[Top Agency Series] The Art of Strategic Software Partnerships With Alex Natskovich

Alex Natskovich is the Founder and CEO of MEV, LLC, a technology services firm that builds custom software and modernizes digital systems for life sciences, real estate, and pharma companies. With over 20 years in software engineering, he has led 200+ projects across diverse industries and specializes in distributed systems, cloud computing, and large-scale data processing. Under his leadership, MEV has delivered major projects for clients such as Cartier, Novo Nordisk, and Daiichi Sankyo.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [4:41] Alex Natskovich introduces MEV and its mission to help clients win with custom software
• [5:21] Growing up in Soviet Belarus and surviving economic turmoil
• [9:05] From accidental freelancing to founding a software development firm
• [10:22] Why core values outweigh technical skills when hiring developers
• [13:06] Expanding from healthcare and pharma into startups and product companies
• [14:50] How MEV’s engagement models evolved from fixed budget projects to dedicated teams
• [17:41] Pricing strategies that fit both startups and enterprise clients
• [20:47] Common software pitfalls, from untested assumptions to privacy oversights
• [32:52] AI tools Alex uses, from GitHub Copilot to Fireflies
• [39:44] How AI reshapes client expectations and product development

In this episode…

Surviving economic chaos can forge an entrepreneurial spirit that thrives in uncertainty. What lessons can be drawn from growing up in a place where scarcity and improvisation are part of daily life, and how do those lessons translate into building successful teams and technology today?

Alex Natskovich, a veteran software engineer and product leader, believes resilience and resourcefulness are the foundation of innovation. He shares how early hardships taught him to adapt quickly, think creatively, and focus on core values when hiring talent. From avoiding common product pitfalls, like untested assumptions and weak data privacy, to embracing AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and Fireflies for smarter development, his insights reveal how to build scalable, market-ready products. These experiences underscore the importance of aligning strategy, technology, and culture to win in competitive markets.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Alex Natskovich, Founder and CEO of MEV, to discuss how early-life resilience shaped his leadership in software development. He explores hiring based on core values over technical skills, lessons from guiding Hawaii Information Service’s MLS platform overhaul, and the impact of AI on client expectations and product development.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Alex Natskovich on LinkedIn
• MEV, LLC
• Hawaii Information Service
• React
• Atlassian™ Software
• Jira
• Confluence
• Slack
• GitHub
• Cursor
• Codex
• Firefly Notetaker
• Fireflies.AI
• TL;DV
• Granola
• Google Gemini
• Suno
• ChatGPT
• LumiGrow

Related episodes:

• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Online Forms and Productivity With Aytekin Tank of Jotform” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Israel Leader Series] Engineering the Autonomous Revolution with Rabbi Mois Navon of Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Building something that nobody wants is not winning, so we focus on helping clients validate ideas before investing too much time or money.”
• “Growing up, we had to survive on very little — herding cows and growing our own food taught me adaptability and resilience.”
• “Core values matter more than technical skills; hiring people who truly embody our values is the foundation of strong teams.”
• “Many underestimate the last 10% of software — delivering a commercial-grade product often takes much more work than people expect.”
• AI hasn’t replaced developers, but it has transformed how clients communicate their vision and how we collaborate to build solutions.”

Action steps:

1. Define your company’s core values and hire by them: Establish and communicate values to build aligned teams and foster honest communication.
2. Validate assumptions early and start with MVPs: Test ideas with minimum viable products to reduce wasted resources and avoid overbuilding.
3. Establish transparent and direct feedback processes: Encourage clear communication to accelerate learning and problem-solving.
4. Prioritize compliance, privacy, and security from the start: Address data protection and regulations early to prevent costly rework.
5. Embrace new tools cautiously and iteratively: Pilot and integrate technologies only after proving they enhance productivity and stability.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Alex. You can check him out at MEV.com. M E V .com. Alex, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out.

This is you know, I don’t know, I have a top agency series, right? And this kind of falls in that category. But I also have a top software series and that also falls in that category because you really help companies create software, right? You’re the strategic software development partner for these companies.

But we’ll lump you into both of those and so on the SaaS side, I had one of the founders of Pipedrive. That was a really good one. They had around 10,000 customers when I interviewed them. Now they’re over 100,000. Just a crazy winding journey. Yeah. You know, Pipedrive.

And then Zapier. One of the founders of Zapier, Wade Foster. That was a good one. And one of the the founders of Jotform. And I liked you probably experienced this with different pricing models with software, but they had a freemium version. And I’m like, how can you have millions of users using freemium? This costs you real dollars. Right. But they had an interesting way of kind of elevating the free users to the paid users. Right. And the adoption and everything like that.

