Zhenya Luchinin
Product leader. Generative AI. Founder. Fifteen years of shipping products, the last four of them building them myself.
Background
I started as a web designer in 2003 and spent the following years inside tech companies — LiveJournal, Habr, Yandex, Look At Media, Bookmate — as a designer and art director.
In 2010 I started a design studio. It grew to forty people and focused on digital product design: top-6 digital design studio in Russia, top-1 for UX and research. Alongside it I launched several startups, including three proptech products that put me in the top-20 proptech founders in Russia.
Since 2023 I live in Barcelona with my family and three kids. That is where I stopped being only a designer and started being a builder: four iOS apps in ten months, a frontier-model benchmark and an agent prototype — design and code, solo.
Projects
aya photo
One reference photo becomes a full photoshoot of you. Idea to App Store in one month, designed and built solo in React Native and Expo. ~2M views from a single UGC creator, ~10,000 downloads, install-to-paid conversion up 2–3× through paywall and pricing experiments.
aigma
An AI design tool: describe or drop a reference image, get a real website back, on an infinite canvas. Built on a benchmark of every frontier model rebuilding an image as working HTML, and a prompt system aimed squarely at the AI-slop problem.
dear journal
A minimal, beautiful journaling app with Ezra, an AI companion for reflection, insights and guided entries. I have journaled daily for years, and most apps felt noisy or ugly — so I designed the journal I wanted and built it myself.