Konstantin Kalinov, founder of Aviasales: we went to develop horizontally
On October 16, the master class of Konstantin Kalinov, the founder of Aviasales.ru, was held in the HSE building on Pokrovsky Boulevard in Moscow. He flew for a while from Thailand, where the head office of the project is located. I visited this event and offer you, I think, an interesting report. This is not a review article, these are questions from the audience and the answers to Constantine.
Just a few moments. First, I tried to convey the most accurate questions from the audience and the answers of Constantine. The second is that everyone turned to him on “you”, at his request. Well, there is a small amount of vocabulary, but “you cannot throw out the words from a song”.
')
I'd add on my own - I liked what Konstantin was talking about.
Enjoy reading.
Question from the audience: Share, what did you do before? You must have a rich background.
Konstantin Kalinov: I generally got on the Internet around 1994. It was a long time ago and then no one had this Internet, and people did not know what the Internet is. We sat on some hacked accounts, hacked modems to get on the Internet. Such indecency involved. But it was a long time ago, I was young and did not weigh anything.
Then I somehow walked away from this, graduated from the Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (audience laughter), worked in the police as a senior opera. Then I left law enforcement, and went to work at the plant, was engaged in economic security. But even there something did not grow together, because it was the same cops, only they were not in uniform, but in suits.
In 2000, I was actually out of work. I wondered how I would like to do? And he remembered the Internet. I was already a fairly active user.
I sat down and thought: how is that, I pay for some 50-100 dollars to access the Internet, how do all these websites exist at all? What do they live for? They are free, I do not buy anything from them, I use them, but where do they get money from?
With this question, I actually went to the Internet. Then there was no Google, Yandex was some, did not even know then that there is one. There was a Yahoo! And at school I studied German and I did not know a word in English. I sat down and began to understand how it works, I found webmasters forums where everyone discussed this. What kind of marketing do they have, how did websites do, etc.
I was sitting with some kind of paper translator. Then I did not have online translators, looked at the texts and tried to understand what they wanted to say? Well, and since I did not know English, I could not do any websites, because I could not program and did not know anything. And I thought about the sites about love: there are few words, and there are many cases.
And actually got into this business, it was in 2000. I will dispel your doubts, this business is legal, but not in Russia. It is legal throughout the world with the exception of only Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and of Muslim countries. In the USA, this is a legal business and there are quite a number of corporations that earn a lot on this.
There were some rumors that Hollywood pavilions, in which shooting films and programs take place, do not in themselves bring money. They bring money when they are rented to these guys. Well, in general, adult is a very interesting business.
In the sense that it’s generally very interesting how it moves the Internet. In all seriousness. These huge transatlantic highways that YouTube is currently running on — once used to run porn. And they were built to run on them porn. Because in those years it was 90% of the pumped traffic.
Because the text weighs a little, and the pictures weigh a lot. And this is a very great move the Internet industry forward. And, contextual advertising was invented by porn movies!
In fact, these guys - they are very seriously moving the Internet industry forward. It seems that they are just bad guys. All these stories about the conversion, about the manipulation of the conversion - all from there. Because when you earn 50 thousand dollars and from them 45 thousand dollars you spend on servers, on which everything is kept and swings at you - you have to clearly count. Where do you lose, and where do you win. And this business has taught me a lot.
I do not advise you to go there now, there the competition is just hellish. And with such a mass distribution of free content - with sales is now very bad.
But, nevertheless, for me it was a pretty good kick. There was a moment, I was engaged in traffic generating projects and the attendance was about 3-5 million people a day and hundreds of sites. It was very cool to understand how much traffic it brings.
We wrote a system that “ate” the server logs on the fly, understood how the user interacts with the site, what clicks, what kind of conversion it creates and shows it all clearly. And this allowed us to cut our expenses by a third and 5 thousand dollars of profit turned into 15 thousand dollars in just 2 months.
And at that moment I thought, was it really we who invented such a thing? Probably, it is necessary to show it somewhere and try to earn. So my software business appeared.
We suffered for about half a year. There were a lot of sales, there were a lot of people who wanted to. But we are faced with such a story that a very big question arises, how to maintain it on another server?
The software was really very complicated, it was written in C ++ and it worked very quickly. And then we came up with the first SaaS-model. We began to sell our customers a ready-made solution: you buy a server from us, we put everything on you, we support you, software is free for you. You only pay for the server.
