How I helped cs.money 4x their revenue

The problem

cs.money is a platform for trading, buying, and selling in-game items — primarily CS:GO skins. When I joined, the company had millions of users but was running blind:

• No analytics. No unit economics, no funnel tracking, no understanding of who the users were or why they converted.
• Production was down for hours every day. Core functionality — trades — would just stop working.
• Marketing was burning budget. They reported "1M users brought to the site" — 99% of which were bots and users from India with sessions under 3 seconds.
• Releases took 1-2 months. No processes, no documentation, teams operating on verbal agreements.
• The design team never tested anything. Decisions were based on "looks good to me" instead of data.

What I did

Month 1: The audit

I spent the first month doing a complete tear-down of every product, process, and metric I could find. The conclusion was clear: we couldn't optimize what didn't work. The entire product development needed to be rebuilt from scratch.

I brought this to the CEO with a direct recommendation: stop trying to grow a broken product. Fix the foundation first. He agreed — and within three months I became the product owner of the entire platform.

Building the system

I managed a team of 25 people — backend, frontend, QA, and designers — with one PM reporting to me. Here's what we built:

• Product analytics from zero. Worked closely with a product analyst to instrument the entire platform. Started running A/B tests before every release.
• User research. For the first time, we understood who our users were, what jobs they were hiring the product for, and which segments actually mattered.
• Design testing culture. Moved the design team from "looks good" to "we tested it and here's what works."
• Processes for every team. Defined, implemented, and enforced workflows. Ran cross-team retros and postmortems so we could learn from mistakes instead of repeating them.
• Jira + Confluence migration. Moved the entire company from chaos to structured project management — for $150K instead of the $2M quote from an external vendor.
• Marketing + product alignment. Got marketing and product teams working together on campaigns instead of operating in silos.
• Full platform redesign. Took the site from "AliExpress resale landing page" to a proper e-commerce experience where the Buy button actually existed in the cart.

The hard decisions

Some team members were actively sabotaging results. I made the call to remove them — and hired a project manager who helped transform not just our team, but the entire company's operations.

Before & after

Results

What the CEO said

"Hiring Mike was one of the best decisions for the company. He was a rock for the young team and fresh air for me. His skills and knowledge allowed us to transform the company's primary and other parts into successful user-oriented products. He covers the area where others should have three people: managing the 20-person team, product and business development, product strategy, risk management and also raising & consulting the rest of the product teams."