Americans constantly give advice - sometimes it hurts: how Ukrainians moved with their business to the United States

Alexey and Marina Shumayevs are a young Ukrainian family. After the honeymoon, they decided to create a leisure planner during the cruises. Cruisebe, went to the Dallas-based accelerator Tech Wildcatters and moved to the United States.

MC Today Photos

In an interview for MC Today Alexey and Marina talked about the idea of ​​creating CruiseBe, their previous projects, the differences in doing business in Ukraine and the USA, and also shared their experience of participating in a business incubator.

Alexey and Marina met ten years ago - they studied together at the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University. In the last courses, they began to meet.

“I didn’t want to work for someone. Understand that you need to do your project, “- says Alexey. Since Marina was a programmer, and Alexey was a marketer and designer, they decided to launch a website studio.

“We made a couple of sites, but quickly realized that we want to launch startups,” says Alexey.

The first project the couple launched in 2013 year: “It was a kind of social network for plumbers, nannies, repairmen and husbands for an hour - a mixture of Uber and LinkedIn.” Workers could share experiences and find customers. Something similar is now engaged in Kabanchik.ua.

But the project did not shoot. Due to inexperience, the founders immediately entered the markets of several countries - in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. And the project did not have enough resources for development.

“About two thousand workers registered on the site, but they were heavily scattered around the cities. Later they realized that it was necessary to start from one city, ”says Marina.

The next project of the couple is “SEC Guide”, which helped to orient in shopping centers. “In the best time, the site was visited by 30-35 thousand people per month. We collaborated with many shopping centers, from Dream Town to Prospect, ”the girl explains.

In 2014, the market sank: during the Maidan, people were not in the mood for trips to shopping centers. “It wasn’t even necessary to collect statistics. You come to the mall on Saturday afternoon, and there are no more 100 people there. In the regions, the situation was even worse. We decided to freeze the project, ”recalls Marina.

Photo facebook.com/chastime

Idea during the honeymoon trip

Closing the SEC Guide, the couple remembered the idea that they had during their honeymoon trip. In 2013, Alexey and Marina were on a cruise and were surprised that there were no services that would help plan such trips.

Information had to be collected from various sources - from Wikipedia to TripAdvisor. It took a lot of time. This is how work began on CruiseBe, the leisure planner during the cruise.

Since the main cruise market is located in the United States, the project immediately began to be prepared for the local market: "We understood that it would be hard to go there without experience - we applied for ten American accelerators."

“The first accelerator, which was ready to take us, turned out to be from a small city with a population of up to 100 thousand. We didn’t really want to go there, besides, we didn’t have time to go to the current set, and the next was six months later,” says Alexey.

“We learned about the fact that we were entering the Dallas-based accelerator of Tech Wildcatters when the sixth hour was on the stuck Intercity train on the way from the Dnieper to Kiev. It was in the winter: in the car ten degrees of heat, the connection appears rarely. And here comes the email that they are waiting for us for an interview in Dallas, ”the couple recalls.

Alexey and Marina believe that in some sense they were lucky, because they already had their US visa open: “We had to fly there in two weeks, we would not have had time to issue all the documents from scratch.”

The selection in Tech Wildcatters consisted of three stages: an application, a psychological test (whether participants can be entrepreneurs, are they ready to take risks) and a personal meeting.

The final stage involved 50-60 startups, passed - 10-15, including us. “Typically, programs in accelerators last three months and that’s it. We, despite the fact that almost a year and a half has passed, still come to the office of a startup incubator and communicate with mentors - they help us in every way, ”says Alexey.

Accelerator helped Shumayev to deal with the intricacies of doing business in America: "We learned a lot of legal nuances: how to register a company, pay taxes."

Mentors taught to communicate correctly with clients, to negotiate with partners, to adjust the development plan: “We didn’t know about 80-90% in general about the startup culture, although we thought that we would not get anything special here.”

“Financing is far from the main thing that the accelerator provides. Usually this is a small amount, which is enough to complete the program, make some minimal product and, possibly, launch the first advertisement, ”Alexey thinks.