And so I got a hosting company. My partner and I have built a data center in Prague, now it has the second or third. I have been doing this for a long time, there were many customers who buy 10 servers at once. These are customers who spend tens of thousands of dollars a month for your service. And accordingly behave accordingly.
It doesn’t matter to them whether you are sleeping or not sleeping, where you are, in what country. They pick up the phone at 3 am, and if they want to talk, they call you. You have to get up, go to the computer and communicate with them. I somehow got so pissed off that I sold the business for 5% of the value of the assets. I got out, got the money, with this money I lived a year and the whole year.
Question from the audience: What is your general attitude towards venture capital?
Konstantin Kalinov: We tried to look for investments. Well, as "we", I tried to look for investments. All investors laughed: “What do you mean? This is some kind of garbage, it will not work, I will not participate in it. Who needs it? This is some kind of nonsense. Here is Anywayanyday, here is Pososhok, which is 10 years old. Here there is a DAVS, which is some kind of ancient, it has 50 air ticket offices throughout the country. Here they are great, and you do not understand Nichrome. ”
Question from the audience: How are you developing the service now?
Konstantin Kalinov: We went to develop horizontally. In RuNet, our share is 15-20%, it can be increased, but difficult. Therefore, we went to other countries. We launched a product for China, now Germany is launched, then Turkey, then Australia and Thailand, where the head office is located.
Question from the audience: Why is China?
Konstantin Kalinov: China is a big country, 2 billion people live in China, it is 1/3 of the population of the entire globe. China last year signed a firm contract for the 900 Boeing 373, this is a short-haul aircraft. China this year launched the assembly of its own aircraft.
Last year, China signed a firm contract for 800 Airbus 320 aircraft, which are also short-haul aircraft. China is developing at a frantic pace. Now you can still “jump in the carriage”, but time is running out.
Question from the audience: You said that the company was developing at its own expense. When did the hiring of people start in the team?
Konstantin Kalinov: As I said, the company did not invest in pure form, I worked first alone. Well, in general, the site, it was a site, there was no engine, but there was traffic, there was advertising. This money is 100% spent on employee salaries. The first programmer - development - more money. The second programmer - development - more money. And so on.
- How many employees do you have?
- Now about 50.
- Are you a programmer?
- I can program, but I did it the last time for a very long time and it turns out very expensive. My time is more expensive.
Question from the audience: Did you think about leaving the company with money?
Konstantin Kalinov: Now I see no way out for myself. I do not know what should happen so that I now sell the company. It grows, and grows by 300-400% per year. We are growing faster than the fastest growing fund.
Personally, I do not care about this issue, I get a salary, and this is enough for me. And now we are earning more than we can spend. We are just looking for a point of application of power, where I can put 100 thousand dollars and in a month there will be 110 thousand dollars. And extrapolate: put a million and in a month "take out" a million and 100 thousand dollars. When we find such a point, we will attract money, wanting a lot.
Question from the audience: Is the headquarters location in Thailand a business decision or a personal one?
Konstantin Kalinov: Here is both. About 6 years ago I flew to Thailand to spend the winter for 3 months - and I stayed there. One year out of these six I lived in Russia, when my wife was pregnant and the child was born. And at that moment Aviasales developed, these were the first steps - we moved to Thailand with the whole team.
This is a personal motive, because I am sick in St. Petersburg, even though I come from there, this climate is killing me. This climate is killing my son, who is also constantly sick there. And it was a personal decision - this time. And secondly, the cost. For example, for your office in 700 square meters. meters on the beach, we pay 115 thousand rubles a month. Now compare with Moscow.
Question from the audience: You said that in due time investors were, to say the least, cool towards your project. And if a man came to you now and said that he wanted to make such a service, would you answer him?
Konstantin Kalinov: I would say that the train has left. In fact, once a week I see a new Aviasales: blue, green, red, black, yellow, etc. There are many of them, and if you find them ... well, you will not find everything, because many have already died. Well, do not live. It's just such a story that a player can only be one, well, a maximum of two, the third has nothing to do there.
Question from the audience: What is your biggest difference from competitors, what gives you so fast to develop?
Konstantin Kalinov: Yes, they are also developing quite quickly. It seems to me that this is the image of the company that manages to shape into the eyes of people. We are ready for dialogue, we are ready for any contacts.
Any user on our site can write to me, and I will answer. If I am at the computer, I will answer in 5 minutes. It bribes many people, they write to me, and I answer. Sometimes they write a lot, and I answer a lot. Try writing something.
Question from the audience: How do financial processes take place, are they on your side?
