Maksym Stepanenkofounder brief

Unistaff: AI sales employees that a small business hires, examines and manages

Unistaff is an AI sales employee for small service businesses: HVAC, moving, real estate, salons, restaurants, consulting. It answers website chats in English, French, Ukrainian and Russian, says it is an AI in the first message, quotes prices only from the company's own knowledge folder and hands the client to a person on request.

Before it takes a client, it sits an exam built from the hardest conversations of its trade. Every question runs three times, and one failed mandatory question fails the whole exam. From 9 to 11 October 2026 there were 17 sittings, 10 graduates and 495 graded answers, all published in the exam log.

Where it stands today: a live product and a public demo without login. Outside users and revenue: none yet. Next come widgets on my own business sites, then free one-month pilots with agency clients in Ottawa.

• unistaff.ai
• Demo, no login
• Exam log

Company

Developed inside INNOVA CONSULT LTD., federal Canadian corporation, CBCA 1522612-1, Ottawa

Equity

Founder 100%. No outside investment taken so far.

Built with

Python, FastAPI, SQLite, a website chat widget; OpenAI GPT models with an open-weight fallback. Written with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, which I direct, test and review.

Separate product since

25 June 2026; the sales-employee version since 8 October 2026

MMIX, my marketing agency

Owner and director of Marketing MIX LLC since 2013: websites, ads and SEO for small businesses in Ukraine and, from Ottawa, in Canada. That is where I see what happens to leads after they arrive, and it is the problem Unistaff works on.

• mmix.biz
• Project page

Licensed insolvency practitioner, Ukraine

Licence No. 157, issued by the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine on 5 March 2013. The Commercial Court of Kyiv appointed me liquidator of PJSC Invicta-Mayak on 24 June 2015 and approved my report and liquidation balance sheet on 19 October 2017. A Ministry of Justice audit (certificate No. 7 of 18 March 2020) found no violations.

Law firms and corporate services in Kyiv

Development Director at Volodymyr Kapustin Law Bureau (2010 – 2013), then director of Registration Bureau LLC (from October 2013) and Legal Solutions LLC (legal.ua, 2014 – 2023): company formation, corporate changes, contracts, compliance and insolvency for small and mid-size founders.

• legal.ua
• Project page

Education

Master of Economic Theory with honours (2006) and Bachelor of Economics and Entrepreneurship with honours (2005), H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University

Early career

Banking, Ukraine, 2006 – 2008: PRAVEX-BANK, UKRSIBBANK, ALFA-BANK

In Canada

Living in Ottawa since May 2023; INNOVA CONSULT LTD. registered 25 July 2023

• muginai.com

  live

  A multi-tenant autonomous SEO platform running entirely on free engines

  muginai.comproject page

• legal.ua — Legal Solutions

  live

  A law firm's site whose clients disappeared; the teardown showed exactly where the enquiries were leaking

  legal.uaproject page

• crystal.tax

  live

  A tax and corporate site where 45% of all requests went into an endless redirect

  crystal.taxproject page

• MMIX — Marketing MIX

  live

  An agency older than ten years, moved onto a new site with an honest portfolio

  mmix.bizproject page

• UAFest — Ukrainian Festival of Lanark

  live

  A festival in Carleton Place and its whole digital contour: a trilingual site, a CRM, an archive, a platform for other towns

  uafest.caproject page

• Capital Cultures

  in preparation

  A second festival, this time in Ottawa, built on what UAFest taught

  capitalcultures.comproject page

• GameFacilitators.org

  live

  The platform of an international association of game facilitators, live on its own domain

  gamefacilitators.orgproject page

• BABA & KOKUM

  live

  About the shared and the separate past of Ukrainian settlers and the Indigenous peoples of Canada

  babakokum.comproject page

• OSMOZG v2

  growing

  An orchestrator for a company of AI agents: a task comes in, agents work, and the acceptance stamp cannot be faked

  how it works

• GrantOps

  live

  A hub for grants and hackathons: finds programmes, watches deadlines, assembles packages

  how it works

• AccountingOS

  growing

  AI accounting, tried first on my own corporation: annual returns, T2 and GST/HST of INNOVA CONSULT LTD. filed in house

  how it works

• NetworkHub

  in testing

  A photo of a business card, then a dossier on the person, then a personal message written in their language

  how it works

• FirstCiv

  live

  A consent-first digital archive of living cultural heritage

  firstciv.com

All projects and how each began