How NOT to Start a Business in Serbia: Bad Advice

Over the past few years, Serbia has become one of the key hubs for business relocation and new ventures. But along with the wave of entrepreneurs came a wave of near-identical mistakes.

Marya Artamonova and Anna Matyukhina are the founders of Make Sense Lab, a strategic marketing agency. They help small and medium businesses build marketing end to end — from 'should we even launch this?' all the way to full ownership of a steady stream of clients.

In an interview for Kommersant in Serbia, the two experts shared — in the form of deliberately bad advice — why familiar tools like complex sales funnels and ads with millionaire-follower influencers backfire here, which 'best practices' are worth ignoring at the start, and how to build a system that runs without the owner's constant involvement.

Top 5 pieces of bad advice for building a business in Serbia

Tip 1. Believe with your whole heart that you brought a brilliant piece of know-how

Marya: The key ingredient is total confidence that you've invented something unique. Nothing like it exists here yet, so people will surely line up. In practice, a product or service might not exist not because nobody thought of it before, but because nobody needs it. The Serbian market is fairly conservative. People tend to choose the familiar option over the new one just because it's more advanced. If your product requires changing buyer behavior, you first have to explain to people that they even have a problem, then teach them a new way to solve it, and only after that sell your service. That's slow and expensive.

Anna: Don't assume you're smarter than every local entrepreneur and every Russian-speaking person who arrived before you. The idea of baking Russian pancakes or building 'the Serbian Avito' has almost certainly occurred to someone already. What matters is finding out the real market size: who your audience is, how many of them are in the right area, and whether their need is already met by a dozen similar projects.

Marya: Right. It's not always a free niche. Sometimes it's just an empty spot — with no demand. Before investing, you need to validate not just the idea, but people's willingness to buy the product here, now, and at your price.

Tip 2. Obsess over a perfectly polished visual identity

Marya: Assume your signage, website, and Instagram are 90% of success. People are used to the visual language that already surrounds them. An entrepreneur thinks: 'The design around here is bad, I'll make mine good, and everyone will come to me.' But an overly polished look can lower trust instead of raising it.

Anna: This isn't unique to Serbia. Expensive design often tells the client not 'this is quality' but 'this is expensive.' Someone sees a dental clinic's website that looks like a spaceship and assumes they'll be charged a fortune. So they pick something in between — not sloppy enough to doubt the competence, but not lavish enough to fear the price. Visuals have to match the segment. If you're selling a premium product, an expensive presentation makes sense. If you're aiming for a mass audience, it can push people away. Design doesn't exist separately from price, product, and client expectations.

Tip 3. Skip the math before you open

Marya: A huge number of business owners in Serbia are people who urgently needed to register a sole proprietorship or a DOO (LLC) to get a residence permit. The decision logic is often: 'I'll open something, anything, as long as it's running.' The result is a completely unplanned venture, both financially and in terms of labor. A classic example is a single coffee shop or a small standalone retail spot. Opening it eats up a pile of resources: equipment, an espresso machine, tables, chairs, renovation, rent, deposits. And at the end, that one location brings a modest monthly net profit. That model only turns into real income once you have a chain of 10 locations, each bringing in, say, €500. That's your €5,000 in net profit. But no one just starting out has the resources to build 10 locations at once!

Anna: The main trap that kills newcomers is payroll and payroll taxes. If you hire someone at a modest salary of 70,000 dinars, you'll have to pay roughly another 45,000 dinars on top in taxes and contributions. If you didn't account for that upfront, you're in for a catastrophic surprise by month two — right when it's too late to change the rules of the game.

Tip 4. Work only online — never leave the house, never look around, and never read the flyers stapled to fences

Anna: A huge mistake relocated founders make is underestimating how low digitalization is in Serbia and how strong the habit of 'analog' behavior still is. In megacities like Moscow, people got used to marketplaces, express delivery services, and the pattern of 'hop on the metro and go across town for the thing you need.' Serbia works differently: most people are deeply reluctant to trek across town for anything. They look for goods and services strictly within their own neighborhood. If you want to burn out fast — stay home, only run ads online, never step outside, never look around, and ignore the signs on fences and banners.