Konstantin Kalinov: We do not take a card from a client, we are a search engine. We are looking for tickets for 45 air ticket offices and send the user to buy there. Next, we take their sales data, find out which partner brought which sale, and charge him a commission.
At the partner it looks in the form of a table with statistics. It indicates how many searches there were, how many sales there were, how much money he earned, etc.
It is possible to separate traffic by source, i.e. this is what we call markers. From different sources, traffic can be marked differently, see what works better, what works worse. All this is built on a system of markers.
Those. Users visiting our site are marked with a special label. This tag drags him around the site. If he has gone somewhere, this label is transmitted along with it, and we get a report.
This, by the way, can be done on Google analytics. If your partners cannot provide you with such information promptly, you can request them to make you a separate access to the meter, which will only show your traffic. This is done easily, but there will be some inaccuracies. But for operational management it is quite suitable.
Question from the audience: How much traffic comes to you through affiliate networks?
Konstantin Kalinov: Partner sales are about 10-15% in Russia. It seems to me that this is not enough, there is potential. We just do not really understand how to work with networks, with some it turns out. We have affiliate networks that have $ 1,000 a day sales.
Question from the audience: You said that it is impossible to “play” with discounts. And what can be offered to regular customers? For example, the categories of people who pay the most?
Konstantin Kalinov: We must offer them some additional value. Any Playing with the price is a very dangerous thing that leads you out of a business with a large margin to a business with a small margin. And it is very dangerous to get involved in it.
The easiest seemingly tool. Made a discount - all came running. No not like this. They have come running now, tomorrow they will not come to you again and will go to look for a new discount. And this is not the audience that you have left.
With mailing lists we do it like this - we have several types of mailings. There is the simplest when the user receives a list just all of their proposals, which we have collected for yesterday. This is the easiest type of mailing.
And we have the opportunity to subscribe to a specific tariff. For example, I want to fly on February 1 from Moscow to Washington. And now I have attended to the search for this ticket, and I do not really understand whether it is expensive or cheap. And now it seems to me that I still don’t need to buy, and maybe I want, and maybe something will change. But I can subscribe to this fare, and every day will receive a letter containing the exact price of the flight.
Thus, monitoring price changes can give the moment when this ticket will be cheap and you can buy it.
Question from the audience: Mobile application, does it give anything? At least there is an order of numbers.
Konstantin Kalinov: 10%.
Question from the audience: What is the average market conversion rate for air tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: In general, in the industry it is believed that if your site converts 2% of visits to the site into sales, this is a success. I think that this figure is 3.5%.
Question from the audience: I would like to know about the conversion. How did you increase it, how did you work with it?
Konstantin Kalinov: A / B testing, we have a lot of iterations. We are trying. Made the button orange, pomer. Nothing changed. Transferred it to the right - slightly changed. Added a reference to the basket, something has increased. Those. these are very, very many short iterations. We have a lot of traffic and 2-3 hours are enough to estimate the conversion.
And we have now developed a system that allows us to “roll out” changes very quickly and “roll back” changes very quickly. We have it all on Ruby with Rails and we have now separated what the user sees from the internal engine and pretty quickly roll out the changes very easily. Actually here are some manipulations
Question from the audience: How do you analyze traffic? Standard analytics or you have something of your own?
Konstantin Kalinov: We have our own system. We also use analytics, as well as paid solutions, but more as informational. All main analytics on searches, clicks, transitions, sales - all of it is ours.
Question from the audience: Did you have such a desire to stop being a metasearch and sell tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, it did not appear, because there is a conflict of interests. It is clear that the sale of their tickets will bring more money and it will be more profitable to make a sale for yourself, rather than sell air ticket tickets. And accordingly, I can not keep myself in order not to manipulate the issue. Therefore, I do not want conflicts of interest.
Question from the audience: How much do you spend on advertising?
Konstantin Kalinov: What is considered advertising? We have contracts that we have paid for a year.
We just think a little bit wrong. We simply consider the money spent on the advertising channel. For months, I do not break, but we have no concept of budgeting. I know how much we spend on the context, for example, last week - 12 thousand dollars was spent.
Question from the audience: And what is the most effective channel?
Konstantin Kalinov: What is effective? If we are talking about profit per user, yes, this is contextual advertising. Well, probably, along with the mailing list. And if you take in terms of sales, then this is an affiliate program. And before the active development of the affiliate program - seo was an excellent source.
Question from the audience: Social networks do not give customers?
