The untold story behind Vasili Kuchigan’s journey from the tennis court to the top of Fiverr — and the exact system generating over $320,000 per year

The Tennis Pro Who Walked Off the Court and Onto Fiverr

A former tennis pro building a $320K-per-year freelance business sounds like the kind of story someone makes up to sell a course.

But Vasili Kuchigan is the real thing.

He was once ranked in the top 360 of the International Tennis Federation, competing in professional circuits across Europe and beyond.

He trained with coaches, played in international tournaments, and had every reason to believe the sport would be his career.

But somewhere between his third year at a US university on a tennis scholarship and his graduation day, something shifted.

He was building something else on the side — quietly, persistently, inside a platform called Fiverr — and that quiet thing had started to generate $10,000 a month before he even had his diploma.

By 2025, that quiet thing had grown into a full social media agency generating $320,000 per year on Fiverr alone, with an additional $20,000 to $30,000 coming from direct clients paying through Stripe.

And by 2026, Vasili had also launched a brand-new AI-powered SaaS tool called Freelance Hustle AI — built specifically for Fiverr sellers who want to reply faster, manage clients smarter, and scale without burning out.

This is the story of how a former tennis pro turned a $5 gig into a six-figure freelance empire — and what every online entrepreneur can learn from the journey.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.

From the Tennis Court to a Scholarship in the United States

Growing up, Vasili Kuchigan had tennis in his blood long before he understood what it meant professionally.

His grandparents played the sport for fun, and as a seven-year-old watching them on the court, he fell in love with the idea of the game before he even understood how to keep score.

By the time he was nine or ten, he was competing in his first international tournaments — and doing well enough that the expectation shifted from hobby to serious career.

Tennis is an expensive sport, and his family supported the journey as far as they could, covering coaching fees, equipment, and tournament travel.

But when the opportunity came to earn a scholarship and study at a university in the United States, Vasili took it — not just for the education, but because American university athletic programs at the time offered elite-level infrastructure: dedicated coaches, fitness trainers, medical support, and full gym access.

The catch, which he understood clearly from the beginning, was that choosing the university route in that era meant the professional path would narrow significantly.

Top-ranked players who wanted to go pro after high school simply did not have the time to train at the required level while also studying, writing papers, and sitting in classrooms.

Vasili knew this, accepted it, and arrived on campus with something that would serve him far better than a professional tennis ranking — a hunger to figure out how to make money on his own terms.

How a Former Tennis Pro Found Fiverr in His Dorm Room

It started the way most great side hustles do — with a casual search, a little curiosity, and a lot of spare time.

Vasili stumbled across Fiverr while browsing online during his time in the US, looking at how people were earning money from their laptops.

He saw designers making logos, developers building websites, marketers running social media pages — and he saw order queues with 100, 200 active projects sitting beside single seller profiles.

He did the math, and the math made him want to try.

The first few services he offered were exploratory — logo designs and other gigs he was learning as he went — and the early months were quiet, bringing in almost nothing.

But in 2016, his third year at university, he found the niche that would change everything: Instagram growth.

He had been helping his tennis coach in Spain — a man he trained with during summers in Marbella — grow his coaching business’s Instagram account.

The strategy was simple but effective for the era: follow the top followers of large accounts in the same niche, wait for them to follow back, and engage consistently to build a real audience.

He tried it on his coach’s page and watched it work in real time.

Within minutes of following the right people, some of them came back.

The follower count moved.

The page grew.

And Vasili thought, “If this works for him, it works for anyone — and people will pay for it.”

He listed it on Fiverr, landed his first client, then his second, and within months had a steady stream of orders from business owners across the US, UK, and Europe who wanted their Instagram pages to grow with real, engaged followers.

The Rise — From $5 Gigs to $10K Per Month Before Graduation

The former tennis pro turned Fiverr seller did not grow overnight, but he grew steadily in a way that built real staying power.

Month by month, the revenue climbed.

$100. Then $500. Then $1,000.

By the time he was finishing his final year at university, he was pulling in $2,000 to $3,000 per month from Fiverr alone.

By February or March of his graduation year, he had hit $10,000 per month — a milestone that, in Russia where he was from, represented the kind of monthly income most people worked full-time for an entire year to approach.

