FutSafe — our goal is your safety.

Once my brother and I knew what we wanted, we started building the site ourselves, by hand. School had just ended for the summer, and we sat in my brother’s room until sunrise, reading stacks of articles and studying other sites. A month later we had the first version.

At the same time, my brother was very good at trading the game currency and understood how it worked, because by then he was in several “trader” chats, where people gave advice on the player market: whom to buy and whom to sell to come out ahead. He suggested to the 30-year-old admin of one of those channels that they start their own news page on VK, the Russian-speaking internet’s Facebook, and a closed paid community where traders would share tricks for earning the game currency.

The first clients came through the VK page and the closed communities. They trusted us completely, because we were in constant contact with them and handed over the money or the coins before the client paid.

I ran the first deals entirely on my own: my brother was handling VK and the community, and there were no employees yet. When the page and the communities grew, my brother and I put all our savings into promoting the site and hiring our first employee.

I came up with a set of rules to follow so that EA would not ban the accounts the deals went through. People were afraid less of being cheated by the seller than of the seller doing a sloppy job and getting their account banned.

When the first clients came in, I realized I definitely couldn’t manage on my own, so we started hiring a team. At first we decided to hire one employee. My brother and I ran the interviews through questionnaires on VK and Telegram, so that nobody would find out we were 12 to 15 years old.

I trained the first employee on the whole system myself; as the team grew, they trained each other. We worked for a Russian-speaking audience, and many of the players lived in time zones 4, 6 or 9 hours away from ours. To keep clients from leaving, we had to be online 24 hours a day. So a few weeks after hiring the first employee we hired two more. In the first season the team came to 5 people, counting the two of us: 3 operators and 2 content managers.

After one season there were still times when we were slow to reply, between 5 and 7 a.m. Moscow time. So we decided to hire 4 more operators to spread the load evenly and leave no client waiting: 98% of coin-selling sites lost clients because they took too long to reply. By the end of the second season we had grown the team to 10 people (7 operators and 3 content managers). We also decided to rebuild the site. This time it was built by one of our employees, who was also in charge of promoting our VK pages.