Konstantin Kalinov: Social networks give customers, but so far quite a few. Let's just say social networks are for users to communicate. For the formation of this image of the company here and in order for the company name to be heard.
Buying advertising on social networks and bringing it to the site is expensive, we don’t even go to zero for this type of advertising. Now we are creating an audience around our community, but it is impossible to monetize it all the time, so we entertain users more, give some beautiful content and sometimes give some commercial offers. We slowly begin to understand in what proportions and what to do and slowly the audience in social networks is growing.
Question from the audience: Tell me, is it difficult at all to force yourself to work?
Konstantin Kalinov: In the sense of forcing yourself to work? I force myself to rest! This business is like a child you cannot leave, and sometimes you have to beat your hands, leave the computer, try not to take a mobile phone.
Question from the audience: How do you open offices in other countries?
Konstantin Kalinov: None. We just open up. We are on the Internet. Until recently, we did not have an office in Moscow. How did we work in Russia? Yes, that's it, through the Internet.
Question from the audience: Why the office in Moscow?
Konstantin Kalinov: And there were 2 reasons.In Moscow, there were employees who we needed, but who were not ready to move to Thailand. Well, most of our partners are in Moscow. And with them you need to somehow arrange communication.
Question from the audience: Can you tell something interesting about the increase in conversion on the site? For example, they made an inscription blue, or put a search in another place or something else.
Konstantin Kalinov: Yes. We used to have a search form on the right and occupied about 1/3 of the screen. When it was made on the entire width of the screen - the conversion increased almost 2 times.
We are all the time trying to convey to people that we are not selling anything, we are a search engine for avibilets. And we had it so that when you click on the “buy” button, a window with a list of partners was opened. And then we removed the window and put the click "buy" on the cheapest place. Conversion increased by 2 times.
Question from the audience: What business would you do? What would you go now, but you just do not have time?
Konstantin Kalinov: Now mobile development is very interesting. Mobile technologies and the opportunities that a mobile phone gives us, they open up enormous prospects for all such interesting services.
I flew on a plane, listened to an interview with the founder of GetTaxi, got off the plane, got on an express train and called a taxi at the entrance to the station. Fucking works. I missed such a thing a couple of weeks ago when I was standing in the rain in Bangkok. And not a single taxi stopped, we drove by.
And those who stopped, said no, I'm not taking you. I do not understand why, because they know this fucking Thai language so well. And there I suffered, I called this taxi service, but no one knows English and I cannot call myself a car.
Even when I take a car, I can’t explain the address to him, I show it on the map, but he doesn’t understand. Born in the village. I really need it in Bangkok, in Shanghai I need it.
Question from the audience:How difficult it was to form a team of the best specialists. How do you disassemble it?
Konstantin Kalinov: Very difficult. And hiring each programmer costs several thousand dollars. That is exactly the search and recruitment. We take specialists only with the highest possible level. In the meantime, you will find it. ... Basically, these are Russians and Belarusians. Well, there are from other countries, but all are Russian speakers.
We have no turnover. We try to do so that our people have the most interesting, the desire to work and technical specialists do not “flow” at all. For all the time, 3 people left the company. I fired one, and the two left.
Question from the audience: What are the biggest problems in the team?
Konstantin Kalinov:Yes, they are fighting, infection, on these motorbikes! And the rest is no problem. Guys are falling off mopeds, especially when they first arrived. And the problem of hiring exists, we want to be cool specialists, as a rule, these are people who are already under 30 and more. They have wives and children. And problems of location appear, they do not even consider moving somewhere. Although there is nothing difficult, believe me. I also have a wife and child. And many in our company have wives and children. Problem location is not a problem. This is the problem for them.
Question from the audience: Do you have a small child, where will you teach him?
Konstantin Kalinov: There are British International Schools in Phuket - this is a school at Cambridge, you will not find such an education in Moscow.
Question from the audience:And not inviting foreign specialists - is this a principled position?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, no, there is simply no need, we are coping. We tried to work with the Hindus, but this is dark, of course. This is total darkness. They just have a completely different approach.
He heard that there is some such technology, let's say xml. He worked in the company, and at the next table there was a dude who knew something about xml. And this already writes itself in the summary - xml.
Well, I'm exaggerating, of course. You send them a task, and the Hindus are polite and he answers you why he wrote like that. And he writes how he understood this task. Reread what you sent to him. What did he want to say that? The Chinese are better in this regard. But there they have with English just a very serious misfortune.
Question from the audience: Konstantin, do you plan to become a business angel or can you be an investor?
