You're reading: No need to leave Ukraine to do booming tech business

Odesa-based tech startup Readdle is creating applications that smartphone customers don't want to live without.

The business started in 2007, the same year as Apple’s first iPhone, and now claims multimillion-dollar revenues from 33 million downloads of its seven mobile iOS applications — focused on time management and making documents, books, images and PDFs easier to read and share.

In 2009, Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg listed Readdle Docs as one of his “favorite apps that make the iPhone worth the price,” a mention that spurred  sales.
With more than 60 employees, Readdle concentrates on the American market, which supplies 45 percent of the business. Another 30 percent come from European Union countries.

Four friends, graduates of Odesa Mechnykov University, bought their first iPhone shortly after its release and figured it was useless for reading the books.

For almost a year, Readdle existed as a web service through which one could upload and read a PDF book on the iPhone. But few months before the App Store was to be launched in the summer of 2008, Igor Zhadanov, Readdle’s chief executive officer, received a promising offer from one of his former colleagues who worked for Apple at that time.

“In short it sounded simple and huge – ‘we want you to be on our App Store,” Denys Zhadanov, Igor’s brother and marketing director at Readdle, recalls.

Readdle’s team started working day and night. Within four months of intense coding, they presented Readdle Docs, a $14.99 file manager for storing and opening any file extensions on iPhone, including Microsoft Office files, PDFs, images and videos. It became a part of the package of 500 apps available on the first App Store version on July 10, 2008. Now the app is called Documents 5 and is free to download without any ads or built-in apps.

“The app was sold widely and that meant it was useful for people, as they would not spend their money for nothing. That was in fact our primary intention – to make value, people’s lives easier, smartphones having more instruments to arrange one’s daily schedule,” Denys Zhadanov says.

Shortly after, they created Scanner Pro, a text recognizer that now has seven million downloads and product leader status. Worth $2.99, the app makes the phone work like a real scanner.

“After Scanner Pro was featured by Apple as App of the Week in early 2014, almost everyone in the U.S. knew about us,” Denys Zhadanov said. “So once at the bar, when I told a guy that Scanner Pro is made by us, he told me ‘No way! Did you guys really make it? I have it on my home screen, let me shake your hand.’”

Readdle’s team stands in front of the first building in Odesa, where it rented an apartment to work on the first app.

Later Readdle had series of new launches, offering options on editing the PDF documents and managing one’s calendar.

Ian Robinson, a tech expert from the U.K., has all the Readdle apps. “I’ve bought and tried all the other popular PDF apps for iPad and iPhone. They all pale in comparison to Readdle’s offerings. Either the user interface is cluttered and hard to use, or the app is slow. PDF is the lingua franca for document exchange and Readdle’s applications on iOS make everyone a fluent speaker,” he says.

Readdle’s sales growth has slowed to 20 percent in 2014, still an achievement considering the paid apps market is shrinking.

The latest Readdle product, launched in 2014, was Fluix, a software for document management, also usable on the iPad.

Readdle’s success is a rare case wide acceptance of products from Ukrainian tech engineers. Without any investment or permanent presence in the Silicon Valley, the heart of the globe’s tech industry, its products are in demand. So far, the team plans to stay in Odesa

“It is always great to visit the Valley several times a year to get new connections, absorb inspiration, ideas and entrepreneurial spirit, but then return to Odesa for real work,” Denys Zhadanov says.

Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures CapitalCiklumFISON and SoftServe.