Case Pyrus: How Maxim Nalsky is looking for and finding the best solutions

Moscow, 15 minutes walk from Sokol metro station. On the way, I get into a situation, the unreality of which is felt in everything — after that it becomes clear that we are in the middle of a monument of architecture . Maxim takes me to the balcony of a single four-story building, says that in the summer here is much nicer - around, wherever you look, two-story cottages.

Accepting Maxim Nalsky's invitation to talk, I could not even imagine that this would result in such a global discussion. I suggest, taking this opportunity, to all readers of Megamind to get a little bit of the expertise of a person who, with pleasure, creates B2B-products all his life - and this is not the “Founder’s Councils” .

- Maxim, what is Pyrus ? ERP / CRM? Or is it a product that grew out of the need to somehow optimize your own processes?

The third answer is probably the most correct.

Pyrus is a system for organizing work, workflows. For example, you have a process in your company. Let's say reconciling invoices. The organization receives 100 invoices for payment every day. For the payment to pass, each of them must be signed by four or six people. Moreover, IT documents are signed by one person, purchases - the third, rent - the fourth. The financial director wants to see only that which exceeds 500,000 rubles, and the general director - more than a million.
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You write instructions how this should happen in your company, but employees may be mistaken in executing this instruction. Therefore, you are looking for a specialized software optimizing process.

Another example is imagine that you have a huge organization, such as a bank. It has 7,000 employees, 20 people come to work and leave every day - this is a common situation for organizations of this magnitude.

You have processes, for example, onboarding - the first acquaintance of a person with work, issuing access to the system - in order for a person to start working, he needs to be given a personal "key" from several programs at once. It also needs to be coordinated and monitored so that the process is as optimized as possible and works without failures: quickly and accurately. What happens if a person gets the wrong access? Or not the right? And if you do not receive on time? Everywhere - the delay.

Our platform enables business managers to optimize processes on their own, without including a programmer / developer, and most importantly - without tremendous costs.

For any of the examples that I cite, you can go and buy a specialized solution, but it will be terribly long: the choice of the supplier, the writing of the TK, the tender, the implementation. While implemented - it turned out that the requirements went forward. It’s not for me to tell you how dynamic this is.

Our client, Sovcombank, on our platform optimized 250 processes. That is, they have 250 different “forms” of applications inside — examples I gave, or, let's say, monitoring offices. They have more than 2000 offices, there is a form in which each of them should report once in a while.

- So these are some systems inside the system, or, say, platforms?

Absolutely.

- A lot of questions arise, but before diving into them, I would like to expand my horizons. At your entrance I saw a stand with FinGrad's flyers, looked at the papers, saw that the founding date was no longer in this decade. So this is a previous experience in one direction or ...?

No, absolutely not.

The only thing that unites my projects in life is that they are B2B.

iiko , one of my projects, is a vertical B2B for restaurants.
FinGrad is a horizontal system operating in various industries, designed for financial reporting. The fact is that in Russia the reporting is historically confused. It primarily serves not the interests of shareholders, but of accountants and tax authorities. Therefore, in parallel, all are management accounting.

This is usually done in Excel. Excel is actually a great tool. This is probably one of the most brilliant creations of mankind in the field of software. But Excel has its limitations and, when you have 50 legal entities, and even 5 legal entities, in fact, each in its own database 1C, and you reduce it all in Excel ...

FinGrad is designed to replace Excel at this very moment. It connects in real time to your data sources (which is 1C in 90% of cases) and eliminates the need to maintain complex tables.

- Well, since we touched 1C, which itself is a difficult topic, does Pyrus allow to integrate with the accounting and workflow systems and optimize these processes?

Yes, because document management is one of the business processes. Contract negotiation is an example of a business process. You can coordinate, suppose, claims for damages in the insurance company - also a document flow, but with its own specifics.

Our unique difference from all the others is that we are a communicative platform. That is, people communicate with us, and in other similar systems, no matter the workflow or task management, you are forced to go "to work." A lot of buttons, one way or another, something is uncomfortable. People really communicate with us.

Typical example of use: there is an agreement, someone wrote, someone answered. Right inside the system, it is very convenient.

Here Maxim gets his mobile phone and shows the chat, which is, in fact, a task, with a deadline and responsible.

In 1C there is no communication. This is a financial engine that performs the addition operation very well. Pyrus does not do a plus operation (adding financial postings), so we integrate with 1C and allow us to perform typical scenarios.

For example, they agreed on an account, after which it can be exported to 1C or as a payment order to a bank client. Or, for example, an event - suppose, the excess of payables or receivables in 1C. You need to decide whether to take some action already or not. Here the task in Pyrus opens, and there already there is a discussion of the decision, its coordination.

