In the very early days Ultimate Guitar was called Zappp’s Guitar Archive and published exclusively in Russian, but by 1999 the portal was bilingual and was growing into a serious international business. What we care about is the product we make,” Naidenov says. “We don’t care about all these crises and the rate of the US dollar. Ultimate Guitar’s turnover is now “several million dollars per year” and the company claims not to be too concerned about Russia’s struggling economy. With the borders of Lithuania and Poland just 50km away, Kaliningrad’s low property prices have attracted computer programmers from across Russia and the rest of the post-Soviet region. In 2015 investments in IT dropped by 45% and tech only accounts for 2% of Russia’s total exports.īehind the scenes at one of Russia’s tech success stories Photograph: Maksim Yurgensonīut the Baltic city of Kaliningrad, home of Ultimate Guitar, has slightly more on offer to attract the sector. “I posted a dozen or so tablatures of Guns N’ Roses, and the next morning I saw that the site had already had 30 visitors, so I plunged myself into developing it further.”While Russia is one of the rare countries where the local search engine, Yandex, is more popular than Google, and the local social network, Vkontakte, is more popular than Facebook, the tech sector based in Moscow is facing turbulent times.
It was the late 90s, everyone was doing it,” remembers Naidenov. “I was just finishing school here in Kaliningrad in 1998 and during summer vacation I decided to make a ‘hamster’ page. It ranks in the top 500 most popular websites in the US and Dave Mustaine, founder of one of the thrash metal group Megadeth recently credited the site with helping him to learn classical Vivaldi compositions. Created by Naidenov when he was just a schoolboy on his summer holidays, Ultimate Guitar now has 11 million registered users.
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