Roman Kirigetov, Kabanchik, “I can abandon business for three months and it will continue successful running”

Since the moment of transaction many changes have occurred. Let’s start from the team. How many employees do you have now?

Right now we have 12 employees [Editor’s note: The original article was published on March 07, 2018] . Our team is quite small. We try to hire the employees, who have high skills in diverse sectors. It means that they can contribute to performance of various tasks. If we are short of hands, we can use resources of EVO Group or search for the executor through our own service – Kabanchik. It’s not a joke. In most of the cases it is even faster: you place an advertisement, assign a task and get a result. Often this refers to Designers, Layout Designers and Copywriters.

How deeply are you involved in business yourself?

For the period of the company’s operation we have managed to build the processes in such a way that nobody notices if I take a three-month trip. To be honest, the company will be able to operate normally and have progress even if I am not there for half a year. I also search for weaknesses in the service and try to fill these gaps. I am playing the role of the person, who deals with strategic planning: I try to understand what we will be like in a further few years and what should be done for this purpose.

So, how do you see the service in the next few years?

Our goal is to cover all regions of Ukraine to a maximum extent as well as to provide
an opportunity to find the executor in the most diverse categories on our website. We have started from delivery and today, using our service, you can find a nurse or choreographer. In fact, we have to ensure that upon necessity to find an executor of any kind of works, the client should always think about us. It will take a certain time, but even now we are pretty good at it:

50,000 of executors from different cities already work using Kabanchik.

One more thing, we start working with networks. For example, now our partner is a network of construction stores “Leroy Merlin”. We have special offline stands, where you can come and order a service with the assistance of a consultant. In future we are going to place an advertisement near every product, which has to be installed: you buy the goods and a voucher for services. The store hands over such voucher to our skilled worker and you get the full service. We also have an idea to cooperate with housing complexes in order to provide their dwellers with an opportunity to order diverse works and services directly from our local representatives.

Do you have foreign countries in your schedule?

We look at Kazakhstan and Belarus, but we do not develop these markets. The matter is that we see still a lot of things to be done here in Ukraine. Therefore, the Ukrainian market is a priority for us. In future, we see the potential of entering to other countries. However, I suppose that it is not Europe, but rather the African and Asian countries.

Speaking of the future, Uber is going to buy thousands of cars to create, in fact, their own taxi service. Airbnb builds hotels. Actually, the companies partially move away from the initial business model and launch traditional businesses. Do you have something like this in mind – to create your own team of, let’s say, plumbers?

Actually, I have such an idea. It is caused by the reason that we already see the demand for such services on the part of huge corporate clients who can become our regular customer. For instance, a network of stores: from time to time they have something to repair or fasten. It is no sense to employ their own team and it can be a problem to engage third-party contractor – it can be not so fast, or the way of payment is unacceptable as they have to pay cash from the secretary’s personal account instead of transferring corporate funds. It would be more convenient for them if we became the company-executor and could send them our team at any time. Now we are working on the model where we will not hire plumbers, etc., but will have “permanent remote employees”, able to perform just our assignments.

How do you work with new cities and how do you find executors? What marketing channels do you use?

It is quite simple. Our service has internal analytics and we know where and what kind of services users need. Therefore, we can see that in one of the cities somebody is looking for a repairman. If there is no repairman or their number is too small, we can arrange a search by ourselves and find a local repairman, call him and offer job through our platform. To reach a critical mass we can call a few people and place advertisement in regional editions: sometimes it is one of the ways how we search for executors. Further a buzz marketing works: if the executor sees that there are continuous orders and everyone honestly pays – he/she will tell the others about it. The same is with the user who gets high-quality service and starts recommending the service to colleagues.

You take nothing from a user, but collect an interest from
an executor. How do they response to this?

We have no problems as an executor obtains access to the service, continuously providing the latter with job. To make it clear, we have some executors, who have more than a thousand of feedbacks: you can imagine how many tasks they have performed. And this example is illustrative of many others. The average time of response to user’s request is about 2 minutes. Kabanchik enables the executors to find tasks faster and almost without intermediaries: interface of the service is almost the only thing, which separates the executors from a user. Moreover, the executor pays a fee just in case if the task has been performed. We have examples when people, due to a huge number of orders, engaged assistants and, as a result, opened their own business. Something that comes to mind: a girl cleaned apartments herself and now she has 50+ employees and she is our corporate client (“Kabanchik” provides an opportunity to perform task not just by a person-executor, but also by the company).

What is the amount of fee for using the service?

For an executor it is 10%, but it shall not exceed 500 UAH per order. In other words, if you order a repair that is estimated at 50,000 UAH, the executor will pay just 500 UAH. Corporate clients can get additional bonuses for 1800/3000 UAH for the period of 6/12 months.

What is an average check for the services today and how has it changed?

We began with 40 UAK, and further it was 150 UAH. Now an average check for the task makes 600 – 800 UAH. We have about 30,000 orders each month.

The last amount of the company’s revenue, publicized in the media, is dated 2015, when you announced the acquisition. At that moment you had 3 million UAH of revenue per year. What do you have now?

I cannot disclose our financial situation. However, if earlier we earned 3 million UAH per year, now we have at least twice more per month. We are not loss-making and all that we earn we invest in development.

Kabanchik’s team

You have never disclosed conditions of the deal. Firstly, did angels, who had invested $60,000, withdraw from the shareholders’ structure? Secondly, have you been paid in cash or EVO equities?

An amount of the deal is not disclosed. I cannot also tell about the form of payment: money or equities. As for the angels – yes, their shares have been bought.

Well, let me rephrase the question: do you now work as a hired employee?

No, I don’t. I will only say that I am interested in growth and development of EVO business.

Photos are provided by the hero of the article.