Hello, foreign reader! I’m writing from a place as distant as Mars – from Moscow. For some reason it seems to me that in the US people represent Russians as aliens, living in wild conditions with their bears in the North. That’s not exactly true, but pretty close.
You won’t believe me, we’ve even got startupers there! I’m one of those guys. My name is Voronin Alexander, I’m 29 and all I know is how to sell.
18 months ago we launched the city mobile app franchise – “MyTown”. We attract partners and make separate city apps for them. People promote it among the residents of their towns and attract advertisers from local companies. We also receive monthly fees and develop our product. From the start we were able to grow quickly up to 320 partners in Russia, get 500 000 downloaded apps and join the IIDF accelerator.
But we have no knowledge, no experience and no skills to continue our aim of conquering the most attractive market on the planet. In Russia we managed to make all sales through the most popular social network Vkontakte, just placing ads on the business pages. That`s why I immediately got on Facebook to retry this case, but in the US. As you know, I couldn’t find such business pages. We tried to make a target advertising campaign, and it was absolutely useless. Then I was looking for local franchise websites, but even they couldn’t set us up. I’m not a stupid guy, but it turned out that I can’t deal with such a simple task.
I decided to contact some of the possible buyers directly. I assumed that local newspapers and city news websites would be interested in making profit from local advertising. I wrote to 30 companies and had no answer…
Maybe they just don’t want to communicate with Russians?
In any case I’m gonna stand my ground until the end, but the first sale abroad our project MyTown will make remotely. Courage and dementia always helped us.
If you have a good advice or a question, contact me on facebook.com/asvoronin88. And I promise I will write you the next article about my first successful remote selling.
For those who still want to see our work, here are the links:
IOS – goo.gl/ItzWTz
Android – goo.gl/SU0FOC
FinSMEs
13/04/2017