Artists Don’t Have a Career Ladder. So I’m Building One

In 2022 Viola was living in Dubai, trying to get her first platform for creatives off the ground. Her developers were building it in the evenings, after their day jobs. Progress was slow, the product was stuck, and Tavrovsky was running out of patience. Then her friend from Silicon Valley gave her some blunt advice: fire the entire team and build it yourself. There was just one problem. Tavrovsky couldn’t code.

The next morning, she fired them all anyway.

Within the next month she and her co-founder used Bubble (no-code platform) to build the first MVP version, teaching themselves through tutorials. The product even included an early AI feature that helped creatives decide what to charge for their services.

Tavrovsky says she subsequently developed several products, including a social network for the art world, a creative-services marketplace, a voice-first task app, an AI-powered smart bin with a working hardware prototype and, eventually, WeDirectory, which the company says has built a substantial user base.

Today, WeDirectory is built around a problem Tavrovsky believes the creative economy has largely overlooked: cultural projects are everywhere, but the infrastructure that helps them build sustainable businesses and generate income is not.

Tavrovsky positions WeDirectory as one attempt to address that infrastructure gap by helping creative websites improve their visibility to search engines and AI tools. The company has already collaborated with globally recognized brands across fashion and luxury.

Tavrovsky didn’t arrive at the problem from the art world. She is a former private banker with a background in corporate digital transformation. She says it was only after entering the creative industry that she realised how poorly its underlying systems were built.

That observation has taken her from no-code software to escrow rules written without a lawyer, from training a computer-vision model on her own household rubbish to building hardware, and from founding companies without venture capital to sitting on the jury at MassChallenge Switzerland.

Take us back to the moment when you fired your entire developer team. In hindsight, do you still believe it was the right decision?

It was. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made. It was scary, of course, I won’t deny that. They were really good guys, great engineers. It’s just that they all had other jobs, and what we were building had become their evening hobby. You cannot build a product working part time. My friend told me something that really stuck with me: “If you have enough courage, you’ll fire your team and do it yourself.” I’ve always loved a challenge, so I thought, “Yes. I’m strong enough. I’ll fire everyone and figure it out myself.”

What technical background did you have that allowed you to make the leap?

I didn’t have any. I’d never written a line of code before then. I always have a full picture vision regarding any products, systems, or companies, but never coded them myself. My co-founder said, “There’s this platform called Bubble. Let’s try it.” So we sat down with YouTube. There was no ChatGPT yet. And in a month, we had assembled the first version ourselves: a social network for creatives with a marketplace inside it, plus a small AI assistant that helped people understand what to charge for their services, because nobody in that world really knows what to charge. Was it beautiful? Yes. Did it work? Yes. We did it and were proud of ourselves. From that day on, I never again waited for someone else to build my product for me. Today, I write code myself.

Before all this you were in private banking and then in corporate digital transformation. Why the creative industry, of all the places where you could have applied that?

I’ve been involved in the arts and culture sector all my life, and I was always frustrated by the snobbery, nepotism, lack of structure, and chaos. I wondered how people could even survive and build careers in that environment. When you’re a lawyer, there’s a clear career path: associate, senior associate, partner. Doctors have a career path, too. But a creative person finishes art school and often has no idea where to go next. Art colleges don’t teach you how to sell your work, build a business, or code. When I was doing a master’s in art history I was shocked that nobody around me had a CV. I don’t mean they had poor CVs, they didn’t have CVs at all. There were incredibly talented people with no portfolio, applying to nothing, because nobody had told them that residencies, grants, and awards existed, or that you could apply for them with a document.

So I started with the most boring thing possible: I made them CVs and provided a step-by-step plan for how to make the first move.

That is a long way from a platform.

In a way, every one of my products started with a simple concept like a CV and turned into a piece of technology. After the CVs, everyone wanted an exhibition, because having an exhibition in London is a line on your résumé. But exhibitions are expensive. You need a curator, a patron, and money. I said, “Let’s just do it ourselves.” We all chipped in. I rented a small gallery in Camden for almost nothing. The artists mailed me their canvases rolled up through the ordinary post. We stretched them on site, and we opened a group show. Then came Venice. And then people started writing to me: “Can you help us organise this? Can you introduce us? Who do you know?” The creative industry often relies heavily on personal networks, with opportunities arising through friends and professional connections. I wanted to replace that informal chain with a system. That is the whole company, in one sentence.

The first version was a marketplace for artworks. It isn’t anymore. What happened?

