, Vladimir and Sergey were in a hotel room with laptops, finalizing the alpha version, checking the referral system, and conducting final tests. The very last commit was made 40 seconds before the release.

A significant role in the successful launch was played by the team’s cohesion. As mentioned earlier, many met at Wrike, where, for example, Maxim was a lead and mentor to Vladimir, and Sergey and Sasha also worked there. Moments involving stress and the need to make quick decisions were handled smoothly and calmly by the team.

The team worked 60 days without weekends, from January to February.

“It was tough. Hard. Yes. But there was simply no other way. It just didn’t work out,” said Vladimir.

In the future, the team would slightly regret not expanding the development team at the very beginning, only doing so when the number of players exceeded several million.

You could say that the founders became prisoners of their own success. On the one hand, there are many interesting solutions, but implementing them all with limited resources is practically impossible. Therefore, Open Builders continues to hire new developers, giving the team the opportunity to rest and recover.

Initially, Vladimir handled all the backend development for Notcoin (including servers, databases, and more). Sergey Chikirev worked on the frontend. They then strengthened the team by pulling people from other Open Builders projects and also hired additional developers. A guest developer worked briefly on the backend of Trade Bot and is now fully immersed in the Community bot.

Regarding development, Vladimir also mentioned that sometimes external developers were hired to write smart contracts, including those from the Happy Santa team (guys who once worked on VK Coin). For example, some mechanisms for vesting, NFTs, and drops were written by community members. However, there is no other connection to VK, as none of the four founders have ever worked there.

When choosing between programming languages on TON, Vladimir prefers FunC, as it was the language he started with on TON. Although he notes that there are some aspects of the code he doesn’t like. Vladimir is also familiar with the new Tact language and even participated in a special Tact developer competition. However, in the end, he stuck with the familiar FunC.

Notcoin Listing

“There has never been anything more challenging,” said Vladimir.

This succinctly captures Vladimir’s comment on the events surrounding Notcoin’s listing on the world’s largest exchanges.

“The most difficult part was the agreements and the responsibility we bore towards our partners and the community. Everything had to come together at one moment. While bugs in the game or user negativity can be fixed, a listing happens once and forever — it can’t be rolled back,” said Vladimir.

The community remembers how the launch of $NOT on exchanges was postponed several times. Initially, Sasha mentioned April 1st, then April 20th (4/20). Eventually, the event took place on May 16th. In response to the perpetual question of “when is the listing,” Sasha joked in one of the chats that he would write a book about it when it was all over.

One of the key tasks the team set for themselves was maintaining the functionality of the TON network during the extreme increase in transaction volume.

As a result, the solution was to distribute the load between the blockchain and centralized exchanges. Users were offered the option to choose in advance what they wanted to do with their $NOT on the big day: withdraw to an exchange for sale, stake in the game to level up, or simply withdraw to a personal wallet.

The $NOT chart on TradingView showed significant volatility on the day of the listing.

Bugs

The team faced specific risks related to potential errors in the game code. During the gameplay, several noticeable incidents occurred that affected some players’ game balances. For instance, a raw solution was used for minting vouchers, leading to numerous errors in the game. Some users had their coins deducted without receiving the voucher, causing the team to revisit the same issue multiple times.

“We had a lot of problems with the vouchers. We probably went back to them four times. We sent out the unminted ones. We restored the balances for those who paid for them. Then something else… Every few weeks, we would get alerts from the community… Okay, we’re back at it. Yes, it was actually a pretty quick and raw solution. And it came back to bite us hard because we rushed. We’ve learned our lesson. And we definitely don’t want to do that again,” said Vladimir.

Current bugs in Notcoin, which occasionally occur during partner tasks involving pool mining, balance displays, and withdrawals, are known to the team. For these purposes, the technical support chat has been reopened. The team also monitors feedback in Telegram, Twitter, and the game’s beta chat, where 150 early participants help accumulate and address various issues promptly.

It’s worth noting that the team has remained resilient to FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), and Vladimir calmly responded to our questions about the bugs. According to him, the main task of the team is to create a quality product despite any challenges.

Most problems, according to Vladimir, were related to hardware. The servers simply couldn’t handle the constantly increasing load. At its peak, Notcoin was running on 16 servers, with an RPS (requests per second) of 90–100 thousand. The highest server bill exceeded $155,000. After transitioning from the mining phase to Explore, the server load significantly decreased. However, more resources are now consumed by the Community Bot, which is the main node for mining $NOT from pools.

