Author
Antonina Smyrnova
We sat down with Mykola, co-founder of resynced.io, to talk about how the platform began and what he has learned along the way. resynced.io came from a very common problem many teams struggle with: keeping their tools in sync.
It quickly turned into a long journey of building, testing, fixing mistakes, and learning from real users. Along the way, Mykola and his co-founders discovered how easy it is to over-engineer features, how important it is to talk to users early, and how powerful it can be to give non-technical people tools normally meant for developers.
In this interview, Mykola explains how the idea for resynced.io appeared, why the first version took much longer than expected, how user feedback reshaped the product, and why the team is focused on making complex tasks simple for everyone.
Before resynced.io, what did your path look like?
Mykola: It actually started back in school. I took part in chemistry Olympiads and later studied at the university's chemistry faculty. I finished my degree, went on to a PhD track, and spent a lot of time doing research. I even published some scientific papers in international journals.
After a couple of years in the PhD program, though, I left. I’m sure there are many studies with real potential and impact. That’s great. But I wanted something different. So I started looking for a place to build a career outside the university.
How did you end up in software development? Had you programmed before?
Mykola: Not seriously. I started learning to code on my own and then joined the industry. For about 8 years, I worked as a developer, first as a junior, then a mid-level, and finally a senior engineer. I worked with international teams on different projects.
Later, together with my co-founders, we started a service company, LeanyLabs. But even as we were building the agency, we always had this unresolved desire to create our own products.
How did the idea for resynced.io appear?
Mykola: There are three of us: me, Marian, and Andriy. Marian and I had worked together before; with Andrii, we’d known each other since school. For a long time, we were thinking: Should we build a product? A service? What exactly should it be?
At one point, we even tried to build a product for QA, an automatic session recording so testers could easily reproduce bugs. We spent some time on it, but not enough to turn it into a real product. Then we focused on the service company. But as engineers, we still felt pulled toward product work. We wanted to build something where we had full influence: decide what to build, how to build, and apply our own product thinking.
That’s how the idea for resynced.io emerged. It wasn’t like: “We must build a data sync tool.” It was more: “We want to build something,” and this idea grew out of our real experience.
We had worked a lot with monday.com and other tools. We saw firsthand the strong need to synchronize data across systems.
Did you personally have that need, or was it only from clients?
Mykola: We had it ourselves. One concrete example was syncing Notion with Notion. Different workspaces, different databases, we needed them to stay in sync.
At the same time, talking to clients and monday.com team members, we kept hearing the same thing: there’s a need to sync monday.com with other tools, especially Google Sheets.
But there were already tools on the market. Why weren’t they enough?
Mykola: Because there was no good platform that solved it well.
Many solutions did it, but none of them were complete or reliable enough. From what we saw, that need wasn’t adequately covered at the time. So we decided to build our own solution.
We talked to people, researched existing apps, tested them, and conducted a competitive analysis. Even while we were doing that, a few more tools appeared, some quite promising, but we felt there was still space for a better approach.
How long did it take from the idea to the first release?
Mykola: About a year. Much longer than we expected.
We constantly thought: “Let’s just improve this a bit more. Let’s make it a bit more complete before we show it to people.” We made many decisions based on the idea that it’s better to build something “fully ready” rather than ship a rough early version.
At first, data sync sounds very simple. Then you start digging deeper and realize how complex it gets:
- Different data types
- Type conversions
- Mapping items and IDs
- Filtering rules
- How to handle automatic deletions
- How to implement it on the chosen tech stack
- How to deploy and scale it so it survives a heavy workload
- How to work around the limitations of each platform’s API
For example, monday.com has webhooks that notify you about changes. But they don’t always fire for every scenario. If you remove a person from a “Person” column, the webhook doesn’t trigger. So we had to implement a core architecture decision: we don’t rely only on webhooks. We regularly re-read all the data to make sure we never miss changes.
Then you need to make that re-reading fast enough, efficient enough, and capable of handling thousands of records. It’s a lot of engineering work.
What turned out to be the most challenging part: technology, marketing, or something else?