The main thing is networking: “Accelerator is a kind of intermediary between startups and mentors. You find “your” person and then communicate with him. So we met Andres Fabrice, who over the 25 years in the travel industry - learned a lot from him. ”

Photo mc.today

Where is the money

Now CruiseBe is a website, a mobile app for iOS and a chat bot on Facebook. “Initially, we just collected information about all the ports and cities — when the ship is about eight hours, people want to know what can be seen there.”

A couple of days before the presentation to investors in the accelerator, the couple decided to add an aggregator function. So that a person can simply choose his cruise and his date, and the program itself will build a route and offer leisure options.

“Cruise ships are huge. To prevent them from being lost, people are given paper cards, as in the distant past. Internet prices on board can go up to $ 30 per hour or up to $ 300 for the entire cruise, so few use them. We added the ability to download maps offline and build routes on liners in our application - like in Google Maps, now it works on 40 ships, ”adds Alexey.

On average, every month through Cruise, people build 2 thousand cruises, site traffic - 15-20 thousand people per month. The mobile application - 8 thousands of downloads.

CruiseBe team is small. In addition to Alexei and Marina, the project involved a few more people. There are also 6-7 content managers and outsourced programmers.

The project is monetized by advertising in the application and on the website. The ability to watch information about the cruise, the ship and a separate port also costs money. You can also purchase a premium subscription to disable ads and access all paid features.

A paid year subscription costs $ 19,99, and downloading one cruise offline is $ 4,99. Alexey said that now several large companies are interested in their project: “They want to license our data - we will also make money on big data”.

The chat bot is used by several people a day, this is more to the future. “We also have a chat bot on Facebook with elements of artificial intelligence,” says Marina. Previously, it was just a bot, communication with which occurred by selecting the proposed answer options - the format "Yes or no." Now he is able to recognize the speech of a person and maintain a dialogue.

“We made the bot not only help find information on the cruise, but also entertain the person: play with him in quiz or offer to find out the port from the photo,” adds Alexey.

Experts rated the chat bots CruiseBe: “We spoke at conferences in Miami and San Francisco with a report on it. Were on the same stage with representatives of Facebook, Airbnb and Expedia. In the fall, talk about the bot in Las Vegas. ”

“Despite the fact that now everyone is talking about chat bots, not many people use them. We have a few people a day. In the travel market, almost everyone has a similar situation. In addition, the age of our audience - for 40 years, they still do not strongly trust bots, "- says Marina.

At the same time, the couple said that they could not ignore this direction - the future is definitely behind the chat bots: “We perfectly understood that this was more work for the future and we would not immediately get a return.”

The chat bot turned into 24 / 7 tech support and saved the founders from having to answer trivial questions, like "Show me a plan for this ship."

The difference between a business in Ukraine and the United States

“Americans are very open. If you wish, you can reach out to any person, even to the head of a large company. We once talked with the Vice-President of American Airlines - they wrote to him by mail, and he helped us with advice, ”says Alexey.

“When we started in Ukraine, many people froze. In the US, they can also be denied something, but they do it with a smile, which is much nicer. True, now in our homeland the situation has changed - people have become more open, ”said Shumayev.

But in the openness of the Americans there is a minus. According to Alexei, they all love to give advice, even if they do not understand the topic.

“We are often advised to add some functions to the site, a couple of times we are caught in this. Without first analyzing the need for elements, we spent a month on development, but in the end no one used them, ”recalls Alexey.

Read also on ForumDaily:

The secret of success from Ukrainians in New York: business in 'communal apartments'

'Black on the Reds': how an African American lived in the USSR for 44 years

Do you want more important and interesting news about life in the USA and immigration to America? — support us donate! Also subscribe to our page Facebook. Select the “Priority in display” option and read us first. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our РєР ° РЅР ° Р »РІ Telegram  and Instagram- there is a lot of interesting things there. And join thousands of readers ForumDaily New York — there you will find a lot of interesting and positive information about life in the metropolis.