Here at the Center for Entrepreneurship, we prioritize globality, especially in the context of the acceleration program. We integrate this idea and the spirit of globalization and scaling, so we are very pleased to see that our teams are succeeding and actively developing outside of Ukraine.
And we already have a successful example of scaling and global thinking: SoMo Bot, members of our acceleration program, are now entering the market of Europe.
From a media monitoring agency to a Google opponent
Well, briefly about the most interesting! The startup was founded in December 2019, before that it was just a media monitoring agency. Later, we began to develop those products and realized that the agency contains too much unnecessary analytics, which is now effectively dealt with by IT systems. IT systems save time and can collect much more detailed data than 15 analysts (which is a lot of money when viewed in 5-10 years).
So now we’re changing our strategy a bit. If before it was a media monitoring bot that worked on key reminders on the Internet, now we want to turn it into a search service for mentions on the Internet. In fact, our competitors are Google, Rumbler, Yandex.
Sometime in August, we started to develop a media monitoring system similar to YouScan and LOOQME, but our technology is unique, it is written on our core, our parser – it is made in Ukraine 🙂 Our technology works much faster than the proposals of our competitors, and we this whole thing is a bit “corrected” by artificial intelligence and we continue to develop.
disRUPTOR
We are now planning to enter the international market because we understand and feel that the Ukrainian market is too small for media monitoring, and at this rate soon “there will be a lot of water in our boat.” That’s why we decided to go to the ocean in this boat. We will start with close Europe. We also thought about America, but we have not set up these international processes yet, some kind of support group, so it is difficult. We also thought about Asia, but this is a completely different mentality, we will have to turn everything upside down. We focused on the fact that the CIS countries and Central Europe are the best option, because we as a startup need to save resources.
Accelerator as a motivation for scaling
The idea came at a time when we were already in the acceleration program, mentoring sessions and the Go-2-Market Strategy module helped a lot. Let’s just say we have people on our team who graduated from Stanford and Harvard, but even these famous universities can’t provide you with knowledge that can be updated as quickly as things change in today’s world.
Thanks to the program, we changed our position a bit, adjusted the team. The mentoring session with Ivan Petrenko was especially helpful, he explained how to keep a busy team at a remote job to keep the family atmosphere of the startup.
We also really liked that the teachers and mentors of the Center for Entrepreneurship are trustworthy, because there is a lot of information about them and they are really authoritative specialists.