How Armenian teenagers built a platform for developing soft skills and acing interviews

Narek Sargsyan, city — Martuni, entrepreneur, Co-Founder & CEO, Instagram

How it all began

I was born in Armenia in 2007. From age 10, I was into programming — first building simple websites, then developing games. I was always drawn to creating things of my own, though I was not thinking about business yet.

At 15, my friend and I took our first steps in entrepreneurship — we started selling guitar lessons. Erik played really well, so we figured he could teach others. We had one customer, but the project closed quickly. Those were our first hands-on steps.

At 16, in 2024, I was still programming and gaming. In one game, I met our future project manager Kristina Margaryan, who told me about LinkedIn. I signed up and started applying for jobs, but could not land anything — either I was not accepted or I failed the interviews. That is when I realized it was a widespread problem: many people face rejections, and HR teams rarely provide feedback.

On July 19, 2024, I decided to build a platform to help people find jobs. In four days I developed the concept, and in eight hours — the first prototype. That is how Grind Soft was born.

Launching the Startup

My co-founder Erik Tonoyan and I knew almost nothing about business at the start. I understood the service needed to be monetized, but that meant registering as a sole proprietor and dealing with legal matters. In the first week I was writing to banks, pitching partnerships — and they replied «sure, let’s do it.» I did not realize it meant nothing, but just getting a response from a bank was inspiring.

Our team has seven people. The youngest are me and my co-founder — we are both 17. I am in 12th grade, and he is in his third year of college.

Target audience

We help people enter professional fields and develop their soft skills. The problem many face is not a lack of technical skills — it is an inability to demonstrate their value in the job market. People lose jobs or get rejected at interviews simply because they can not talk about themselves, explain what they bring to a company, or make the case for why they should be hired.

Our goal is to help people improve communication, negotiation, and teamwork skills. We provide tools for confidently presenting yourself, effectively collaborating with colleagues, and building productive communication.

There are products out there that prepare people for technical interviews, but only a small portion of solutions focus on soft skills — and those that do tend to be too generic, offering vague feedback like “A2 level” or “T3” with no clarity on what the assessment is based on.

What sets us apart is detailed, personalized feedback. We analyze not just the content of answers, but also voice, confidence, and speaking pace — then provide a full communication analysis.

Our main audience right now is individual users. Once we reach 4000 users, we plan to move into B2B, so companies can hire candidates with real skills rather than just mass-applying résumé senders.

Challenges

When we started, we knew almost nothing about startups, incubators, or accelerators. Everything was built from scratch.

Advice for aspiring founders: live your project, do not just treat it like a job. Even as a student, I am mentally focused on growing the startup and hitting milestones all the time.

The main thing is to start with the product and talk to people. Write your idea down on paper, tell others about it, and try to “sell” the concept. If you can not get people interested from the very beginning, it only gets harder from there.

We went through this ourselves: for the first few months we gave nobody access, calling it a beta. If we had started sharing it right away, things could have moved much faster. Now we actively engage users.

Achievements

Getting into the DigiTec exhibition was our first real success. It was the first time we presented the product to real people — three days, around 700 visitors per day. We told them about the project, and people were genuinely interested — they wanted to try the service, practice interviews, and develop their skills.

But that is also where our first major failure happened: we did not give users access. We thought the product had to be perfect, so we just handed out business cards hoping people would come back later — they did not. For several months we tried to raise investment without fully understanding how to do it. Those five months became a validation period: collecting feedback, adding features, developing the product. We pitched at various events but got no investment — there was no traction, no users. We faced rejection after rejection, but did not give up.

In May we had our first official offline pitching session. Investors advised us to build an audience first: without users, all pitches are pointless.

In September we launched the Arminterview service. We started actively posting on LinkedIn, inviting people to try the service and build their skills. We now have over 250 users, and one customer has already purchased the premium version. During this time we participated in international events: C Startup Summit, DigiTec, and FinnoWay Armenia.

Plans

We now have a clear fundraising plan and continue developing the product to help people improve their skills and succeed in interviews. Our main priority right now is growing the user base as fast as possible. By the end of year we aim to reach 500 users, and by summer 2026 — 4000 users and 50 companies on the platform.

We are not in any accelerators yet and are fully focused on product development. After establishing ourselves in the Armenian market, we plan to attract international companies and expand into Europe — specifically Belgium. The US is a long-term goal, around five to seven years from now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​