Mykola: Honestly, everything is hard.
If you measure by time and effort, development took the most time and effort. That was the most challenging part overall. But looking back, I can see that we also made mistakes, in architecture and in our assumptions about what clients actually need.
One example: we built a very complex filtering system.
You could define filters on both sides of the sync, define what happens when data no longer matches the filter (should it be deleted or not), and so on. We spent a huge amount of time and effort on this.
In practice, most customers don’t care that much. They need basic filters, not an advanced filtering engine from a sci-fi movie.
We also built a complex system to match records across two systems. We assumed that users already have data in both tools, and they need to match them. So we created a matching mechanism that lets you choose one or more fields on both sides.
It was powerful, flexible… and, for 90% of people, unnecessary.
Most users have data only on one side. They just want to copy it to the other side and keep it in sync, no magic matching needed. So our tricky feature actually made the first sync harder for most people.
That was a big product lesson: don’t invent features for your users that they never asked for.
We ended up hiding that advanced matching behind a separate “power users only” layer and saw much better results.
Q: How did you get your first users?
Mykola: Very simply.
We created a landing page with two sentences explaining what we wanted to build. We added a field to leave an email if someone was interested.
Then we posted on several forums that we were working on a data-syncing tool and invited people to join the list. That’s how we got our first users and emails.
Q: Is there a user story that really stuck with you or influenced the product?
Mykola: Yes. We have a real estate customer. He rents properties and has to use an old, specialized CRM system designed for real estate. It’s outdated, but very tailored to his industry.
At the same time, he runs everything else in monday.com, which is modern, convenient, and structured.
He came up with a clever setup: he exports data from the old CRM into Google Sheets, and then uses resynced.io to sync Google Sheets with monday.com.
So he ends up with both: the old system that’s required for his domain, and a clean, modern monday.com setup, always in sync.
Watching his demo was really fascinating. It showed how, if someone is willing to experiment, they can connect systems that were never meant to work together.
During that call, we also noticed several things we could simplify and improve in our product. Real users always teach you something.
If we zoom out, what’s the mission of resynced.io for you?
Mykola: We want to give non-technical people the ability to do things that are usually quite hard.
Imagine a project manager who isn’t technical and doesn’t want to write scripts or maintain custom integrations. We believe that with the right interface and product design, even something as complex as data synchronization can be made accessible.
A lot of our users say the same thing when we ask what they like: “It’s simple. It’s clear. I set it up in ten minutes.”
That’s the best feedback for us, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to build: a product we can be proud of, that feels powerful but still simple.
Q: What motivates you the most in working on resynced.io?
Mykola: Good feedback.
Of course, it’s motivating when people buy paid plans, which matters too. But what really drives me is when users say: “We tried many tools and nothing worked, and with resynced.io we finally got it working. It was convenient, it took 10 minutes, and we did it ourselves.”
That kind of feedback is incredibly inspiring.
Q: What would you say to someone who wants to build their own product?
Mykola: Know your audience. Don’t assume anything about them — ask, research, talk.
Iterate fast. It’s better to ship something simple that actually solves a real problem than to spend a year perfecting features nobody asked for. We learned this ourselves.
Communicate constantly with your users. Add something, remove something, see how they react. Solve a clear problem and don’t add unnecessary complexity.
And one more thing: if you can’t find your target audience before you start building, you definitely won’t find them after you launch.
Q: How do you see resynced.io in 3–5 years?
Mykola: Honestly, it’s hard to say precisely. But we’ve learned something important: it’s impossible to build a truly universal system that syncs everything with everything perfectly.
Each platform has its own nuances, and those nuances are important to users of that platform.
So I think the future is more about focus and specialization. Instead of one giant tool that tries to cover every case, I can imagine a “swarm” of smaller apps, each one designed for a particular “A ↔ B” scenario, deeply integrated and really polished.
Or, at least, a more clearly defined niche where we’re the best possible solution. If we become the obvious choice for a specific market or workflow, that will already be a big win.
Read more articles in our blog. And try resynced.io for free.
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