So those are interesting. And then I have some good on the agency side. I don’t know if you get approached at all, Alex, from companies trying to acquire you, but Todd Taskey has a –

Alex Natskovich: 01:56

All the time.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 01:58

What’s that? All the time?

Alex Natskovich: 01:59

All the time? I get, like, 2 or 3 emails a week, probably.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 02:02

Yeah. And Todd has the Second Bite Podcast, and he helps agencies. He pairs private equity with agencies and helps sell agencies. And second bite because sometimes when they sell, they’re not retiring. They’re just keep doing what they’re doing. Maybe more of what they’re doing, what they like doing. And if the private equity if and when the private equity sells again, sometimes they’ve gotten more in the second bite than they did in the first. So that was a good one about the M&A space, the agency space. So check that one out with Todd.

And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution of production.

Number two, we’re an easy button for companies gifting. So we make gifting staying top of mind. Your clients, partners, prospects, even staff from a culture perspective. Simple. Easy. Affordable. All you do is give us a list of the people we do everything else. Everything’s also branded to your company. And we don’t send tchotchkes or things like that. Alex, that you’re going to throw in the garbage. We actually tend to send food products that I would want to eat. So that’s what we send.

So we kind of sell, you know, call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it stress free for a company to build amazing relationships. You know, because for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways in how I can give to them, and I found no better way over the past decade to profile someone on my podcast, you know, share with the world what they’re working on and to send them sweet treats in the mail so you can check us out at Rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I am excited to introduce Alex Natskovich. He’s the Founder and CEO of MEV, MEV.com, a global software development services company. Since 2006. So he was doing it before it was cool to do AI and programming and everything like that. He’s partnered with enterprises in healthcare, life sciences, consumer tech, fashion all over the map. They’ve worked with companies such as Novartis, LG, Cartier, and so many more. Alex, thanks for joining me.

Alex Natskovich: 04:13

Good to be with you, Jeremy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:14

I want to start with, I want to get to your background and how you got to the United States, because I know you have an interesting background, and I was looking at, you know, your education and metaphysics and, and thing, you know, analysis of calculational command theory, you know, things that, you know, I have an issue pronouncing sometimes. But let’s start off with just tell people about MEV and what you do.

Alex Natskovich: 04:41

Yeah. So we’re a software development partner. Essentially we build software for our clients and various different engagement models. We help clients build software products, we help solve problems with software. And our mission is really to help customers win with the right technology. So that’s what we aim to do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:57

How did you get into this?

Alex Natskovich: 05:00

Well, it’s a long and winding road. I’ve been in software since I was a kid, basically. I really like computers. I, you know, it was a very natural fit for me to go into software engineering. I landed my first engineering job in New York quite a bit ago. And, you know, I kind of, like, got frustrated with the way software has been built back in.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:19

When did you move here to the States?

Alex Natskovich: 05:21

That was 2004, actually.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:23

What was it like? Tell people where you grew up and what was it like there?

Alex Natskovich: 05:27

Well, I mean, I grew up, I was born in Soviet Belarus. I sort of grew up through the 80s and 90s over there. And it was rough. It was not an easy time. You know, the Soviet Union, I don’t remember it a whole lot much, but I have some glimpses of how it was.

And then the crazy 90s in that part of the world was pretty intense. You know, you had to survive and just, you know, you learn how to get by with very little.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:56

Can you like when you say tough and survival with very little. Like just what’s an example of that? You know, because people listening, I mean, let’s say they grew up in the States and you go to a full grocery store and, you know, know rough and tough is always relative, right? So what did that look like for you?

Alex Natskovich: 06:16

Well, in the Soviet times there wasn’t really like basically through both 80s and 90s, we had to like grow our own food most of the time. There was, you know, grocery stores, you can go there and buy like bread, maybe some basic things like salt. And sometimes there were more products for sure, and it kind of like fluctuated, but it wasn’t very easy to so like getting food was a concern. You know, you had to like invest some time and effort into that part.

Then when the Soviet Union fell, it was just like a very challenging time because, you know, your money would be devalued like every other week. So, like, how do you and you get the salary? I mean, I wasn’t working at the time. My parents were. But people just had to almost survive in even in the worst way because they couldn’t really rely on, you know, the rubles being worth the same thing. They had to like, you know, again, grow their own food and try to get dollars as quick as you possibly can before you know it get fully devalued.

So all of these things were things you just had to deal with. And then on top of that, there was like a lot of crying, a lot of corruption at that time. So it was a very unusual time for people to, like, operate because it was kind of rising capitalism, which, you know, I’m a strong believer in capitalism, but in the 90s, in that part of the world, it was very different what we perceive here in the US. You know, these days.