Konstantin Kalinov: Well, I don’t have enough money for an angel or an investment. The company has no task to invest. And for those who address me, I help. Is free. Well, if I have time and if I find it interesting.
Just a few moments. First, I tried to convey the most accurate questions from the audience and the answers of Constantine. The second is that everyone turned to him on “you”, at his request. Well, there is a small amount of vocabulary, but “you cannot throw out the words from a song”.
')
I'd add on my own - I liked what Konstantin was talking about.
Enjoy reading.
Question from the audience: Share, what did you do before? You must have a rich background.
Konstantin Kalinov: I generally got on the Internet around 1994. It was a long time ago and then no one had this Internet, and people did not know what the Internet is. We sat on some hacked accounts, hacked modems to get on the Internet. Such indecency involved. But it was a long time ago, I was young and did not weigh anything.
Then I somehow walked away from this, graduated from the Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (audience laughter), worked in the police as a senior opera. Then I left law enforcement, and went to work at the plant, was engaged in economic security. But even there something did not grow together, because it was the same cops, only they were not in uniform, but in suits.
In 2000, I was actually out of work. I wondered how I would like to do? And he remembered the Internet. I was already a fairly active user.
I sat down and thought: how is that, I pay for some 50-100 dollars to access the Internet, how do all these websites exist at all? What do they live for? They are free, I do not buy anything from them, I use them, but where do they get money from?
With this question, I actually went to the Internet. Then there was no Google, Yandex was some, did not even know then that there is one. There was a Yahoo! And at school I studied German and I did not know a word in English. I sat down and began to understand how it works, I found webmasters forums where everyone discussed this. What kind of marketing do they have, how did websites do, etc.
I was sitting with some kind of paper translator. Then I did not have online translators, looked at the texts and tried to understand what they wanted to say? Well, and since I did not know English, I could not do any websites, because I could not program and did not know anything. And I thought about the sites about love: there are few words, and there are many cases.
And actually got into this business, it was in 2000. I will dispel your doubts, this business is legal, but not in Russia. It is legal throughout the world with the exception of only Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and of Muslim countries. In the USA, this is a legal business and there are quite a number of corporations that earn a lot on this.
There were some rumors that Hollywood pavilions, in which shooting films and programs take place, do not in themselves bring money. They bring money when they are rented to these guys. Well, in general, adult is a very interesting business.
In the sense that it’s generally very interesting how it moves the Internet. In all seriousness. These huge transatlantic highways that YouTube is currently running on — once used to run porn. And they were built to run on them porn. Because in those years it was 90% of the pumped traffic.
Because the text weighs a little, and the pictures weigh a lot. And this is a very great move the Internet industry forward. And, contextual advertising was invented by porn movies!
In fact, these guys - they are very seriously moving the Internet industry forward. It seems that they are just bad guys. All these stories about the conversion, about the manipulation of the conversion - all from there. Because when you earn 50 thousand dollars and from them 45 thousand dollars you spend on servers, on which everything is kept and swings at you - you have to clearly count. Where do you lose, and where do you win. And this business has taught me a lot.
I do not advise you to go there now, there the competition is just hellish. And with such a mass distribution of free content - with sales is now very bad.
But, nevertheless, for me it was a pretty good kick. There was a moment, I was engaged in traffic generating projects and the attendance was about 3-5 million people a day and hundreds of sites. It was very cool to understand how much traffic it brings.
We wrote a system that “ate” the server logs on the fly, understood how the user interacts with the site, what clicks, what kind of conversion it creates and shows it all clearly. And this allowed us to cut our expenses by a third and 5 thousand dollars of profit turned into 15 thousand dollars in just 2 months.
And at that moment I thought, was it really we who invented such a thing? Probably, it is necessary to show it somewhere and try to earn. So my software business appeared.
We suffered for about half a year. There were a lot of sales, there were a lot of people who wanted to. But we are faced with such a story that a very big question arises, how to maintain it on another server?
The software was really very complicated, it was written in C ++ and it worked very quickly. And then we came up with the first SaaS-model. We began to sell our customers a ready-made solution: you buy a server from us, we put everything on you, we support you, software is free for you. You only pay for the server.
And so I got a hosting company. My partner and I have built a data center in Prague, now it has the second or third. I have been doing this for a long time, there were many customers who buy 10 servers at once. These are customers who spend tens of thousands of dollars a month for your service. And accordingly behave accordingly.