Tip 5. Ignore Viber and stay locked inside the Russian-speaking bubble

Anna: The most harmful advice of all: ignore Viber (the country's main messaging app) and limit yourself exclusively to the Russian-speaking community.

Marya: Targeting only a Russian-speaking audience means working with a critically limited slice of the market. Expats are a transient audience — they move between neighborhoods, change apartments, leave for other countries. Serbs, on the other hand, live here permanently. Mathematically, there are simply more of them! Statistically, the odds that a Serb will walk through your door are just higher. Every large, successful project built by relocated founders that shows steady growth has put serious effort into integrating with the Serbian environment and serving local clients. They have deep ties to the local audience and local business. If you only post in Russian, the algorithms learn to attract a narrow segment of people whose financial priorities right now might be completely different — paperwork, housing — not buying your product. Run your social media in English at the very least, and ideally in Serbian.

How do you assess the local market so you're guaranteed to close within six months?

Anna: First, don't calculate anything at all. Especially not payroll or ROI. Second, lease the most expensive local space you can find for five years and pour tens of thousands of euros into renovating it. Then find out, purely by accident, that the building legally belongs to some guy from Sarajevo, and you can't even get gas or decent internet hooked up for a reasonable price. Third, forgive the landlord every single screwup. If the location is a problem and the landlord keeps pushing you around — give them a second, third, and fifth chance. Whatever you do, don't pack up and leave — stick it out to your very last dinar!

Marya: Ignore the B2B segment entirely. Only chase retail (B2C) and completely ignore corporate orders or small wholesale — which, in Serbia, are exactly what gives you financial stability. Don't differentiate yourself at all. Open the 51st bakery or coffee spot in town, completely ignore the concept of a unique selling proposition, and believe with total faith: 'I've opened — and that alone is enough for everyone to love me.' Believe you're superhuman. Don't hire anyone, don't delegate anything to anybody, and assume nobody understands your business and marketing better than you do.

What advice from a Russian business influencer should you do the exact opposite of, to survive here?

Marya: 'Build complex 15-step sales funnels and run automated webinars.' In Russia, given the sheer size of the market, that works. In Serbia, if you drag someone into a Telegram bot with ten warm-up messages before the pitch, they'll simply have no idea what's happening and leave. The buying decision here is made far more simply and directly. 'Hook people with discounts, promo codes, and cashback.' In Russia, a promo code feels like a happy little windfall. In Serbia, an elaborate bonus scheme raises suspicion: 'Why exactly are they giving me a discount? What's the catch?' A Serb would rather walk to the nearest shop, buy a TV, and personally carry it home than go through a promo-code-and-delivery quest.

Anna: 'Flood every channel with ads and buy up integrations from million-follower influencers.' In Russia, that's great for reach. In Serbia, 80% of a big Russian-speaking influencer's audience sits in Russia — you'd just burn your budget on people who will never physically show up. What works here isn't faceless funnels, but social ties, word of mouth, and personal recommendations. Asking a brother, a close friend, a neighbor, or a regular at a café will always beat clicking a banner ad in Serbia.

If you had to write a parody of '3 Commandments of a Successful Startup' specifically for people who want to fail in Serbia, where would you start?

Marya: Commandment 1. Borrow the money to start your business. Preferably a harsh microloan at extortionate interest. Commandment 2. Believe in your idea with unshakable, blind faith. Don't validate it with anyone, and whatever you do, don't check demand. Commandment 3. Spend every borrowed euro on a €5,000 website right away, and dump whatever's left straight into paid ads.

Anna: The main thing — launch the 15th classifieds site or marketplace in a row. Scrape listings from every Telegram flea-market group with zero demand research, spend a year and a half polishing the build with not a single euro of budget for marketing or actually acquiring real buyers. A success story is guaranteed!

And finally, without any irony: a funny piece of advice you'd never give a client in a serious strategy session, but that actually works great in practice

Anna: Sell your product to your own mom. There's a great concept here: explain what your business does to your mom so clearly that she genuinely understands what you do and why people pay for it. If your mom, after your pitch, doesn't ask 'Sweetie, when are you finally going to find a normal office job?' — and actually grasps the value of the product — your concept is viable for a broad audience too.

Marya: Exactly. If your business makes sense to your mom and to 'your mom's friend's son' — you've already outpaced half the startup founders in Serbia!