Vladimir laughed at this meme and said he would share it in the team chat.

Currently, work continues on the Trading Bot, and the launch of partner games in the Notcoin ecosystem is being prepared. Vladimir refrained from giving specific deadlines. We also learned that Open Builders provides its technical infrastructure to partner projects, significantly lowering the entry barrier for startups in the industry.

Among other interesting games on the market, Vladimir struggled to name specific titles but mentioned that their team eagerly anticipates the launch of the mini-game Lost Dogs — a pioneering NFT collection that first implemented the “merging” mechanic on TON.

It’s also important to mention that Notcoin has inspired dozens of new projects. According to Vladimir, they are currently striving to support promising initiatives and are willing to share their experience with other teams.

“Nice to Meet You!” — Vladimir

When asked the popular question, “How much did you earn during the mining period?” Vladimir replied that he didn’t know for two reasons.

“Sasha handles all the finances. He always knows how much we spent and how much we earned. I am fully involved in the code. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell because it’s internal info,” said Vladimir.

However, the team members are paid in hard currency. Early on, Open Builders attracted investments, including from TOP Labs. It is these funds that form the salary pool for the team.

Overall, the story of Volodya and Sasha resembles the situation of the Durov brothers — Pavel and Nikolai. One is dedicated to mathematics and development and remains in the background, while the other is the face of the company and handles media promotion.

Until recently, Vladimir didn’t have the time or inclination to do a joint interview with his brother, for example. As he said, if given the choice between going to an interview or spending couple of hours fixing bugs, he would prefer the latter. By the way, he really enjoys writing smart contracts on TON. He initially mastered FunC and then Tact. Given the choice, he finds FunC more comfortable since it is the original.

Commenting on the conspiracy theory that the Durov brothers were the prototype for the Plotvinov brothers, Vladimir laughed.

“Creating our own blockchain would be cool but difficult. It’s like a task with a star,” said Vladimir.

He also noted that despite the similarities with the Durovs, there are differences. For example, in their team, the elder brother is Sasha, while in the Telegram founders’ family, Nikolai was born first.

Describing their collaboration, Vladimir portrayed his brother as a very visionary product manager with strong intuition for finding the right solution for users. Vladimir’s strength lies in being able to reactively implement product solutions technically.

“I write quickly and a lot,” said Vladimir.

An interesting fact is that the brothers have similar anonymous Telegram numbers ending in 0001 and 0101. Sasha decided to give this gift to Vladimir for New Year’s. It indeed looks vibey.

Besides development, Vladimir is not averse to jumping into various projects on TON. He prefers fundamental tokens like DEXs or NFT marketplaces but has also bought different tokens at highs and had to ride out the lows.

As for hobbies, Vladimir is very fond of seasonal activities, especially snowboarding. He also developed a strong liking for tennis, which he played for a whole year in Georgia with a personal coach.

He can play Korzh (famous Belarusian rapper and songwriter) on the guitar and also play PlayStation with his brother while discussing ideas.

He greeted 2024 with the official launch of Notcoin and a heavy load on the servers. Two minutes to midnight — gathered with friends and five minutes later back to the laptops.

And exactly three months later, on April 1st, he celebrated his birthday with a DAU (Daily Active Users) of 5 million people and a peak online count of around 600,000, coinciding with the end of the mining phase.

What Can We Say About Vladimir’s Personality?

To conduct the interview, we connected with Vladimir via video call. For a moment, it seemed that Sasha had joined the call by mistake. The brothers are so similar in appearance and voice.

Of course, the parallel with Nikolai Durov is pure conspiracy theory. However, Vladimir indeed excels at creating products for millions of people. Notcoin and the Community Bot are vivid proof of this.

After spending two hours talking to the co-founder of a unicorn startup in 2024, you can’t help but be inspired by his ambitions and motivation. “The guy is 27 years old, he dropped out of college at 17 after 9th grade, and today he writes the most popular mini-apps for Telegram. Damn, I want to do that too!” I thought after one of his answers.

On behalf of the community, we want to give Vladimir huge respect and gratitude for the vibe and the products.

We hope to meet Vladimir again at The GateWay 2024!

The interview was conducted and prepared for you by @Notyou, JpegMillionaire, and TON Persons.