It doesn’t matter to them whether you are sleeping or not sleeping, where you are, in what country. They pick up the phone at 3 am, and if they want to talk, they call you. You have to get up, go to the computer and communicate with them. I somehow got so pissed off that I sold the business for 5% of the value of the assets. I got out, got the money, with this money I lived a year and the whole year.
Question from the audience: What is your general attitude towards venture capital?
Konstantin Kalinov: We tried to look for investments. Well, as "we", I tried to look for investments. All investors laughed: “What do you mean? This is some kind of garbage, it will not work, I will not participate in it. Who needs it? This is some kind of nonsense. Here is Anywayanyday, here is Pososhok, which is 10 years old. Here there is a DAVS, which is some kind of ancient, it has 50 air ticket offices throughout the country. Here they are great, and you do not understand Nichrome. ”
Question from the audience: How are you developing the service now?
Konstantin Kalinov: We went to develop horizontally. In RuNet, our share is 15-20%, it can be increased, but difficult. Therefore, we went to other countries. We launched a product for China, now Germany is launched, then Turkey, then Australia and Thailand, where the head office is located.
Question from the audience: Why is China?
Konstantin Kalinov: China is a big country, 2 billion people live in China, it is 1/3 of the population of the entire globe. China last year signed a firm contract for the 900 Boeing 373, this is a short-haul aircraft. China this year launched the assembly of its own aircraft.
Last year, China signed a firm contract for 800 Airbus 320 aircraft, which are also short-haul aircraft. China is developing at a frantic pace. Now you can still “jump in the carriage”, but time is running out.
Question from the audience: You said that the company was developing at its own expense. When did the hiring of people start in the team?
Konstantin Kalinov: As I said, the company did not invest in pure form, I worked first alone. Well, in general, the site, it was a site, there was no engine, but there was traffic, there was advertising. This money is 100% spent on employee salaries. The first programmer - development - more money. The second programmer - development - more money. And so on.
- How many employees do you have?
- Now about 50.
- Are you a programmer?
- I can program, but I did it the last time for a very long time and it turns out very expensive. My time is more expensive.
Question from the audience: Did you think about leaving the company with money?
Konstantin Kalinov: Now I see no way out for myself. I do not know what should happen so that I now sell the company. It grows, and grows by 300-400% per year. We are growing faster than the fastest growing fund.
Personally, I do not care about this issue, I get a salary, and this is enough for me. And now we are earning more than we can spend. We are just looking for a point of application of power, where I can put 100 thousand dollars and in a month there will be 110 thousand dollars. And extrapolate: put a million and in a month "take out" a million and 100 thousand dollars. When we find such a point, we will attract money, wanting a lot.
Question from the audience: Is the headquarters location in Thailand a business decision or a personal one?
Konstantin Kalinov: Here is both. About 6 years ago I flew to Thailand to spend the winter for 3 months - and I stayed there. One year out of these six I lived in Russia, when my wife was pregnant and the child was born. And at that moment Aviasales developed, these were the first steps - we moved to Thailand with the whole team.
This is a personal motive, because I am sick in St. Petersburg, even though I come from there, this climate is killing me. This climate is killing my son, who is also constantly sick there. And it was a personal decision - this time. And secondly, the cost. For example, for your office in 700 square meters. meters on the beach, we pay 115 thousand rubles a month. Now compare with Moscow.
Question from the audience: You said that in due time investors were, to say the least, cool towards your project. And if a man came to you now and said that he wanted to make such a service, would you answer him?
Konstantin Kalinov: I would say that the train has left. In fact, once a week I see a new Aviasales: blue, green, red, black, yellow, etc. There are many of them, and if you find them ... well, you will not find everything, because many have already died. Well, do not live. It's just such a story that a player can only be one, well, a maximum of two, the third has nothing to do there.
Question from the audience: What is your biggest difference from competitors, what gives you so fast to develop?
Konstantin Kalinov: Yes, they are also developing quite quickly. It seems to me that this is the image of the company that manages to shape into the eyes of people. We are ready for dialogue, we are ready for any contacts.
Any user on our site can write to me, and I will answer. If I am at the computer, I will answer in 5 minutes. It bribes many people, they write to me, and I answer. Sometimes they write a lot, and I answer a lot. Try writing something.
Question from the audience: How do financial processes take place, are they on your side?
Konstantin Kalinov: We do not take a card from a client, we are a search engine. We are looking for tickets for 45 air ticket offices and send the user to buy there. Next, we take their sales data, find out which partner brought which sale, and charge him a commission.
