BERLIN – Building a successful startup is a hard work, in which very few eventually succeed, ending up with a global business or a lump sum of cash after the exit. There are many forces that help in the process and those that slow your progress and threaten to kill the product.
In most cases, startups in their early stages are being built by entrepreneurs locally, even if their ambitions are to conquer the world (and they should be). Having the proverbial walls that help is usually a good thing for a startup founder – but what if it’s not the case? What can you build outside of your comfort zone and your home country?
The Kyiv Post talked to a few Ukrainian entrepreneurs who are currently living in Berlin, Germany, and working on very different kinds of startups for local and global audiences.
Two-wheeled treasure hunt
Hanna Slobodyanyuk-Montavon moved to Germany from Ukraine in 2008 to pursue a Master of Laws degree. Now her day job in Berlin is in a city planning consultancy, which works with Ukrainian cities on water supply projects; the rest of her time is devoted to Quest.bike.
A cycling enthusiast herself, Hanna has launched a web-based platform for gamified guideless city tours. With a rented bike and smartphone with internet access, anyone can get to play a game that leads to exploring the city and, eventually, finding a real “treasure.”
“The idea was to combine city tours with games and cycling,” Slobodyanyuk-Montavon told the Kyiv Post. “Our players get to know the cities not through a guide book but get an immersive experience.”
Currently the game is on in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Krakow, Dundee, Lviv and Kyiv. The most active cities, Berlin and Lviv, have seen 258 and 49 teams completing the quests, respectively. The startup, which consists of two founders, editor, and developer, is always on the lookout for new authors and artists who can write new quests.
In the next three months, Slobodyanyuk-Montavon plans to break even and expand to the markets of Southern Europe, which are supposed to be more active during the winter time.
All hands on deck
Java developer Denys Lonshakov left Kyiv in 2013 to keep working as a software engineer in Germany and bring his hobby – board games, – to a new level. He’s the founder of 2Geeks, a board game publisher on track to have its first game out in October.
“I wanted to try my hand at rolling out board games for the European market, first of all for German audience,” Lonshakov told the Kyiv Post. “We have a distributed team now. I’m based in Berlin, my Ukrainian publishing partner IGames is in Khmelnytskyi, designer lives in Kyiv, editor lives in Poltava, and so on. This model is similar to many IT companies.”
Dubbed “Pirates of the 7 Seas,” 2Geeks’ first game will make its debut on Europe’s biggest board games convention Internationale Spieltage SPIEL’15 in October. As the name suggests, it’s built around the pirate setting with each player having to manage a pirate gang, trick opponents, rob caravans and do whatever else pirates do.
“If we sell 2,000 copies of the game before the end of this year, then I’ll know it’s a hit,” Lonshakov said.
Currently Lonshakov is funding the publishing business by his own means but next year he’s planning to turn to crowdfunding.
“Most of American publishers are getting to Kickstarter,” he said. “It’s become a new way of pre-ordering games.”
In addition to board game development and publishing, Lonshakov with his Ukrainian partners participated in founding of Igrosfera, a board game fair in Lviv. The organizers didn’t hold the event in 2014 and 2015 but promise to re-launch it next year with a competition for board game developers.
Cleaning by the numbers
The oldest and most advanced of the three, CleanAgents is hardly a startup anymore: after two years of work, it was acquired by its rival Helpling, another German startup backed by the local venture giant Rocket Internet.
Sergiej Rewiakin, a Luhansk native who had lived in Poland, the U.S., and the UK before moving to Germany, has built CleanAgents as a marketplace platform for cleaning services, one of the first in the country. To learn more about the needs of cleaners, he worked as one himself.
“I cleaned apartments for half a year to understand how it all works,” Rewiakin told the Kyiv Post. “I realized I that despite I was pretty good with Excel, I just couldn’t clean a window.”
The hard work resulted in a model centered around the cleaner, not a client. At the time of writing, there were more than 1,000 cleaners active on the website.
The platform is localized in four languages, though about 60 percent of cleaners use Polish, and another 15 percent Italian.
“Any migrant looking for a job can come to us, and we’ll show them how to register with the tax office and start working with us,” Rewiakin said.
CleanAgents was acquired by Helpling in March 2015 for an undisclosed amount with a requirement that Rewiakin works in the company for another year. The entrepreneur doesn’t plan to stay much longer than required, though. In a few months he wants to start working on a new project in the logistics industry.
Freelance writer
Andrii Degeler can be reached at [email protected].The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
