From Pixel Art to a Million Registered Users
Anton Tyshchenko has been building digital products for almost 20 years, and it started with pixel art. A Sega Mega Drive console in the late 90s was his first real encounter with the games industry. He taught himself to code and build websites, spending years making sites and themes for clients, work that set the quality bar for everything he has launched since.
In 2016, he and a partner launched CraftPix.net, a game asset marketplace for indie and mobile developers, on a starting budget of $ 2,000, with no office and no investors. The bet was on free content matching the quality of the paid assets, and on SEO instead of advertising. His partner planned the content and managed the artists, while Anton handled the technical side, SEO, and promotion. CraftPix now has almost a million registered users worldwide, reached profitability in its second year, and has been growing on its own revenue ever since, without a dollar of outside funding.
Oleg Domrachev and Anton Tyshchenko, co-founders of CraftPix.net
Launching gdoc.io From CraftPix's Growing Pains
Running the paperwork and operations side of CraftPix taught Anton how much of an entrepreneur's time documents consume. At the same time, the traffic on CraftPix's content sites showed him that millions of people search every day not for design, but for working documents: invoices, resumes, contracts. In 2021, with a small team, he launched gdoc.io, a browser-based service for working with documents and automating document workflows. In 2025, more than 3 million people had used it.
gdoc.io is also built around a principle. Anton describes most services in the space as running on a "ransom model": they let a user fill out a document, then ask for payment before releasing it. gdoc.io was built to do the opposite. It is an automation tool, not a hostage vault: user data is never locked, documents stay under the user's control throughout, and the service only charges as a business scales its usage. Anton judges the products he builds by the same standard he uses when choosing services for his own companies, and trust sits at the centre of that standard.
gdoc.io is an automation tool, not a hostage vault: user data is never locked, documents always remain under the user's control, and we only charge for scale, as the user's business grows. It matters to me to build a service people can trust, judged by the same criteria I use when choosing services for my own companies.
Built Office-Free, By Design
The team has been fully remote from day one. Anton has lived as a digital nomad for years, based in Thailand, while the roughly 20-person team is spread from Europe to Asia-Pacific and Latin America. The corporate structure was built to match: in 2023 he founded Tyschenko Company Limited in Hong Kong as the management company, and in 2026, once it was clear gdoc.io deserved a life of its own, he spun it off into a separate Singapore company, GDOC PTE. LTD., to develop the service as an independent unit for the global market.
CraftPix is a mature, stable business today, while gdoc.io is in an active scaling phase. Neither has taken outside investment, and Anton has no plans to raise; both grow organically, with a focus on efficiency.
How Anton Found Osome
Anton has followed the fintech industry for years, and it was through an interview that he first came across Osome. The piece covered the team behind Rocketbank, a neobank Anton considered one of the most progressive of its era, one that had set the bar for customer experience in mobile banking. It also mentioned that the same team had gone on to build a corporate services company in Singapore. Recognising the people behind the product, Anton was confident they would bring the same technology-driven approach to accounting and corporate services that they had once brought to banking.
The collaboration began in 2023, with the creation of Tyschenko Company Limited in Hong Kong. Osome has been the company's only accountant since its founding. Incorporation and secretarial work for that first company had been handled by a different provider, but working alongside Osome on the accounting made the difference in service level clear. So when the time came in 2026 to spin gdoc.io off into a separate Singapore company, Anton took the full package from Osome, including corporate secretary services.
Choosing Osome for the Full Package
The onboarding experience was seamless and, in Anton's words, surprisingly convenient. He was impressed by the dashboard and by how quickly the tools let him connect a company to the service. Building SaaS products himself, he looks at other services with a professional eye, and what stood out most was the chat with the Osome team: the right specialist joins in to solve a specific task, with no emails sent into the void and no waiting to be redirected.
I build SaaS products myself and look at other services with a professional eye: you can tell this product was built by product people. I would especially highlight the chat with the team and how easily the right specialist joins in to solve a specific task, no writing emails into the void or waiting to be redirected.
When Osome Took On 1,800 Invoices in One Sweep
The clearest example of what Osome has taken off Anton's plate comes from CraftPix. Stripe was never the business's main payment processor. Anton enabled it as an additional payment option, and once he saw the volume of reporting work it would generate, he switched it off. By then, it had accumulated around 1,800 transactions, each needing an invoice attached for the books. Anton automated the export of invoices from the marketplace, and the Osome team took on the entire task of matching them against the Stripe statements, closing it out completely. Done manually, he estimates it would have taken weeks of monotonous work.
What Osome Has Given Back
Thanks to Osome, Anton now spends at most three hours a month on accounting, with everything else handled without him. He struggles to even estimate how much time he would spend without that support, since he has never run a company without it, which he considers the best recommendation there is. He values a founder's hour spent reconciling transactions as the most expensive hour of all, because it is time stolen directly from the product. Every hour Osome takes off his plate goes back into growing gdoc.io and CraftPix.
Advice on Documentation and Payments
Anton's advice to new founders starts with documentation. Collect all primary paperwork from day one: invoices, contracts, bank statements. Reconstructing records after the fact is always more expensive and more painful than filing them properly from the start.
His second piece of advice is about payment infrastructure. Before setting up Stripe, look carefully at the transaction volume it will generate and the paperwork that comes with it. Even with a partner like Osome, thousands of transactions are a serious challenge, and he suggests founders consider Merchant of Record models such as Paddle, where the service legally acts as the seller, aggregates customer payments, handles sales taxes and invoicing, and sends a single monthly payout instead.
Advice on Structure and Overheads
Founders incorporating in Hong Kong should register on eTAX, the Inland Revenue Department's online portal, right away, so they can track company notifications from the start.
Cut unnecessary overheads ruthlessly. Anton does not think an office is necessary in 2026, and believes a significant share of full-time roles can be covered by contractors and AI agents instead.
It has never been easier to build an international business with a small team. The entire infrastructure, from corporate services like Osome to payment platforms and AI, exists so that founders can focus on the product, not the paperwork. We built two products with millions of users without a single office and without investors. If we could do it, so can you.