At the partner it looks in the form of a table with statistics. It indicates how many searches there were, how many sales there were, how much money he earned, etc.
It is possible to separate traffic by source, i.e. this is what we call markers. From different sources, traffic can be marked differently, see what works better, what works worse. All this is built on a system of markers.
Those. Users visiting our site are marked with a special label. This tag drags him around the site. If he has gone somewhere, this label is transmitted along with it, and we get a report.
This, by the way, can be done on Google analytics. If your partners cannot provide you with such information promptly, you can request them to make you a separate access to the meter, which will only show your traffic. This is done easily, but there will be some inaccuracies. But for operational management it is quite suitable.
Question from the audience: How much traffic comes to you through affiliate networks?
Konstantin Kalinov: Partner sales are about 10-15% in Russia. It seems to me that this is not enough, there is potential. We just do not really understand how to work with networks, with some it turns out. We have affiliate networks that have $ 1,000 a day sales.
Question from the audience: You said that it is impossible to “play” with discounts. And what can be offered to regular customers? For example, the categories of people who pay the most?
Konstantin Kalinov: We must offer them some additional value. Any Playing with the price is a very dangerous thing that leads you out of a business with a large margin to a business with a small margin. And it is very dangerous to get involved in it.
The easiest seemingly tool. Made a discount - all came running. No not like this. They have come running now, tomorrow they will not come to you again and will go to look for a new discount. And this is not the audience that you have left.
With mailing lists we do it like this - we have several types of mailings. There is the simplest when the user receives a list just all of their proposals, which we have collected for yesterday. This is the easiest type of mailing.
And we have the opportunity to subscribe to a specific tariff. For example, I want to fly on February 1 from Moscow to Washington. And now I have attended to the search for this ticket, and I do not really understand whether it is expensive or cheap. And now it seems to me that I still don’t need to buy, and maybe I want, and maybe something will change. But I can subscribe to this fare, and every day will receive a letter containing the exact price of the flight.
Thus, monitoring price changes can give the moment when this ticket will be cheap and you can buy it.
Question from the audience: Mobile application, does it give anything? At least there is an order of numbers.
Konstantin Kalinov: 10%.
Question from the audience: What is the average market conversion rate for air tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: In general, in the industry it is believed that if your site converts 2% of visits to the site into sales, this is a success. I think that this figure is 3.5%.
Question from the audience: I would like to know about the conversion. How did you increase it, how did you work with it?
Konstantin Kalinov: A / B testing, we have a lot of iterations. We are trying. Made the button orange, pomer. Nothing changed. Transferred it to the right - slightly changed. Added a reference to the basket, something has increased. Those. these are very, very many short iterations. We have a lot of traffic and 2-3 hours are enough to estimate the conversion.
And we have now developed a system that allows us to “roll out” changes very quickly and “roll back” changes very quickly. We have it all on Ruby with Rails and we have now separated what the user sees from the internal engine and pretty quickly roll out the changes very easily. Actually here are some manipulations
Question from the audience: How do you analyze traffic? Standard analytics or you have something of your own?
Konstantin Kalinov: We have our own system. We also use analytics, as well as paid solutions, but more as informational. All main analytics on searches, clicks, transitions, sales - all of it is ours.
Question from the audience: Did you have such a desire to stop being a metasearch and sell tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, it did not appear, because there is a conflict of interests. It is clear that the sale of their tickets will bring more money and it will be more profitable to make a sale for yourself, rather than sell air ticket tickets. And accordingly, I can not keep myself in order not to manipulate the issue. Therefore, I do not want conflicts of interest.
Question from the audience: How much do you spend on advertising?
Konstantin Kalinov: What is considered advertising? We have contracts that we have paid for a year.
We just think a little bit wrong. We simply consider the money spent on the advertising channel. For months, I do not break, but we have no concept of budgeting. I know how much we spend on the context, for example, last week - 12 thousand dollars was spent.
Question from the audience: And what is the most effective channel?
Konstantin Kalinov: What is effective? If we are talking about profit per user, yes, this is contextual advertising. Well, probably, along with the mailing list. And if you take in terms of sales, then this is an affiliate program. And before the active development of the affiliate program - seo was an excellent source.
Question from the audience: Social networks do not give customers?
Konstantin Kalinov: Social networks give customers, but so far quite a few. Let's just say social networks are for users to communicate. For the formation of this image of the company here and in order for the company name to be heard.