- I ask not for myself - I just want to understand the context, because 1C is a special story

1C, in fact, is not a system for managers, that is, the CEO does not go to 1C ever. At least, usually does not walk.

- Probably the maximum that he watches is banking, financial transactions, account balance

Exactly. A 1C is not for him.

We built a system that has a convenient mobile application for iOS, Android, Windows Phone. All applications are working offline. If the connection is “twitching” when you are driving in a car, train or subway, by plane - Pyrus continues to work.

This is crucial for the B2B products used by the “tops”, directors, and managers. Without offline mode, people simply will not use the product.

- Maxim, you started to work closely on the product in the 12th year, and went out in public in the 14th. Full one and a half, almost two years - what are the results of the activity? In particular, outside of Russia, because, if I understand correctly, you also have Western clients

Yes, that's right - our customers in 40 countries, Russia and the USA are two main markets.

- And how do these markets look from your point of view, what is the difference between them?

I'll try to answer.

The main tool for organizing the communication process is email. No matter what anyone says, e-mail really takes up a huge share of the workflow — 200 billion emails are sent every day. About a quarter of them are business messages, even if you subtract spam, the numbers are still very significant.

On the one hand, this happened because it is very convenient: free of charge, very simple (fill in 2 fields, press a button), it is available everywhere and to everyone. This set of factors predetermined the popularity of e-mails.

On the other hand, those who invented an e-mail 40 years ago, in a nightmare did not expect this. It was a simple program for sending messages from terminals with a resolution of 80x25 characters, connected in ARPANET between universities.

- It is clear that it was such an "electronic telegraph"

Around the 71st year, there were not even normal computers. The first personal computer - Altair, I recall, appeared only in the 75th.

As a result, e-mail, based on the initial design (in terms of architecture), had limitations that are in the way now. Just email has become very much, e-mail is not structured. How do people try to solve and improve it?

There are many task managers. Alive them a couple hundred for sure, and a couple tens of thousands less alive. Often these are not very complex software products that differ from each other in design. Conceptually, this is an advanced version of lists that can be maintained anywhere: in Excel, Word, Google spreadsheet or even in Notepad.

Specialized solutions make it possible, of course, to play with lists better. The most famous now: Asana, Trello, Basecamp in the States, Bitrix24 and Megaplan with us.

They all have a fairly user-friendly interface and beautiful design. However, communication is not always convenient. Therefore, a person is forced to work in them and in other programs where communication is easy: e-mail, Skype, Slack, and so on.

Accordingly, the attention will defocus between several products, one of them goes into the background in the end. And here it becomes clear that communication is more important. Because in the end, non-task managers choose.

They have a stream of incoming users at a fairly high outflow. If you look at the same Basecamp (which has existed since 2004 and is the leader) - 9 million accounts. And e-mail accounts in the world 4 billion, of which one billion is used for work. That is, look, the company for 11 years of existence took 0.9% of the market. What does this mean? The fact that the problem, in general, is not solved.

At the same time, this is a good business, 9 million paying accounts are significant, I am sure that the guys are earning well.

There is also a subcategory of “IT” task managers, such as Jira, Redmine and so on, of what works with the code - they all work with GitHub, and in the very “gita” there is a good tracking system. But all these systems are focused on IT specialists. An accountant, support service, or commerce cannot use it simply because of the complexity of the interface — such a restriction. That is, it cannot become a general corporate tool.

Another category is CRM-systems, among which in the States is the undisputed leader of Salesforce, we have a similar leader, amoCRM, and perhaps their main competitor, Bitrix. All of them are well suited for sales, and business is very important to sell. Optimization of the sales process - the most important, no sales - no business. Therefore, this category is understandable, Salesforce wraps around $ 6 billion a year - a very large cloud system, quite expensive. There are smaller competitors, such as Pipedrive and SugarCRM, which compete with Salesforce from the bottom. In particular, in the States there are companies that produce CRM for vertical niche markets and have, say, 100-200 thousand users. These are, as a rule, products that perform a function in a particular industry better than “common” tools simply by understanding the specifics of certain market segments.

Accordingly, CRM is a good thing, but also not suitable for everything, it cannot stand at everyone in the company. Everyone in the company, after all, has other tools, and marketing and sales use CRM.

Next, there are workflow systems - this is Microsoft's Sharepoint, as well as a number of other systems. All of them, in my opinion, have one drawback - they are difficult to access for the user. Drawing charts is good, but people need it easier and, ideally, to “press one button and it works.” Accordingly, there should be some pre-configured process templates - all of this and go, in the direction of simplification, accessibility of use to end users.

