Selling America

Today’s episode welcomes Yaroslav Lazor and Sergiy Korolov, CEO and Managing Partner of Railsware - a product studio with two main focuses – products and consultancy services. They’ve worked with brands like Mailtrap, Coupler.io, Jira Smart Checklist, Calendly, and Brightbytes and helped them become commercial products with large user bases, steady growth and ambitious plans.

Railsware was founded back in 2006 as a collective of founders that wanted to combine their expertise and build something new. Instead of growing their team, they ended up scaling down and eliminating members of their initial team. Yaroslav was there from the beginning, while Sergiy joined a bit further down the line, when there were 50 employees already working at Railsware. They initially scaled up to 75 team members until part of their team decided to go out on their own and start their own shop.

What differentiates Railsware is that they don’t just develop software - they fully build out applications and deliver to clients ready for commercial use. Clients love this model, which is evident when looking through the Railsware portfolio, which consists of big names that never churn. Standing out in a saturated market is no easy task - that’s why Railsware decided to go against the grain and market themselves like a software company would, making the customers journey their north star. Their strategic positioning gave them a huge upper hand when fighting for lucrative contracts and ultimately led to become the type of service that other providers try to copy and imitate.

KEY INSIGHTS:
03:16 Joining Railsware by accident
06:03 Developing vs Building software
08:32 Closing your first big logos
12:01 Niche down to scale up
14:25 Railsware’s approach to sales
19:17 Lead gen in a technical space
24:03 High volume vs high quality services
27:13 Pivoting from service to product
38:11 Railsware moving into the US market 
44:13 Taking on the right clients like Calendly 
52:39 Don’t be afraid to sell to the US
57:38 Running a unique, memorable sales process
59:02 Imposter syndrome is holding you back

Connect with the guests, Sergiy Korolov and Yaroslav Lazor
Connect with the host, Sergey Olexa

Today’s episode welcomes Sasha Voloshyn, Chief Business Development Officer at Soft Way - an all-in-one B2B travel platform for managing travel and business spend for clients such as Volvo, Chanel, McDonalds, and Lifecell. Over his career, Sasha has held positions in health tech and venture capital, and founded multiple companies -  including an outsourced sales development agency.

Sasha’s outbound agency was his first entrepreneurial pursuit. Building Pilot made him realize that he wants to abandon the 9-5 lifestyle to build his own ventures. One of their biggest advantages was Sasha’s co-founder in the United States. He knew from day one that the US market was a priority, and that a local presence would be huge. Not only does a US presence help you better understand the current market trends, but it also unlocks investment opportunities that would otherwise be almost impossible to acquire.

After Pilot, he realized that his next step was moving towards developing products. Sasha’s next company was Postello.ai, a tool that helps create written social media content. Postello attracted a total of $60,000 in government sponsored Ukrainian and European Union investment funds at 0 equity, which got them off the ground pretty quick and led to an acquisition later on. Sasha went on to leverage his AI tool to write a speech for the Ukrainian government, bringing a lot of new eyes on their product.

Breaking into venture capital is the dream of many finance graduates, entrepreneurs and executives. Sasha’s VC journey began when he partnered with the €50,000,000 Spanish business incubator Demium, helping them relaunch in Ukraine and maintain their activity after the war began. Since then he’s helped numerous startups raise capital, win awards, and he  even played a role in securing a $2,000,000 investment for the startup that ultimately acquired his company, Postello.ai.

Tune into the full episode to learn more on how to secure venture capital!

KEY INSIGHTS:
01:31 Sasha’s entrepreneurial journey
07:27 AI-written government speech
09:09 Sasha’s road to venture capital
13:14 Entering the US scene
16:18 Raising US venture capital
18:57 Should you hire US based sellers?
21:32 Adjusting messaging for the US market
27:30 Should you invest in Product or GTM?
35:42 How should technical founders approach GTM?
39:58 Picking the right startup incubator
43:47 What are the current priorities of Soft Way?
46:21 Why don’t EU companies move into the US market?

Connect with the guest, Sasha Voloshyn
Connect with the host, Sergey Olexa

Today’s episode welcomes Felix Schirl, Founder & CEO of trbo - the leading technology provider for dynamic onsite personalization, optimization and testing. trbo’s AI-driven onsite personalization platform allows users to customize website content, A/B and multivariate test, and serve recommendations down to the individual level using machine learning.

Felix has been in the ecommerce space since 2000. He saw how much money goes into driving website traffic and realized that there was a huge inefficiency in place. Customers prefer a personalized approach when making buying decisions, and most websites simply don’t offer it. When doing market research, Felix realized that companies understood this caveat well, but considered a personalized website experience to be too expensive. So in 2013, creating a way to make customized websites accessible became the vision of trbo.

Even though they started out in Germany and initially targeted the DACH region, Felix always saw the US market as a North Star and made a move to start their go-to-market journey in 2020. COVID heavily impacted their planned timelines, but they were able to make a showing at last year's Shoptalk in Las Vegas, which became a soft-launch of their US expansion. They are currently actively testing out multiple approaches to see what works for them before making any heavy investments in a particular strategy.

Tune into the full episode to learn more on how Felix made his move into the US market!

KEY INSIGHTS:
01:01 What led Felix to founding trbo
05:37 trbo’s go-to-market vision
07:13 How Felix found his first client
12:13 Building a European sales team
14:37 How to scale your partner motion
19:02 Efficiently ramping up new partnerships 
22:02 How trbo entered the US market
29:02 Can your European sellers perform in the US market?
34:07 Outsourcing vs building in-house?
37:55 How to use events as part of your GTM 
45:05 trbo’s US milestones

Connect with the guest, Felix Schirl
Connect with the host, Sergey Olexa
Check out trbo