He hired his first team member during the summer between university years, bringing in someone from back home to help manage the growing order volume.

That team member has been with him ever since.

Vasili graduated with solid academic results, not because school was easy alongside Fiverr, but because he refused to let his father down — and because he knew that finishing gave him permission to go all in.

The day after graduation, he did exactly that.

He came back home, set up a proper office, started building out his team, and committed to Fiverr as his full business — not a side hustle, not a backup plan, but the main event.

The First Crash — And Why a Former Tennis Pro Knows How to Get Back Up

By 2019, Vasili’s social media agency had grown to nearly twenty people.

The revenue was strong.

He had been invited to the New York Stock Exchange to witness Fiverr’s IPO — standing on the famous balcony, signing the wall alongside other top sellers from around the world, and feeling like everything he had built was real.

But the business was built on one thing: Instagram growth services.

And Instagram was about to change the rules.

The platform began tightening its limits on follower interactions — reducing how many people you could follow per day from thousands to just fifty or one hundred.

Tools and strategies that had worked reliably for years stopped working.

Revenue collapsed.

A team of nearly twenty people meant a payroll he could no longer sustain.

He had to let people go — a process he describes as one of the hardest things he has ever done professionally.

By early 2020, he had stepped back almost entirely, moved in with his grandmother in the Russian countryside, and was back down to a few thousand dollars per month while he tried to figure out what came next.

He tested other ideas.

He took a mental break.

And then, toward the end of 2020, he noticed a competitor still offering Instagram growth services on Fiverr — and still carrying a full order queue.

That was enough.

A former tennis pro who has spent years learning how to absorb a loss and come back harder on the next point does not stay down for long.

He reached out to his Fiverr customer success manager — who had also been pushing him to return — and made the decision to rebuild.

The Comeback — A Smarter, Stronger Fiverr Business Built With AI

Vasili came back to Fiverr in 2021 with one important change in his thinking: he would never again let his entire business depend on one service.

He added TikTok growth management alongside Instagram.

He built out a content creation arm — designing social media posts and visuals for clients using Canva and other design tools.

He brought his wife Mila on board to run that content service, and she took to it quickly, drawing on design experience she had developed in earlier projects alongside Vasili.

The content service grew into its own operation: three designers, two based in Serbia and one in Macedonia, all managed by Mila, generating more than $10,000 per month on its own.

As the agency grew, so did Vasili’s public presence.

He launched a YouTube channel and Instagram page focused on helping Fiverr sellers understand how to grow their profiles and deliver better services.

He began interviewing top Fiverr sellers on camera.

He organized meetups for the freelance community in cities across Europe — London, Germany, Helsinki — learning through each one what freelancers needed most.

He built an audience of 30,000 to 40,000 followers across platforms.

And through all of this, he kept hearing the same pain point from sellers: managing client messages was exhausting, time-consuming, and often inconsistent in quality.

That pain point became his next product.

Freelance Hustle AI — The SaaS Tool Built by a Former Tennis Pro for Fiverr Sellers

In March or April of 2024, Vasili was on a Zoom call with an old university friend and former professor — a computer scientist named Iman, who holds a PhD and has a deep background in AI and large language models.

They had tried building projects together before.

Two earlier ideas had not made it past the concept stage.

But this time, Vasili came with a specific problem, a built-in audience, and a platform he understood better than almost anyone.

He told Iman what Fiverr sellers needed: a way to reply faster to client messages, generate better responses to complaints, and manage leads without switching between five different tools.

Iman told him something interesting in return: he already used something similar for replying to student emails at the university.

Within a week, they had a rough prototype — a Chrome extension connected to OpenAI’s API that could read a Fiverr message, understand the context of the seller’s services, and generate a relevant, professional reply in seconds.

The development process took a full year from that first prototype to public launch in May 2025 — not because the core technology was hard, but because building for users is infinitely more complex than building for yourself.

They needed a sign-up portal, a workspace system, a CRM for managing leads, team member access controls, and a training layer that let each seller teach the AI about their specific services, their preferred tone, and the types of clients they did and did not want to work with.

The key accelerator came in December 2024, when Iman started using Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, alongside the Cursor AI-powered code editor.

Development speed jumped dramatically.