Well, what other categories are there? There is a huge group of “accounting systems”, to which I also include ERP - this is software for accounting, warehouse, and so on ... They are in every enterprise, but they don’t address the communicative problem at all - it’s impossible to communicate in them.

Another very interesting category, about which I almost forgot - these are instant messengers. From corporate instant messengers only one is noticeable now, and this is Slack. And for business, people use a wide variety of instant messengers: from Facebook to VKontakte, Telegram and WhatsApp.

Some very interesting things are happening now - China is undoubtedly the leader there, because only WeChat was able to monetize its own customer base by combining communication channels with business. This is a unique and very interesting situation, because Facebook and all other competitors have missed it, and now they are trying to catch up with crazy speed. Everyone will develop such channels, because it is already clear that this happens and works - you just need to do it. A good example of how Silicon Valley has lagged behind China.

Slack is a unique example, corporate messaging is still in its infancy, and Slack is the first serious entry into this area. I recently read a critical article about Slack, they say, the latter says two things: I will increase your productivity and save you from email. So the second he really does, and the first - no. Because you get rid of email by paying an increase in the number of small messages in real time and defocusing attention between channels. This is a thing that not many people think about.

“Make me see only what I have to work on at any given time.” This is an unsolved problem: mail is overloaded, Slack is overloaded, messengers are added to all this. And there is still no single space in which you can see all your tasks, real tasks. It is interesting to work on this problem, and this is what we do - in Pyrus you see only what is important. We have a simple and unique mechanic ( Maxim again stretches into his pocket for a smartphone ).

- Maxim, I had the first time when you showed the interface, I had the feeling that there was a cross between a task manager and a messenger in front of me

We want it. There are two aspects: tracking and communication, historically they are separated. Communication is Slack, email and Skype, and tracking is Asana and Basecamp. And I think it should be one product. It is wrong to separate ... ( Maxim still gets the phone and shows the new interface of Pyrus ) - our tasks are discussions.

Returning back - e-mail is an important point of communication, you have perfectly described the landscape of what is happening.

- Many people in Russia want to use Pyrus, feeling the need to optimize business processes? And what happens in this direction in the West?

We are growing steadily. I'm not ready to give specific numbers yet, but believe me - the number of users is increasing. The most important thing that we like about our business ... can I brag a little?

- Of course

There are very important metrics ( Maxim takes a marker and goes to the board ) - you know them, this is Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users. Different companies evaluate these metrics differently, but I believe that the main metric is to divide one into another. This is a non-manipulated metric. DAU and MAU can be increased by investing money in marketing - users will come, register, you count them, everything is great. Some share will really stay with you for a long time. The result of their division, DAU / MAU, is the characteristic of the product: “What part of my audience use the product every day?”. This figure is a consequence of the internal functions of the product, it is very difficult to deceive.

In messengers, this ratio is more than 50%. For WhatsApp, this value (in 2014, Sequoia Capital, one of the shareholders, published a large explanatory post with this metric explaining why a startup costs $ 19 billion) reaches 70% - 500 million monthly, 350 million daily.

For us, this figure is 61%, that is, in this sense, we fall into the category of instant messengers and cherish it very much.

- Do task managers have this figure much lower?

20-30%

- We touched on the e-mail, and I’m wondering - what is your opinion about it as a whole, how are you going to improve the work with it? How do you use email today - as the simplest feature?

E-mail is very good in certain scenarios when you need to distribute information (mailing list). Or the second scenario: we met with you, exchanged business cards, I need to make contact - a simpler way than e-mail, did not come up. Theoretically, you can connect in a business social network, in the same LinkedIn'e or Facebook'e, but the most convenient way to drive letters and tsiferki and send a letter.

Confirmation of transactions is also mostly happening in e-mail, although in many respects SMS is more convenient today, that is, again - this is a step towards messaging. On the other hand, in working scenarios (coordination of documents, decision-making as a result of discussions), when it is necessary to restore the sequence of making a particular decision in a year, find in the archive ... problems start here with the mail. When recruiting a new employee, suppose you need to transfer some layer of work and correspondence, will you send him all the letters a few years ago one after another, choosing the most important ones? No one will do that.

Mail in such scenarios immediately becomes noncompetitive, but the same Slack looks much stronger - an important part of Slack is archiving and searching the archive.

