Ukraine has shown itself to be an attractive location for outsourced information technology services.
Slowly, however, the country’s most talented programmers are taking the reins and going international, bringing with them innovative business solutions that are gaining popularity.
Talent alone is not enough to compete with big established players on the global market. It takes planning, hard work and a good deal of strategic thinking to turn a great idea into a successful business. And a little bit of luck.
Operating out of a small, but welcoming apartment in the Podil district of Kyiv, 32-year-old Chyngys Barynov and his two partners have turned their startup idea, worksection.com, into a profitable business.
While Barynov is educated in computer science, his colleagues have backgrounds in physics and robotics. They have all always shared a passion for working with computers and programming. One day three years ago, they decided to try and turn their ideas into a common venture.
The group’s first startup was the site quickribbon.com. This was an online tool helping bloggers to design their blogs, and it quickly proved popular.
“We were spotted quite fast and in the first five days we had 2,000-3,000 visits per day. Since it was a free service we created, we did not really generate any money on the project, but it gave us the courage to create others.”
The team was spread out among three cities in Ukraine, and used online project management programs to communicate and work together. But they couldn’t find any program that suited their needs, so in late 2009 they decided to build their own platform, whose features were broader and better suited to joint working than those of existing ones.
“We built worksection.com in around two months and when it was ready, I wrote on a IT community blog that we used to work with Basecamp (a leading project management site ), but we now switched to worksection.com. That quickly lead to 200-300 users registered and around 150 of these (were) paying for the service,” Barynov says.
At that point, however, the team had no experience or knowledge on the strategy and skills required to nurture a startup. Everything was an experiment back then, they said: Even simple things like finding a bank that could assist e-commerce proved difficult.
When the first money came in, however, the group lost focus. Barynov chased an old dream of playing professional poker, while the others relocated to Kyiv. But customers kept coming in and after a year they decided to dedicate themselves fully to the project.
“I started to read books on strategy, while the two others programmed and developed the site. I began an active dialogue with our customers, something that proved to be very successful. It gave us a lot of feedback on our work, and it has doubled our conversion rate to 14 percent,” Barynov says.
Today the site has more than 1,000 paying clients and claims 7 percent of the project management market in ex-Soviet republics, according to research done by Tagline Analytics Agency in 2011.
The success means that they need to hire four more persons and they are having informal discussions with possible investors to actively advertising their service. But looking into the future, they are not sure if they can stay in Ukraine.
The need to be closer to emerging markets and the bad business climate in Ukraine may force the team to go elsewhere.
“The authorities here often have a misplaced way of helping small businesses and because we want to move into other markets than Russian-speaking in the future, we might have to relocate the business to Hong Kong or Israel, Barynov says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Jesper Larsen can be reached at [email protected].