Buying advertising on social networks and bringing it to the site is expensive, we don’t even go to zero for this type of advertising. Now we are creating an audience around our community, but it is impossible to monetize it all the time, so we entertain users more, give some beautiful content and sometimes give some commercial offers. We slowly begin to understand in what proportions and what to do and slowly the audience in social networks is growing.
Question from the audience: Tell me, is it difficult at all to force yourself to work?
Konstantin Kalinov: In the sense of forcing yourself to work? I force myself to rest! This business is like a child you cannot leave, and sometimes you have to beat your hands, leave the computer, try not to take a mobile phone.
Question from the audience: How do you open offices in other countries?
Konstantin Kalinov: None. We just open up. We are on the Internet. Until recently, we did not have an office in Moscow. How did we work in Russia? Yes, that's it, through the Internet.
Question from the audience: Why the office in Moscow?
Konstantin Kalinov: And there were 2 reasons.In Moscow, there were employees who we needed, but who were not ready to move to Thailand. Well, most of our partners are in Moscow. And with them you need to somehow arrange communication.
Question from the audience: Can you tell something interesting about the increase in conversion on the site? For example, they made an inscription blue, or put a search in another place or something else.
Konstantin Kalinov: Yes. We used to have a search form on the right and occupied about 1/3 of the screen. When it was made on the entire width of the screen - the conversion increased almost 2 times.
We are all the time trying to convey to people that we are not selling anything, we are a search engine for avibilets. And we had it so that when you click on the “buy” button, a window with a list of partners was opened. And then we removed the window and put the click "buy" on the cheapest place. Conversion increased by 2 times.
Question from the audience: What business would you do? What would you go now, but you just do not have time?
Konstantin Kalinov: Now mobile development is very interesting. Mobile technologies and the opportunities that a mobile phone gives us, they open up enormous prospects for all such interesting services.
I flew on a plane, listened to an interview with the founder of GetTaxi, got off the plane, got on an express train and called a taxi at the entrance to the station. Fucking works. I missed such a thing a couple of weeks ago when I was standing in the rain in Bangkok. And not a single taxi stopped, we drove by.
And those who stopped, said no, I'm not taking you. I do not understand why, because they know this fucking Thai language so well. And there I suffered, I called this taxi service, but no one knows English and I cannot call myself a car.
Even when I take a car, I can’t explain the address to him, I show it on the map, but he doesn’t understand. Born in the village. I really need it in Bangkok, in Shanghai I need it.
Question from the audience:How difficult it was to form a team of the best specialists. How do you disassemble it?
Konstantin Kalinov: Very difficult. And hiring each programmer costs several thousand dollars. That is exactly the search and recruitment. We take specialists only with the highest possible level. In the meantime, you will find it. ... Basically, these are Russians and Belarusians. Well, there are from other countries, but all are Russian speakers.
We have no turnover. We try to do so that our people have the most interesting, the desire to work and technical specialists do not “flow” at all. For all the time, 3 people left the company. I fired one, and the two left.
Question from the audience: What are the biggest problems in the team?
Konstantin Kalinov:Yes, they are fighting, infection, on these motorbikes! And the rest is no problem. Guys are falling off mopeds, especially when they first arrived. And the problem of hiring exists, we want to be cool specialists, as a rule, these are people who are already under 30 and more. They have wives and children. And problems of location appear, they do not even consider moving somewhere. Although there is nothing difficult, believe me. I also have a wife and child. And many in our company have wives and children. Problem location is not a problem. This is the problem for them.
Question from the audience: Do you have a small child, where will you teach him?
Konstantin Kalinov: There are British International Schools in Phuket - this is a school at Cambridge, you will not find such an education in Moscow.
Question from the audience:And not inviting foreign specialists - is this a principled position?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, no, there is simply no need, we are coping. We tried to work with the Hindus, but this is dark, of course. This is total darkness. They just have a completely different approach.
He heard that there is some such technology, let's say xml. He worked in the company, and at the next table there was a dude who knew something about xml. And this already writes itself in the summary - xml.
Well, I'm exaggerating, of course. You send them a task, and the Hindus are polite and he answers you why he wrote like that. And he writes how he understood this task. Reread what you sent to him. What did he want to say that? The Chinese are better in this regard. But there they have with English just a very serious misfortune.
Question from the audience: Konstantin, do you plan to become a business angel or can you be an investor?
Konstantin Kalinov: Well, I don’t have enough money for an angel or an investment. The company has no task to invest. And for those who address me, I help. Is free. Well, if I have time and if I find it interesting.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/155317/
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