Ekaterina Shalel
How a medical student with four online stores ended up making companies readable to AI systems.
I opened my first business while I was still in medical school at Sechenov University in Moscow. Four online stores, meant to cover the bills until I graduated. They outgrew that, and a few years later I sold them.
Then I did what I had trained for and went into cosmetology, close enough to the products to know what actually differs between them and what is packaging. Then I went into technology, which looked like a clean break at the time and turned out not to be one.
While building SKINBOT, I hit a wall that had nothing to do with the product. I needed someone on the team who could make AI systems understand what we were, and there was no such person on the market. Not expensive, not busy. Not existing. Every marketer I spoke to sold reach, and reach was not the problem: the problem was that machines could not read us correctly.
So I learned it myself, in public, first on the company and then on my own name. Somewhere in the middle of that I noticed I was doing it on weekends without being asked, which is usually the sign.
That is how one product turned into two. SKINBOT is the neutral AI decision layer I built and took to market, live in two countries. Legibility is what I found on the way, and it is what I do now: making a person or a company something an AI system can identify, place correctly, and safely repeat.
The through line, in case it is not obvious, is one moment: when a person decides what to buy. In an online store nobody is standing next to the customer. There is a catalogue, a search box, some reviews, and a person working it out alone. Today the thing standing next to them is a model, and a model can only recommend what it can read correctly.
Medicine left me with a habit that turns out to matter here. Advice carries risk. A recommendation without grounds is a request to be trusted rather than a reason to act, and a system that cannot show its grounds should not be given the decision.
Where to go next
The method, published in full and free to run: the Legibility Sprint. How the paid work runs: ongoing legibility. The terms I coined, each dated: vocabulary.
Questions
Who is Ekaterina Shalel?
A founder and legibility strategist. She helps founders and companies become readable to AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, created the Legibility Sprint methodology, and built SKINBOT, a neutral AI decision layer for beauty retail with live pilots in two countries.
What names does she publish under?
Ekaterina Shalel is the canonical form. Katya Shalel appears in English publications, Екатерина Шалель and Кети Шалель in Russian ones. They refer to the same person.
What is her background?
She studied medicine at Sechenov University in Moscow, opened four online stores while still a student and later sold them, then worked in cosmetology before moving into technology and building SKINBOT.
What does she work on now?
Legibility: making a person or a company something an AI system can identify, place correctly in relation to the entities around it, and repeat a claim about without taking on risk. The method is published in full as the Legibility Sprint; the paid work is running and maintaining it for a client.