UniSender b2b-ecosystem: Angel Talks with Dmitriy Soloviev

We are constantly looking for startups, however, it is important what stage they are at: if the project is at the early stage then we invest, look at the team, how they are able to raise money in market, but there are also cases when we invest and don’t integrate the product until a certain point. And sometimes we attract investment bankers to build relationships with the guys. This is despite the fact that we are completely self-sufficient: we are a profitable company and we don’t raise investments. Nevertheless, we are considering Western partners who can assist in cooperation with the Western capital market. 

One of the investment criteria for startups is the project's ability to immediately enter Western markets so that the revenue outside the CIS is greater. As of today, we have invested in four companies, and I think, a few more will appear later this year. The average paycheck is $200 000 - $300 000. 

The UniOne service has been allocated as a separate company, which deals only with transactional mailouts. Its target audience is larger companies, which have millions of transactional mailouts and the speed of message delivery is crucial. 

There is also another separate company — UniBase. When we were making a product for automating funnels in partnership with developers, we made a script builder.

Building an ecosystem is quite a challenging task. If we take some successful product: a CRM or a bank, then we’ll see that the owners are trying to simply add additional services for their target audience; and for example, for a bank, some non-financial services. But since it is clear that people come to the bank for the main service, and its brand has already been formed following the expectations of people, it turns out that the added services bring little traffic and even less money.

Recently, the situation began to change: the market started to grow, as well as the money in the market. B2B environments will always be there — both with or without us. We don’t know what specific steps we have to take to get there, so all we have to do is to develop product, marketing and financial fields.

We plan to create an ecosystem without adding all the components at once but collect them like Lego pieces, so they will be useful later. We must build it as carefully as possible, hedging ourselves in order to collect all the parts at the right time. We invest not only in the main product, but also in these parts, we begin to assemble them, leaving the possibility of choosing the necessary spare parts at any time, reducing our risks without burdening the main product with unnecessary parts.

Why don’t we launch a venture builder? (Venture builder are companies that take the creation of startups to the assembly line and turn this process into business. The most famous and experienced venture builders are American IdeaLab and Betaworks, as well as Rocket Internet from Germany. They launch several startups at the same time, invest funds and help raise additional money. ― Startup Jedi) It is impossible to catch up with everything and fill it out, as in Tetris, so we focus on our product and expanding the product matrix. Venture builder is a separate business that is quite popular now. Many are building venture studios, incubators, accelerators, having already built certain companies, but this is a business where the economy will be built on the flow. For us, it is not the flow that is important, but the search for those "grains" that will give maximum synergy with UniSender and with the services we have already invested in.

When we were developing StartupIndex, we came up with the term — “venture investing pull”. There is “push”, when you’ve created a startup, invested the money and then you run around the market selling it. And “pull” is when you come to a company as a venture studio and clarify what kind of startups they are interested in.

We request 10% of the company's total budget for research and development (R&D) in order to select promising projects and help them grow. And only when the project reaches the required level, we give it to the company at a fixed valuation, in order to earn money. Currently, many companies have such a model of corporate accelerators: VTB, MTS, Gazprombank. Many enter into agreements with venture capital studios so that they find projects and develop them to a certain level.

In the United States, there is a growing problem with the use of personal data, since even emails are collected through Facebook and belong to it. In Russia, the situation with personal data is becoming more and more severe. In 2006, the Federal Law of the Russian Federation No. 152-FZ "On Personal Data" was issued, which required us to become an operator of personal data, which we did on the territory of Russia. Recently, a law was passed obliging Western companies with a Russian audience of more than 500,000 people to have a representative office in Russia.

Earlier it seemed irrelevant to demand a phone number at registration since the email was enough. On the contrary, the systems are now switching to the collection of mobile data. When registering, we try to request a minimum of information, and for a better understanding of our user, collect attributes in the future, in order to custom the work more efficiently and understand the payment behaviour of users from different business areas.

At early stages, management is less important than the market you enter. The big market will forgive bad team management. And vice-versa, the more complex the market, the more important is good management. If we talk about founders, a good founder has chosen a large market, which allows him to be a bad manager for longer. Good management means managing to grow their share even in a highly competitive market.