They went from meeting once a week to twice a week, started setting harder deadlines, and the product came together.

By the end of May 2025, Freelance Hustle AI was live, with twenty active users going through the free trial — all of them Fiverr sellers managing high message volumes.

How the AI Works — And Why the Former Tennis Pro Uses It Daily

The core feature of Freelance Hustle AI is simple to understand but genuinely powerful in practice.

When a client sends a message to a seller on Fiverr, the Chrome extension reads the message, references the seller’s stored context — their services, their niche, their standard opening questions — and generates a complete, relevant reply in the seller’s voice.

For Vasili’s own social media growth business, that means when a potential client messages asking how to grow their Instagram, the AI immediately drafts a reply asking for the client’s Instagram username and website — the two pieces of information he always needs before deciding whether to work with them.

It sounds small.

But across a day with dozens of incoming messages, it saves hours.

The tool also handles more difficult scenarios: handling complaints with a calm, respectful tone; drafting decline messages for clients outside the seller’s niche; and flagging messages that need a human review rather than an automated response.

The system includes a CRM layer where sellers can track leads that might otherwise fall through the cracks — Fiverr’s native inbox pushes older messages down as new ones arrive, and many sellers simply forget to follow up with interested clients who asked a question two days ago.

The platform is built with team use in mind as well.

Sellers who manage multiple team members can invite them all into a shared workspace, give them access to the Chrome extension, and ensure that every reply — regardless of who writes it — reflects the same service standards and brand voice.

The next feature in development is order management: pulling client requirements directly into the workspace portal so team members can access them without the seller sharing their full Fiverr account login, keeping finances private while keeping operations smooth.

$320K Per Year — What the Numbers Actually Look Like

The headline figure — $320,000 in annual revenue — deserves a closer look, because understanding how it is structured is more useful than the number itself.

The former tennis pro who built this business on Fiverr earns the vast majority of that $320,000 entirely through the Fiverr platform.

He intentionally pushes direct clients back to Fiverr rather than keeping them off-platform, because the system he has built on Fiverr is more reliable, more scalable, and does not depend entirely on him being available at every moment.

An additional $20,000 to $30,000 comes from direct clients who pay via Stripe on a monthly retainer basis — mostly in the medical social media niche, a segment he has developed separately from the main Fiverr operation.

The social media content service run by his wife Mila contributes more than $10,000 per month to the overall business, operating almost as its own agency within the agency.

He has grown this revenue not through paid advertising but through organic content — consistently showing up on YouTube and Instagram as someone who teaches, shares, and gives back to the Fiverr community.

His goal going into 2026 with Freelance Hustle AI is to reach $10,000 per month in SaaS revenue, which he considers a realistic first milestone before pushing toward much larger scale.

He is targeting Fiverr sellers generating at least $5,000 per month — users with enough message volume that the time savings the tool provides become immediately obvious and worth paying for monthly.

What Every Freelancer Can Learn From a Former Tennis Pro Who Never Stopped Playing

There is a pattern running through every chapter of Vasili Kuchigan’s story that is easy to miss if you only look at the current revenue figure.

He launched his first Fiverr gig for $5 and got almost nothing.

He organized his first freelance meetup in Bucharest in 2017, reserved a conference room for twenty people, and sat alone for nearly an hour before accepting that nobody was coming.

He built an agency of twenty people and then watched it collapse when Instagram changed its algorithm.

He spent 2020 regrouping in his grandmother’s house in the Russian countryside.

He came back, rebuilt, diversified, hired again, launched a product, and kept going.

None of that reads like overnight success because it is not overnight success.

The former tennis pro who became a $320K Fiverr entrepreneur applied exactly the same mentality that tournament sports builds in every serious competitor: you lose a point, you reset, you play the next one.

You do not carry the last loss into the next rally.

You do not quit because the first few tries went badly.

You keep showing up, keep improving your positioning, and trust that the cumulative work will eventually produce something remarkable.

In 2026, as AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and OpenAI make it faster and cheaper than ever to build products and deliver services, the primary differentiator for any freelancer or online entrepreneur is not the tool they use — it is the consistency they bring to the work.

Vasili Kuchigan figured that out in a dorm room in the United States, and he has been proving it every year since.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.