How we did cashback service kubish.ru

Welcome, Habrozhiteli! In this post, we will share our experience of launching the international cashback service kubish.ru directly from Silicon Valley.

In September of this year, we learned that the Japanese bought our largest American competitor for $ 1 billion. dollars, and they understood what it is worth striving for now, but let's get into the history first.

It all started in Silicon Valley, in which my partner and I were by the will of fate and accidentally met on the Internet.
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February 2014. Idea
We started working on the project in February of this year and formulated the idea as the most convenient service that allows you to buy goods from online stores all over the world and receive cashback return from purchases. Such services work in America, Europe, start working in Russia, but there was no one service that would allow you to receive cashback from purchases from any continent.

Startup name
This is a difficult task that confronts each project. We stopped at the name CloverR. Clover (Clover in Russian) personifies rather pleasant image. “R” at the end is indicated by “rebates” (discounts). There was an option to be called “Broccoli”, but the Americans have not very pleasant associations with this type of cabbage, so they left CloverR.

The working process
We started the development of the service together. I wrote the code, and Edward analyzed the market and competitors, drew interfaces and worked on usability. We met several times a week in a very famous place in the Valley called Hacker Dojo , where you can meet hackers, eat free pizza, and also fix your project at weekly events on Fridays.



By the way, sometimes Hacker Dojo lets in to train girls, which somewhat distracts from the project.



We worked in the middle of the week, and on weekends we rode bikes around Google, discussing plans.



In the intervals between the development it was possible, for example, to go to a friend for a job in Tesla and once again wonder at the strength of human potential.



Play volleyball with friends by the ocean:



There was still a lot of work, we needed a team that we began to gradually recruit from distant developers. So appeared Alex, Victor, and then the other members of the team.

April 2014. Company registration
In Silicon Valley, and indeed in America, there is a whole industry servicing new startups. C-corporation registration cost us $ 5k. The company should register if you are going to do business. This is important both for the conduct of the business itself and for future investors - 90% of American companies are registered in the state of Delaware. We registered CLOVERR CORPORATION and received 4 million shares each.



July 2014. Validation of the idea
We met mixed reviews. Some said it was cool. Others - that we can not cope with big competitors. We also worked on marketing and focusing with a teacher from Stanford - Daniel Kislinsky, for which many thanks to him!



August 2014 First sale
After 6 months of developing the service, we were ready for beta testing. A lot of time was spent on integration with external systems, reading documentation and licensing agreements of our future partners. Since we did the project simultaneously for different countries, we took into account all the nuances associated with multicurrency and localization. In June, we announced the service in our blog and got the first sale through the service for $ 3, from which we earned as much as 24 cents!

November 2014. Launch in Russia
Two weeks have passed since the launch of the project in Russia, and good results have turned out. To date, more than 2,000 online stores, among which about 700 are Russian, and in the near future, another 500 will be launched. They have created a six-figure amount of stores and are growing at 1% per day. Plan for the year - the achievement of 1000 sales per day. This is the minimum bracket.

purpose
Creating the most convenient and responsive cashback service on the Internet. We are not engaged in delivery, logistics, communication with the client, the selection of the range. Even the purchase of goods and payment takes place at the online store, and not with us. All this is done by our partners, we only give customers the opportunity to receive remuneration from their usual purchases, which can sometimes reach up to 50%. We do not charge for online stores, but allow customers to get a piece of the advertising budget that any major online store has. We know all our competitors, both in America and in Russia. We also know that American services are very inconvenient, and Russian services are not mature enough to compete with Western ones. Our goal is to combine non-standard Russian thinking and Western scale to make something truly worthwhile!

Partnerships
We are actively looking for partners, both in Russia and in other countries. Recently, for example, Hackaton was supported in Yekaterinburg, which was initiated by the Sverdlovsk Film Studio. We support events for entrepreneurs in Russia and Silicon Valley. We are negotiating with colleagues in Israel to work on their market. Right now we are doing integration with Amazon, Ebay and are talking about cooperation with several international companies that can deliver goods to Russia from the USA in 2-3 days.



About the team
The team has 12 people and everyone works remotely, being in San Francisco, Chicago, Yekaterinburg, Kiev, Chelyabinsk, Vyborg. There is a remote work on all canons of 37signals. Every day we arrange stand-ups in order to maintain the dynamics of the project, plan and quickly get results. We carry out tasks in Trello according to the kanban methodology. Some participants did not survive and they had to leave our team because they were not close in spirit, but anything can happen.

Perspectives
We made sure that the market is ripe for our service and are ready to comprehend new horizons. We are creating an international product that includes many integrations and we apply the western expertise of our friends who work at Google, SalesForce, Facebook, Microsoft. Their experience helps not to step on many rakes when choosing technologies, creating architecture, etc.

Nearest features
Mobile application and browser extension.

Technology
We are developing a backend on Django-python with a database on Postgres, which allows us to simply scale in the future. We write mobile application on Ionic Framework with Angular.JS. Additionally, on technologies and batteries that we use talk in the following posts. Spread over Azure Microsoft cloud servers, which also allows you to quickly gain additional capacity.

Immediate plans
We plan to write in this blog about updates that appear on our service and we will be glad to receive your feedback. Also, if the Habrozhiteli allow, in one of the following posts we want to share the experience of integration with external services.

Thanks for the positive feedback! Register on our website kubish.ru