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Dear readers,
Three months ago, a LinkedIn ban looked like it could become a nightmare scenario for one of N. Macedonia’s fastest-growing startups. Instead, it turned into an unexpected growth engine and a reminder that the strongest companies are built on relationships, not platforms.
In this week’s edition, we take a closer look at how HeyReach transformed a major disruption into a $16 million ARR success story, from its unlikely beginnings as a university project to its ambitions of becoming a multi-product SaaS company. We also explore the lessons its founders learned about bootstrapping, AI adoption, platform risk, and scaling globally from the Balkans.
Beyond that, we cover fresh developments across the region, including new VC funding activity in Romania, Serbia, and Croatia, while Kristiana Kuneva from The Recursive shares her perspective on why Balkan startups need to focus not only on technology, but also on storytelling, market access, and building truly global companies.
Enjoy the read!
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs
Getting banned by LinkedIn became HeyReach's biggest growth moment
A part of the HeyReach team
For most startups, losing access to LinkedIn would represent an existential threat. For Macedonian startup HeyReach, a company whose flagship product helps sales teams automate LinkedIn outreach, it should have been catastrophic.
At the beginning of March, the company’s official page disappeared, while its founder Nick Velkovski’s personal LinkedIn profile also vanished alongside it. Overnight, one of N. Macedonia’s fastest-growing software companies lost its most visible public storefront.
Yet, what looked like a crisis quickly became one of the most unusual growth stories in European SaaS this year. “Having a similar experience with Howitzer and Reddit, I guess I didn’t learn my lesson. Being removed from LinkedIn is something that I’d lie if I say we didn’t expect, so we were mentally prepared for it.” Nick says with a laugh.
The founders expected disruption, but they did not expect what followed.
Nick Velkovski during SaaStanak
“The first day I didn’t know how the audience would react, but I was pleasantly surprised. More than 99% of the feedback we received was genuinely supportive, which made me realize that we have such an amazing audience, we have built a brand people trust in, and that we have a ton of people who love our product and company. That was extremely heartwarming.” Nick recalls.
Then came something even more unexpected. “I didn’t expect that this censorship would spin a Streisand effect. The two weeks after being removed from LinkedIn, our revenue skyrocketed and we saw the best performing days. The day of the removal, for example, we added $18K MRR more than what we are adding per day.” he tells IT Logs.
Three months after LinkedIn removed both the company page and Nick’s personal profile, HeyReach had generated nearly $4 million in additional revenue, while April and May became the strongest months in the company’s history. Furthermore, it was proof that its relationship with customers had become stronger than its dependence on any single platform.
From a university project to a SaaS champion
The irony is that HeyReach almost never existed. Long before it became one of SEE’s fastest-growing sales engagement platforms, a group of young students led by Nick and his co-founder Stefan Kotevski were building an entirely different company. In 2021, they launched Howitzer as a university project backed by roughly half a million dollars in venture funding.
The software became the world’s first Reddit outreach platform, helping businesses identify niche communities and send targeted direct messages. It quickly attracted international attention, eventually becoming the number one Product of the Day on Product Hunt.
But behind the early recognition, the founders were discovering the limitations of building on Reddit’s ecosystem. Growth opportunities were constrained, and the business would eventually hit a ceiling. The pivot came almost by accident - inside Howitzer already existed a small LinkedIn outreach feature that had originally been designed as just another distribution channel.
“I actually hated the idea at first. There were already more than 160 LinkedIn automation tools. It felt completely oversaturated.” Nick admits, recalling that everything suggested they were entering the wrong market at the wrong time.
And investors thought the same. “The first six months were brutal. Ten VCs passed.” he tells IT Logs. The company came dangerously close to folding before it ever found traction. Looking back, Nick says there was one moment that changed everything. “Everything changed when we hit product-market fit. Before that, nothing works. After that, everything sticks. It’s like gravity flips.”
That single breakthrough transformed HeyReach from a desperate pivot into one of largest startup success stories the region has ever seen.
Building one of the region’s most admired startups
Today, HeyReach has become much more than another software company. Within N. Macedonia, but also in regional ecosystems, it has become the benchmark founders increasingly compare themselves against.
It is one of the rare companies built from Skopje that has managed to compete globally while remaining rooted in the local ecosystem, inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs who increasingly believe international success does not require relocating abroad.
The numbers explain why - this month the company crossed $16 million ARR, continues to grow roughly 30% year-over-year, employs more than 30 people, remains fully bootstrapped, and now plans to launch two additional products before the end of the year while targeting $22 million ARR.
Internally, however, the transformation has been even more dramatic. “We are evolving internally super fast. At the beginning of the year we used very little AI in our processes, and we were 10x slower than now. Right now AI is extremely and super successfully utilized amongst most of the departments, especially dev and support departments. We are shipping things two to three times faster, and our support has drastically improved, with AI solving more than 70% of the tickets.” Nick explains.
The company has also acquired another business earlier this year, an acquisition that remains undisclosed, and is preparing what Nick describes as a product capable of disrupting the go-to-market industry.
Intercom and HeyReach
“We acquired another company earlier this year, which is still a secret, and will launch another product in a few months from now that we believe will seriously disrupt the GTM industry.” he tells IT Logs.
For him, this represents a new phase in the company’s evolution. “HeyReach is turning into a multi-product company, and that’s a new and interesting challenge that we are on right now.”
Hypergrowth and hard lessons
Rapid expansion has also required difficult organizational changes. “As the company and the industry evolved, especially with AI, we made a change in a few leadership roles, and honestly, I couldn’t be happier.” Nick says.
