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Startup of the Day #20. Business won’t survive without bots. How the RPA startup StROBOscope.me is developing

Monday, March 2, 2020

Startup StROBOscope.me has recently won the acceleration program Startup Training Camp 2 held by Rocket DAO this winter. The team of the startup told us about the company’s strategy and its plans to attract investments.

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What is StROBOscope

Our product is an RPA (robotic process automation) solution. In practice, this means that instead of a human an employer may “hire” a software robot (bot) that works faster, more precisely, doesn’t get distracted by coffee breaks and never accepts competitors’ job offers. Today the first StROBOscope bot is able to search for potential customers (the process is called lead generation).

Lead generation is a routine part of the seller’s work in B2B sales. An employee needs to do repetitive day-to-day activities. We’ve automated these actions, so now a software application is doing all the boring work, while a specialist focuses on higher-level tasks, improves his professional competencies and brings more value to the company and himself.

In IT outsourcing companies a bot commonly works in the following way: firstly it examines the demand for company’s services in a given region and generates a list of potential clients. Then it discards those companies that don’t suit the size, profile, or other adjustable parameters. Bot further checks the CRM in order to find matching companies. If it manages to do so, a relevant seller will be notified. If not, bot creates a new client card and finds decision-makers. Bot may add them as friends, as well as launch a chain of letters on behalf of a sales manager and initiate a number of other sales-related activities. The only thing that remains for a sales manager is to work with the ‘warm’ leads and to close deals.

Our team has recently finalized the core of the product, its distribution, a convenient one-point solution. Any interested party can download it in EXE file format, install it on the computer and make necessary adjustments. It’ll just take ten minutes. Our software is available by subscription, which costs $2000 per annum or $200 per month, and you can also download our 15-day trial version.

We are predicting that bots will become an industry standard, and companies that don’t use them will lag behind competitors and fade away. The market of RPA solutions is increasing by one third per year.

 

StROBOscope.me

Another proof of high interest in RPA solutions is investment success of our competitors, for example, at the Pre-Seed round ElectroNeek Robotics team from Moscow raised $1.3 million in total (the 5th round was closed in November 2019), WorkFusion has closed the E Series with a total investment of $121.3 million. One more significant market player UiPath closed D Round in April 2019 with a total amount of attracted funds of $1 billion.

StROBOscope.me
Click on the image to see the startup's profile on Rocket DAO

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First clients

Generation of the quality leads takes pretty much time. The first presentations to potential clients have already confirmed our hypothesis that automatic lead generation would surely be in demand.

We started developing our bot last year in August and have already collected more than fifty pre-orders. Bot is already working in several Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian companies. We have recently conducted demos for American IT companies.

The price of StROBOscope is about twice less than the salary of an employee engaged in the same work. We have real cases when our bot replaced manual labor, freeing up employees engaged in lead generation for more creative and skilled work. Now the sales department in this company is developing dynamically.

Working on the Scandinavian market sounds interesting for us, as they have a very high cost of hired labor for businesses. This, in turn, hinders the companies’ development, so we have a solution. We have joined one of the accelerators in this region to have an opportunity of easy market entry.

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Difference from competitors

Stroboscope is being developed by a wonderful team of four Belarusian engineers who have managed to make the product simple and accessible. Previously only big, expensive and complex corporate solutions such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, or Blue Prism bot editors could do this work.

We have succeeded to create a cheap, affordable one-click solution. Today on the market the vast majority of RPA products are available only to large companies, whereas our bot can work with the medium, small businesses and even with individual clients. Our product doesn’t need a complicated setup, but at the same time, it carries the best practices to our clients.

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Role of Startup Training Camp acceleration program

After winning the acceleration program we received many offers from business angels and private investors. Startup Training Camp helped us gain trust and recognition.

The organizers have paid undivided attention to all the participants. It was obvious that they were very involved in the process. They helped us find niche experts and establish useful contacts.

Special attention was paid to presentations. With the help of Rocket DAO we were able to better structure the information, add the necessary data, and make our presentation clearer and more interesting for investors. It was a very valuable experience for us.

StROBOscope.me

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Attracting investments

Now we are fundraising to close the Seed round based on the convertible note conditions. The total sum we want to attract is $250 000. We have many offers, that’s why we are more interested to work with investors with relevant competencies.

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Bot department

In the nearest time, we’re planning to release a new bot for recruiting. The mechanics of its work are similar to the lead generation bot and the main task is to “sell” the company to the candidate.

According to the given parameters, an automatic recruiter will find candidates, check with the existing base, create new account cards in CRM and conduct a primary contact with a candidate. Bot will be able to identify the candidate’s rejection of the first proposal and to ask additional questions: “Why aren’t you interested in the offer?”, “When does your contract in the current place come to an end?”. Bot will save the answers in CRM automatically so that the collected information is available for further work.

If a candidate agrees, bot will offer to choose a convenient time for a call/interview, will send an invitation and book a meeting room for an interview.

StROBOscope.me

Thereafter, we’re going to develop one more bot that will focus on promotion through influencers. “Influebot” bot will find, segment and create databases of opinion leaders in a given topic. It will send them proposals for cooperation, control the fulfillment of obligations, and generate summary reports in real-time.

What’s more, bot may become an integral part of the “influencers’ database”, which advertisers will be able to use. We are currently negotiating with the creators of one of such databases. We will most likely announce a deal with them soon. So far the royalty model is on the agenda.

Our next new bot is designed for SMM and is called “stalker-bot”. It will follow people from the target audience, like their publications, and watch their activity in social networks. Bot will be able to document the collected data in CRM, which will become a significant part of Account Based Marketing. A prompt notification of the actions of the representative of the target group will give a sales manager an opportunity to comment or ask a question concerning this post. Such kind of contact works much better than cold e-mailing.

As you can see with the help of RPA methods we are able to automate repetitive and routine tasks and enable an employer to “hire” an entire department in a couple of clicks.

 

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