We learned that artists are wonderful, but unfortunately, they are not a very well-paying audience. A painting is not bread. People buy it when they have money and everything is going well. And there are hundreds of art marketplaces already. The world doesn’t need one more. So we deleted the physical objects entirely, in about a week, and kept only services. Think about ballet. You watch the show, you go home happy. But for that show to happen, there was a sound engineer, a lighting designer, someone who sewed the costumes, someone who photographed it. Dozens of people had to find each other to make that one performance happen. And there was no platform in the creative world where you could quickly find a curator or a lighting designer the way you find a plumber.

That became Behind.

You’ve described developing several products. Do you see them as separate start-ups, or as one venture that keeps changing shape? 

One vision, many attempts. I think of a business like a city seen from space. Sometimes the sewer bursts on one street and you are down there with the workers fixing it. But you have to zoom out regularly, look at the whole city, and notice that there is a fire on the other side. Some of the products were exactly that: I zoomed out and saw a fire. MyPager appeared because we were emailing investors and could not fit the start-up into two sentences plus a PDF that was out of date by the next morning. So we built a live one-page profile for founders, with the team, the numbers, the deck and a button to book a call. We built it for ourselves. Then partners from two well-known Valley funds, people who never answered my emails, simply booked a call through the page without writing back. That is when you know a tool is real: when busy people utilize it silently.

And Clich?

Clich started as an experiment: a task app that works with voice. You say what you need, the request fills itself and finds a person, like Uber for small jobs. We built it in a month. It’s currently on pause, and I say that openly. Sometimes you have to close a chapter. I’ve closed two legal entities this February. It’s not failure; it’s making space for what comes next. A founder who cannot close things eventually drowns in them. I finish things. And sometimes finishing something means deciding that it’s time to let it go.

How did you come up with Rubbin, then? An AI-powered bin is not an obvious product for someone from the art world. Did that also somehow evolve from a product for the creative industry?

Ha-ha. No, that one didn’t. I was living in Switzerland, where you sort waste into about twenty categories, and I kept watching intelligent people throw a coffee cup into the organic bin because they were in a hurry. The idea was simple: a closed cabinet with a camera. You bring the rubbish close, it recognises what it is and opens the correct section. When the bag is full, it seals it with heat, tells your phone, and a new bag inflates. No smell, no thinking. We trained the computer-vision model at home. The whole team was recording videos of our own rubbish so the model could learn the difference between metal and glass. We had a working prototype, drawings, the design. Then we received an inquiry from a prospective buyer in the Gulf. 

And you froze it despite the early success, why?

Yes, yes, I did. Hardware is a different game. Software can sometimes be built with very little money; hardware requires capital, and it needs someone who understands supply chains and assembly. I am not that person, and I didn’t manage to find that person. So I froze the company, and the team supported my decision. That taught me more about what I am good at than any success did. I would restart it tomorrow with the right partner.

Let’s talk about your current businesses. Every second founder in Europe pitches a SaaS. Why is yours still alive, and why should anyone believe WeDirectory is not one more SaaS?

A SaaS product on its own can be very narrow. We use a core data infrastructure with integrated SaaS tools. If you have a huge audience, you can sell them almost anything you want. We started with a problem that had never really been solved: sales. Sales means more traffic. It’s a funnel. So we provide all participants with a funnel and a distribution channel. We don’t care what they sell. Having a website is no longer the problem: according to Clutch, 83% of small businesses now have one, up from 64% in 2018. Being found is the issue. An Ahrefs study of 14 billion web pages found that 96.55% of them receive no traffic from Google at all, and AI search makes this gap even wider, since assistants cite only a small number of sources for each answer.

WeDirectory is designed to structure information from those websites, add human curation, and improve their visibility across search and AI tools. Think of it as a directory and discovery layer for creative studios and cultural institutions. We are now working across 15 categories and have over 100,000 followers on Instagram. We currently grow without a dedicated sales team, relying largely on organic discovery and referrals.

You shared your expertise in business iteration as a jury member at MassChallenge Switzerland last year. What did you see from that side of the table that you could not see as a founder?

That the idea is almost never the problem. The packaging is. I would read an application and think: this is brilliant, and you have buried it on page four. Founders who cannot say in two sentences what they do will not raise money, and they will not raise it because of the two sentences, not because of the product. I judged teams in energy efficiency and healthcare, nothing to do with my experience, and it was the same disease everywhere. It is also why I went. I am thirty-six and I have a very strong need to give back. Mentoring, telling people what I got wrong, is the part of all this that I enjoy most.

You got accepted to Stanford’s summer programme in AI and machine learning but you said yourself that a few years ago you didn’t know how to code. What advice can you give to founders with no technical background?

Nobody is coming to save you. Learn it. Be curious about everything you do.