So that was the challenge. You know, you never know like where your next. Well, not necessarily where your next meal is going to come from. But like you’ll have to take care of it very, very specifically. Right.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:46

You can’t take it for granted.

Alex Natskovich: 07:48

You can’t take it for granted for sure. So we had to grow our own food. You know, we had like Goa and I had I was I was a kid, but I was a, you know, herding cows, for example, like during the summertime. So it’s a very interesting time for me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:03

And now you’re in San Francisco. It’s a lot different from herding cows.

Alex Natskovich: 08:06

It’s a very big jump. Yeah. But I think what it gave me though, like it gave you this experience to sort of survive in very different. And it’s not like a fake survival type thing. You go to a camp and you try to like make a fire or something, right?

It’s like a pretty hardcore deal. You have to just, you know, get by on very little things and figure things out. And, you know, when you couldn’t go to like a store and buy a specific tool, you have to figure out how to, you know, do certain things with the tools you have, right, and build stuff and, you know, maintain buildings and things of that nature.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:37

It’s probably great from like an entrepreneurship perspective, you know, just like adapting and doing what you can with what you got. And how old were you when you moved to the States?

Alex Natskovich: 08:49

Well, let’s see, 22, I think.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:52

Yeah. And so at what point do you decide, because you were working as a senior software engineer for some companies. At what point do you decide I’m going to do my own thing?

Alex Natskovich: 09:05

It kind of happened a little bit accidentally. You know, I was working at a pretty cool startup back at that point in time. And, you know, I started I was young. You know, I was kind of had lots of free time. And I just came across some guy on a social.

Well, it wasn’t social. It was forums back in the day. Right? So it was like some PHP forum. He needed some help for something and I was like, hey, I can totally do that.

So I reached out to him, helped him out, he paid me and I was like, oh, you can get paid like as a consultant. Essentially. I had no idea what any of that freelancing like. I was like, oh, like that, you can make money this way. That’s interesting.

And so he kept like coming back to me asking to do things. And I, you know, I kept doing stuff a little bit on my own. Then he introduced me to his friend who ran a big agency like that guy totally started to like loading me up with work. I had to go out and hire a couple of people also in like a part time basis. And so slowly but surely it sort of grew through like introductions and referrals and, you know, at some point it just made sense for me to sort of move on and start doing that full time.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:07

And that’s and you become, I mean, almost a hiring machine at this point. I mean, you have to bring business in. And then what do you look for? How do you hire a good developer?

Alex Natskovich: 10:22

Oh, man. If I knew the answer to that question, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. I probably would just, you know, write a book or run some talk shows or something. It’s a hard question. Like it’s, I think it boils down to, first of all, hiring good people, which is also a difficult question to answer.

So for us, and it took me a long time to realize, but I think corporate values are super important. And for the longest time I really had this like negative attitude to even the whole concept of corporate values, because I thought it was just some sort of like a consultant mumbo jumbo and bullshit, and people just use it as an excuse to, like, not really do the hard things. But slowly but surely I came, came over to the other side. And I believe that it’s actually very important to have a definitive set of values that you, you know, as a founder or executive team, define yourself and also hire to those values, right? And so that is the first and most important question.

I think we look even less on like technical talents, although that’s important. But just having core values represented in individuals, that is I think the fundamental to really hiring good people and building productive teams. And then, you know, beyond that, really just having deep conversations about how things work and engineering and asking people to do simple tasks, you can actually see how they work, right? And then in reality, though, all that stuff works to a degree, but you can only tell after you hire somebody. So we tried to organize a little bit of like a trial period to understand, like how this individual work, to really see them in action and be very, very transparent and very direct in terms of what feedback we provide to people during that time.

That’s part of our core values, just being really adult and direct in terms of communications, both with our clients and with our employees. And being very honest about, you know, everything. So that I feel that a lot of people find it very refreshing, the level of transparency and level of directness and honesty, because oftentimes people work at companies and like the feedback is very sort of like high flying. It’s kind of like veils the issue. We try not to do it.

We go straight for the problem and try to help people grow as well through that process. So, you know, that’s how I think about it. Probably not the best process in the world as many alternatives, but we try to kind of keep it that way.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:43

And you have talent all over the world.

Alex Natskovich: 12:46

Yeah, yeah. Well, we have people here in the US and in Europe predominantly. Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:53

And, you know, one of the biggest things I’m curious about is how the niche evolved. Right. You start with that one client. Talk about the evolution of the types of industries that you serve.