According to the Macedonian entrepreneur, some longstanding operational bottlenecks disappeared almost immediately. “In some of the departments, the stuff we were trying to fix for more than a year got fixed within weeks, and the new leadership definitely showed themselves.” he tells IT Logs.
Nick Velkovski
He is equally complimentary of the rest of the team. “The people working in those departments adapted to the new changes like heroes. Now I can proudly say that we are set for a super bright future, and I feel like I finally have the team I can rely on to get to the next level.” he says.
One reason Nick speaks so openly about startup growth is that he has experienced both sides of the funding equation - Howitzer was venture-backed. HeyReach was not.
“HeyReach is fully bootstrapped, and we have received no outside capital for it.” Yet he refuses to portray one model as inherently superior. “If it wasn’t for the investment in Howitzer, if the pivot didn’t happen, and if we didn’t make all the mistakes that we did, HeyReach wouldn’t exist.” Nick points out.
Preparing for what’s ahead
Ironically, the company’s biggest lesson this year has not been about AI or product development - but about being resilient. “For sure,” Velkovski says when asked whether the LinkedIn ban changed his view of platform risk. “It’s clear that you can’t build an IPO-worthy business while building on top of another platform.”
At the same time, he rejects the idea that platform dependency makes businesses impossible. “It’s also clear that you can build a really nice, super profitable business and serve an audience really well,” he adds.
Asked whether AI will make outbound sales less personal, Nick sees a different future.
“More personalized - yes. More human - no. More automated than ever - also yes.” he outlines, adding that predictions about the “death of outbound sales” misunderstand how technology evolves.
“I know people on LinkedIn want to say ‘cold email is dead’ or ‘Claude killed X’, but in more than 40 years, since the internet and digital ways of selling exist, I have never seen or heard of any channel dying. They are evolving.” Nick concludes.
Across the region…
Romania has a new venture capital fund. Asternova Vest, the first dedicated VC fund focused on the country's Western region, is targeting €37 million to invest in more than 18 technology startups at the Seed and Series A stages, with ticket sizes ranging from €500,000 to €4 million. The fund was launched by a Romanian-French consortium comprising Aster Capital Partners, Iceberg+ and Venture Booster.
Serbian startup SPONA has raised €300K in a private funding round to further develop its AI-powered sales intelligence platform, which helps B2B companies identify, enrich and qualify leads more accurately and efficiently. The round includes a €55K investment from Zephyr Angels, alongside TS Ventures Fund and several angel investors, with additional matching support provided through the Katapult program.
SPONA’s founder Mihailo Gligoric
Croatian venture capital firm Fil Rouge Capital has announced an undisclosed seed round investment in Metastack, an esports education and performance platform aiming to help competitive players improve through structured learning and tactical analysis. Metastack is developing what it describes as an all-in-one workspace for esports players, combining educational content with tools designed to accelerate skill development.
Granola Runs Revenue On Attio
"When I think of revenue, I think of Attio." - Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business at Granola
Here's what that adds up to:
Zero missed leads and 10x faster access to customer context
Lead triage 83% faster
Five hours saved per week with automated updates
Rumor has it…
Word in the ecosystem is that one of N. Macedonia's most talked-about AI edtech startups, once seen as a company with strong regional and even global potential, has struggled to gain the traction many expected. Despite early buzz, positive media attention and high expectations, growth appears to have been slower than anticipated, with the company yet to achieve the breakout moment many investors and founders had predicted.
Got tech rumors? Ping us at [email protected]
The Ecosystem take…
Kristiana Kuneva, Chief Business Development Officer at The Recursive
IT Logs: What is the biggest business development challenge for startups from the Balkans when entering global markets?
Kristiana Kuneva: The biggest business development challenge for Balkan startups entering global markets is not technology - it is moving from building a strong product to building a globally competitive company.
Founders in the region have excellent technical skills, but international scaling requires additional capabilities: customer understanding, positioning, sales, relationship-building, storytelling, and access to global networks.
IT Logs: Why does the SEE region produce strong engineers but relatively few global category-leading companies?
One of the less visible barriers is communication. Many SEE founders build great products but struggle to confidently present their vision to global customers, investors, and partners. The ability to narrate the story of the company, to explain its value through storytelling, and build trust internationally is just as important as the technology itself.
SEE produces strong engineers because of its technical education, problem-solving mindset, and resilience. But engineering alone does not create category leaders. Global companies require a combination of technology, commercial execution, leadership, and ambition.
The ecosystem also needs a mindset shift around the question of failure. Historically, failure has often been viewed as a setback rather than a learning mechanism. The SEE ecosystem needs to continue shifting toward a culture where ambition is valued and failure is understood as part of the process of building.
IT Logs: Is the main challenge capital, mindset, market access, or something deeper within the ecosystem?
Capital is no longer the biggest limitation. The region has developed stronger VC funds, angel networks, and investor communities, with growing access to international capital. The bigger challenge is ensuring that capital is paired with global expertise - investors and mentors who can help founders scale internationally, not only finance the next stage.
Ultimately, the challenge is deeper than money. It is about ecosystem maturity. SEE already has the talent base. The next step is turning that talent into companies that are not only technically excellent, but globally visible, trusted, and competitive.
Upcoming events in the region…
Infobip Shift - September 13-15, Zadar, Croatia
Startup Revolution - October 01-04, Skopje, N. Macedonia
Business Angel Summit - October 08, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
How to Web - October 06-08, Bucharest, Romania
Automation Summit - October 15-16, Split, Croatia
