A coffee with Viktoriia

Welcome to the journal! To begin, who is Viktoria? 

I’m Viktoriia, 27 years old, co-founder of 17V28.app, based in London. Film photography enthusiast, coffee drinker, and someone who's always looking for the next craft workshop or DIY project to try. I love travelling and finding creative inspo everywhere I go 🤍 And of course, I LOVE supporting women-owned businesses!!

Can you please tell us more about 17V28? 

17V28.app is the best app for creative carousels & digital scrapbooks. You can find 200+ amazing templates in the app to make a stylish post in minutes or just create your own from scratch with all the beautiful tools we have inside. I create our stickers by hand, print & scan papers and pieces that surround me, or things I find when I travel. We create templates with cool creative creators from our community or add templates from our users too, so our community is very important to us!! Go check it out and enjoy the app <3

Where did you find the idea for 17V28? How do you see it developing in the future?

My love for film photography and creative Instagram posts led me to create this app with my husband because I couldn't find anything on the market that matched all my creative needs. The app just turned 3 years old and we're still a small team of three, listening to every user suggestion we get (despite having more than 1.5 million downloads). This year we want to be more in the offline world – host events & workshops, create something physical, so we can meet and talk with our community even more and build a stronger connection with them. When it comes to developing, we try to release new features every week, so we have a huge to-do list and our users always give us more and more ideas as well :) So further more!!

What do you think makes a great Instagram carousel? 

17V28.app :) haha. A great hook & strong visual is always a good match, but I also think that the concept of the post matters – whether it's a "day in my life" or "favs of the month," when you have a specific theme and more context for the audience, it performs better than just a cute photo dump.

What’s one lesson entrepreneurship has taught you so far? 

There are many of them and I learn something every single day, but the best thing is to listen to your audience. We create polls with questions and ask our users which stickers they like more and want us to add, what features they really need, and so on. Sometimes we feel like we have a priority for one feature from our to-do list but our users want another one that in our opinion had less priority. So it's a key – our users are happy that we listen and we're happy that they enjoy the app!! Win-win.

Where would we find you when you’re not working? 

Probably on a long walk with my husband or friends in central London, or at the gym – likely on the reformer haha.

Please tell us what the perfect weekend in London looks like! 

Sun is shining, around 23 degrees, my husband and I decide not to cook breakfast and go to The Hoxton hotel for their brunch. Then we have a long walk to Marylebone and enjoy the weather in our fav park, Paddington Street Gardens, with the 3rd coffee of the day. Strolling around central London and going to see friends for dinner at a pub or a great restaurant. And of course, shooting some film :)

We’ll wrap this up the Lepelclub way: how do you take your coffee?

Cappuccino with regular milk :)