When local startups seek to move beyond Ukrainian and Russian-speaking markets, they turn to other developing economies like Poland.
Already present in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, the Ukrainian startup Preply, which provides an online service for finding language tutors, has launched its Polish version in January.
“Poland is a big European market with a small Russian-speaking audience. This gives access to new customers and pushes for product enhancement,” Kyrylo Bigai, Preply’s chief executive officer, says.
Poland offers several advantages. It is nearby, easy to understand because of language similarities and wealthier than Ukraine.
Preply’s service was launched in April 2013. It operated only with English-speaking tutors in Kyiv. Now it has 6,000 tutors of 12 languages, including Chinese, and around 100,000 website visitors monthly.
In 2014, the company broke even and now 50 percent of Preply’s profits come from the Ukrainian market. But the startup expects the Polish market to bring substantial income, too. Besides their relative wealth, Poles also are more active on the web.
“Out of a total of 45 million Ukrainians, only five million have high purchasing ability,” he explains. “Also most of population likely to use web services is concentrated in cities with population of over million inhabitants. Poland’s infrastructure is more decentralized, so even inhabitants of small cities use online services and have high purchasing ability.”
Prior to Poland, the team tried to enter the U.S. market. With $175,000 in investments, the team spent two months in the U.S., but the market turned out to be too competitive, costly and demanding in terms of the advanced marketing required.
To break into Poland, by contrast, none of the nine team members had to move there. They are still based in Ukraine, including the country manager.
According to the Polish Embassy in Ukraine, last year 1,000 out of more than 100,000 Ukrainian tech specialists moved to Poland to work. Ukrainian companies also outsourced some of the tech products in Poland.
The next markets on Preply’s list are Germany and Spanish-speaking countries.
The company’s service connects customer and tutors similarly how the social networks do, where tutors have detailed profiles.
Tutors set their own fee per hour. Preply’s commission is 100 percent of the first payment to the tutor. It then drops to 18-30 percent, designed to provide incentives for the tutor to provide better and more service.
Preply also collects feedback from customers about the tutors.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at[email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored byAVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
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