Obviously, some of the tasks from the mail will leave, although one-time communication will remain there. I e-mail with my mom, we are so comfortable and do not need anything else. When speech is systematic, working, it becomes a lot ... For example, you order a website to an outsource, you are shown a job, you write a list of comments about what has been done and what is not, in the end it’s quite difficult to understand the final (changed by that moment) status of individual comments. Mail from these tasks will leave. It seems to us that people will use something more convenient, platforms that combine status tracking and communication functions.

When you have a small organization (5-10 people), you set tasks for each other as needed. When you have 500 or a thousand employees, the importance of processes grows many times, and most importantly, the cost of an error in these processes grows in a similar way.

Again an example - again the bank. Every day, every day, he receives letters from various state bodies: the Central Bank, the Federal Tax Service ...
Do not respond to such a letter is impossible. So, there is a process - the registration of appeals of state bodies, you register them, depending on the type of appeal, it is routed. A mistake in this process can be very expensive. Therefore, I want to use the system.

We, in fact, among ourselves, this “flexibility” inherent in Pyrus, called “Excel for workflows”, will now explain why.

What is Excel genius? This is a “system” that business managers can master on their own and do everything in it.

- Everything is simple, yes, and available: 2 columns, 2 lines

Yes. And when you put a sum in Excel, that is, you click on the sigma button in the toolbar, you write a cycle. Without thinking about it, you are writing a complex program. And then, when you make a pivot table, you write a very complex program. After that, when you drag and drop a column to a column, you rewrite one complex program with another complex program - this is a genius. Without programming experience and without thinking.

We want the same simplicity to bring in the customization and automation of business processes. So that people who do not have special programming skills could just as easily deliver any process.

- Pyrus is suitable, respectively, for anything: repair and / or bank management? Do you use your own product in everyday life?

My wife sets tasks in Pyrus.

I would not say that my wife and I have any "business processes", but it sets tasks for me. And many of my friends use, yes.

Our task is to make the processes as simple as possible.

- Win Slack, including?

But there is no such task. Slack does well what he does. When you need to, you know, it’s a little “irresponsible” to talk and interact horizontally - this is convenient. Although I imagine that he is very good in the media or journalistic environment, when there are very large streams of information that require structuring ...

- Yes, there is no better place. Even without structuring, when there is a need for real time - a tool close to the ideal

Accordingly, in those industries where it is critical - in the media, there Slack is king. Twitter could be, but did not.

When in the process several people in a row, that is, one after another, have to do some actions, also so that it can be removed from this metric ... people call the call center, thousands of calls per day, problems require a variety of solutions and including generate a large flow of documentation. How to measure - I, as an organization, work well or not?

I need to know that I decide 95% of requests per day, which means that I need a tool. And the tool should be simple and convenient, accessible to all, from the ordinary employee of the call center of the bank to the chairman of his board.

We have it. In Sovcombank, the first process optimized by Pyrus was the harmonization of board decisions.

Between the participants?

Yes, people were looking for a workflow system, they looked at various options. They are traveling, they need a single place to track decisions. Mail something to send: someone said, others do not. Often decisions are debatable, that is, when not all are “for”, but, for example, opinions are divided and participants in the discussion speak out. Then someone must come and judge. Often this is not one person, people specialize each in their own area of ​​decision making. On mobile devices, by that time most of the systems were not very convenient, and such people cannot work otherwise, they are on business trips, traveling.

That is, it all started with the fact that FinGrad made various products for the bank, and the coordination of technical tasks went in Pyrus. And the bank decided to try the system. They set, hooked up 20 people, in a month - another 100 people, and “grown” in a couple of years to 7,000 people.

I am sometimes asked what processes we are optimizing there - I do not know. They have 4 analysts who do everything themselves, I call them myself and ask: “What did you do?”, And they told me: “Well, yesterday they launched ...”. Well, it's cool, 250 processes, and everyone works.

What competitors do you have specifically then?

Sharepoint, mostly just him.

But this is a very specific product, it is used by a narrow stratum of people.

Yes, because it is complicated — a somewhat cumbersome tool, not too mobile. It is convenient to use when configured. Works - do not touch.

- Pyrus was your domestic product.

Yes, they did for themselves.

- In general, as a result, I get the impression that Pyrus is a system of making universal decisions, or a universal system of decision making

What is the solution? An event that precedes something, and then an object of interaction and process construction. Decisions are the basis of management; management itself is an ongoing decision-making process. The better they are, the better you take them - the better is the management.

- Why do you do what you do, Maxim?

Why did I come to this?

So historically, I was engaged in B2B. Projects, products. I first programmed myself, worked for an American company, then I organized a development group for them in Moscow. This is on the one hand.

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