Introduction
When Maksym Sakharov came to INPUT Global, WeFi already had a product serving 150,000 users across dozens of countries and active deals with institutional partners. Running that product is a full-time job. Building the public presence behind it is another.
That second job is where many founders stall. Running a company and building a public presence require two different rhythms, and turning expertise into consistent external communication takes dedicated effort. In financial infrastructure, credibility travels ahead of the person: banks, fintechs, and institutional investors form opinions through what they read and who they recognize, long before a meeting is ever proposed. A founder whose ideas are visible across those channels enters conversations with greater trust and recognition.
Our mandate was to build that presence on Maksym’s behalf: he keeps running WeFi, we handle everything that makes the market know him.
The Challenge
The first challenge was visibility. Maksym already had a strong internal voice at WeFi, where 150,000 users and the team knew him well. Outside the company, the recognition was still limited. The external audiences the business depended on had limited exposure to his thinking, and internal credibility doesn’t automatically translate into editorial weight.
The second was alignment with 3 strategic goals. First, a BD fast-lane: the partners and investors driving the next stage of the business had to recognize Maksym before the team ever reached out. Second, founder-as-face: a human dimension the brand couldn’t build on its own. Third, thought leadership at the intersection of Fintech and Web3, positioning Maksym for expansions beyond his current role. Every piece of output had to serve at least one of these.
Our Approach
Our work with Maksym was structured around Voice™, INPUT’s internal framework for building founder presence as a measurable system rather than a content output. 5 of its 6 stages shaped Maksym’s program.
Each stage contributes to the Voice Index, a composite score that measures how strong and scalable a founder’s public signal is at any given moment. Maksym moved from a starting point where distribution and authority scored near zero into the upper range for founder accounts in his category. The score is important because each of its components maps to a specific BD function: distribution puts him in the feeds of the people he needs to reach, authority makes him credible when those people show up in a meeting, and consistency keeps both alive between engagements.
How PR and Social Compound
When a significant PR placement landed, we surfaced it selectively in Maksym’s social content, as part of a consistent narrative rather than self-promotion. A founder whose name appears in Forbes, then surfaces in a LinkedIn post with the same depth of thinking, then appears in another editorial context sends a clear signal: this is a voice several editors independently chose to publish.
A potential partner researching Maksym ahead of a meeting now finds a consistent editorial record across tier-1 financial and crypto publications, combined with active social presence where his thinking lands first. The gap that existed between WeFi’s scale and Maksym’s external visibility has closed, and the BD function can lean on that presence instead of explaining it.
Execution Model
The workflow was built around one rule: nothing runs on Maksym’s time.
The split is clean. Our side holds the full production cycle — planning, writing, outlet pitching, placement management, social rollout, and cross-platform cadence. Maksym contributes what only he can: raw market insight during a weekly sync, directional input when the landscape shifts, and final approval on what goes out.
The model works because responsibilities don’t overlap. The agency operates, the founder decides.
Results
Over the engagement, we built measurable foundations across both tracks.
PR: 35+ tier-1 placements across crypto-native and mainstream financial media, with a combined monthly audience exceeding 500 million. Consistent output of 8 or more placements per month throughout the engagement.
Social: 76% follower growth on X over four months, built on earned audience. Engagement of 3.5% on X, strong for a personal brand account in this space. LinkedIn averaged 4% engagement. Zero gaps in publishing cadence across the entire period.
The numbers reflect a starting point. In personal brand work at this stage, trajectory matters more than reach. Maksym now shows up consistently in the editorial spaces and social feeds where the audiences Maksym needs to reach are paying attention — and that presence compounds with every month it continues.