Alex Natskovich: 13:06

I would say the first ten years, it was very accidental in many ways. So we kind of like stumbled our way into healthcare and pharmaceutical space. And that proven to be very deep and very interesting space for me as like an engineer, there’s a lot of data, there’s a lot of untapped potential. There’s a lot of business issues that people could solve with technology. And that’s what I think made me passionate early on, because I love business.

Like I love everything about like, business capitalism and how it really creates goodwill in the world. And so I really come initially from the perspective of understanding the clients, like what the challenge is. And technology really is in service of that. So pharma and healthcare had no shortage of issues and challenges and problems to solve. So it got very interesting for me personally and for us as a company.

And so we acquired mostly in that space for quite a long time. Then when I moved here to California, San Francisco Bay area, that kind of we had startups as a client before that point in time. But I think that really helped us accelerate our presence in that ecosystem and really open like a whole new area for us in terms of the business and focus in different niches. So we really started to figure out how we can reorient a little bit from servicing larger companies to servicing startups. It’s a different dynamic.

And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last ten years.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:29

I’m curious, Alex, how people work with you and how that’s evolved. I mean, as I was looking at, because I know people come to you and they’ll be asking different questions like, okay, are you going to be our dedicated team or are you going to just supply one person? How does it work? Maybe. Where did it start?

And now? How does it work to work with you?

Alex Natskovich: 14:50

Yeah. Well, you know, we started kind of since most of our clients were mostly large organizations. We started in agencies at the beginning as well. We started just working on pure kind of like fixed scope, fixed budget model, which was very inefficient. And we evolved that model a little bit. So we still do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:11

So they would say we want this project. You’re like, okay, we’ll scope it out. It’s going to be $200,000 to do this.

Alex Natskovich: 15:17

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so then it just goes and kind of like phases and it’s very comfortable to them to work in this way because then that’s how their budgeting works. You know.

And it frankly works quite well for the types of problems they’re trying to solve because they’re not really building like new products. Right? They’re not solving business problems with some piece of software or some piece of technology. So it works decently well. And then when we start working with more of a product companies, right?

Companies that build software and then sell it to their clients. This is where we had to introduce other models, where now we become their dedicated team or the integrated team. And the difference between these things is subtle, but the outcomes are quite dramatic, right? So when we look at like augmented staff model, it’s literally you already have your team. They already, you know, you just need extra firepower.

So you come to us, we figure out who that is. And we, you know, staff those people. Frankly speaking, this is probably the smallest service that we have in a company. Most of our clients go more into like integrated and dedicated team buckets, so if you will. And so with integrated team is where we really have a team or maybe some individuals that need not quite a team yet.

Maybe it’s an early stage company. And we try to figure out how we really create a team that integrates into yours. So we become kind of like a whole team from your individuals and our individuals. Maybe you use our process, maybe we use your process. It’s a little bit of that. It’ll take some time to figure out and set up what’s efficient.

And then dedicated team is where we are. Your team. Right? We are your software product team. We build your product and we understand it very deeply so we can be pretty autonomous. You don’t have to, you know, have daily calls with us. You understand we got your back. We understand your business well enough. You kind of delegate certain decision making process to us. And that level of collaboration takes quite a while to actually develop. But once it is developed, it’s a beautiful thing, you know, it works very well. A lot of people don’t believe it, that it actually can operate in this way with a vendor. Right.

But it could, and we’ve proven it over many, many years and a number of clients who work with us in this model.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:24

I’m curious on the pricing. How do you decide on pricing? I know agencies, okay. We just have a you know, we’ll scope out the project. That’s the fee, we do an hourly. How did you come to your pricing model?

Alex Natskovich: 17:41

So initially it evolved over years. And now I have like a fairly you know, I’m an engineer. You can probably tell I built like a pretty sophisticated Excel spreadsheet that factors in a bunch of things, like, you know, our costs and different benefits and, you know, utilization rates and all sorts and all types of things. So depending on the service, it could be, you know, a fixed budget. And we just kind of work towards that budget.

Right. That’s the model we try to use for all of our solutions. And if it’s a team, we figure out the monthly run rate, which will depend on, you know, type of people, number of people, the level of allocation. And that’s what we charge. Right.

So it’s kind of like if you’re a startup it aligns with your burn rate. And you know what exactly that is like. And we dedicate a particular team to build a product. And if it’s an enterprise customer and they want a budget, you know, a certain amount of dollars for an initiative. We try to figure out, like what that would cost Based on, you know, a mix of people, the hourly rates and things of that nature.

So we try to be pretty flexible and cognizant of how clients operate and, you know, adjust based to that.

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