About

Last updated: 1 May 2026

Oleksandr Prudnikov

Developer of FlipperHelper · Wandsworth, London

Hi, I’m Ole

I’m a software engineer based in Wandsworth, South West London. I’m originally from Ukraine — my wife Valentina and I came to the UK in 2022 on the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

FlipperHelper is the iOS app I built for her reselling business. This page exists because Google now ranks pages partly on whether the author is a real person who actually does what they write about, so it’s worth being explicit: everything on this site comes from our real reselling experience, not market research or AI-generated filler.

Why I built FlipperHelper

Valentina started reselling in early 2025. Her first month target was £200 turnover — a realistic starting goal. Every time she hit her target she doubled it for the next month. Within a year she went from charity-shop test runs to regularly clearing £1,300–£1,900 a month. Her record is around £1,700 profit in a single month. She makes £18–25k a year from reselling now.

The turning point was discovering car boot sales. Trains don’t work for early-bird boots, so she got a car. She wasn’t driving before — I taught her. Her business now pays all the car expenses.

For about a year she tracked everything in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet kept getting in the way: she’d log a purchase at the stall, then forget which platform it was listed on, miss a fee, get the maths wrong on a per-item basis. After watching this for too long, I decided to build her a proper app.

FlipperHelper went live on the App Store on 21 March 2026. It’s free, offline-first, multi-currency, and tracks 16 selling platforms. Valentina is the lead tester — if a feature doesn’t survive a Sunday morning at a car boot, it doesn’t ship.

What we actually do

Source from UK car boots — Surrey, Suffolk, North London. Sundays mostly. Hardstanding venues in winter
Source from charity shops — the original learning ground. Now mostly for specific brands and ceramics
Source from France — we drove via Eurotunnel for our first sourcing trip in spring 2026 and came back with a car full of vintage. We’ve been back since
Sell on eBay, Vinted, and Facebook Marketplace — eBay for collectors and high-value items, Vinted for clothing, Facebook for furniture and local pickup
Sell at vintage events as sellers ourselves — we’ve booked stalls at Wimbledon-area vintage markets. Useful for shifting inventory that wasn’t moving online
Use Shiply for shipping furniture to UK buyers — usually £40–£100 per piece

Most of the blog posts on this site are direct write-ups of what we learned doing each of these things.

About Valentina

Valentina is the actual reseller. She came to the UK first; I followed. She worked at Costa for a while before reselling started bringing in real money, then transitioned full-time. She’s the one with the eye for stock — I’m the one who builds the tools. Most of the photos on the blog are from her sourcing trips.

About this site

The blog at flipperhelper.app/blog is where I write up what we learn as a UK reseller couple. Topics tend to be:

Where to source — UK car boots, UK antiques fairs, Portobello Road, Saint-Ouen, French brocantes
How to actually run trips — driving to France for stock, UK online auctions
The boring but profitable bits — Shiply for furniture delivery, tracking profits, HMRC trading allowance

Every post is verified against official sources where applicable, and I try to add real photos from our trips rather than stock images. If something on the site is wrong, please email me — I’ll fix it.

My software background

I’ve been a professional software engineer since before moving to the UK. My day-job work has been in tech and finance — mostly Python on the backend, with detours into Flutter, Swift, and various data-engineering stacks. FlipperHelper is built in Swift / SwiftUI for iOS, with a JSON-based local store, OAuth integration with Google Drive for image backup, and CSV export to Google Sheets.

Open-source bits and other projects are on my GitHub.

Get in touch

If you have questions about the app, want to suggest a feature, spot something wrong, or just want to compare car-boot finds:

I read every email and reply to almost all of them, usually within a day or two.

Download FlipperHelper Free on the App Store