2023-01-27T13:42:00+02:00 Economy 2024-09-15T05:57:09+03:00

Ukrainian news

Edik destroyed the "bot business" in Telegram when he was 20

Edik destroyed the "bot business" in Telegram when he was 20

Meet Eduard Tipiniuc, an IT expert from Chernivtsi who has been making money on Telegram advertising analytics since he was 18 years old. Today he successfully sells Facebook and Instagram advertising analytics around the world

Eduard Tipiniuc, 25, founder of Pascal Group.

Specialization – social media, advertising traffic arbitration, data analysis. Oversees 50 developers. Company turnover for 2022 exceeds $10 million.

Despite all the challenges of wartime and power outages, Kyiv remains a city of innovators and entrepreneurs who find opportunities in difficulties, create jobs and expand the geography of business. The founder of Pascal Group, Eduard Tipiniuc, spoke about the formation and development prospects of the Ukraine’s IT sector.

— I was told about you that you started doing business while still at school, is that true? Was it already an internet business?

My first school experience can hardly be called a business because, due to my age, I could not yet officially become an entrepreneur, so the individual entrepreneur license (FOP) was registered by my older friends who were fond of tattoos. After reviewing completed sketches, I grasped the growing popularity of tattoos and inspired the boys to start a business. My task was to find clients and promote it. Later, our paths diverged: my friends moved to Portugal, where they continued business, and I entered the Faculty of Economics of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University.

— All your subsequent projects were already digital. How did you become interested in programming and why did you decide to focus on products for online marketing?

Yes, someone will say that I was just lucky, but already in my first year I managed to guess the winner of the English Premier League. In the 2015/2016 season, Leicester City won. Practically, this remained the biggest achievement of the team, but it was quite enough for me. Our pre-created fan page quickly gathered its first 50,000 organic audience, which made it possible to start making money by placing advertisements.

We set up our first office in Kyiv in 2017 with a staff of five. And already in 2019, we had two teams of 20 people each, not counting freelancers, who were developing strategies in Telegram and Facebook separately.

Life has shown that without significant investments, you can earn money only by having your vision and the ability to predict trends. In fact, this is marketing!

The profit we earned made it possible to create the first jobs to develop our projects in Web 2.0. Our early projects were aimed at traffic arbitration, analytics and optimization of the current tasks of page administrators, groups and channels for a flexible subscription fee.

Everyone made money from traffic arbitrage, but we always invested in our own development of market analysis models and therefore were more successful than others. Over time, it turned out that the software we developed became the arbiter of new rules on the market.

In particular, we were the first to introduce a service that, for $25 per month, allowed us to accurately determine the number of bots among Telegram channel subscribers. In a few months, it "killed" the bot cheats. The market has become much more transparent, thanks to our service. And we gained our competitive advantage by placing our clients' advertising budgets more effectively.

— Please explain the difference between Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and share your vision of current trends.

Everything is simple:

Web 1.0 is an Internet of sites created by programmers, where the user without professional knowledge remained only a reader.

Web 2.0 is the current version of the web, dominated by platforms where anyone can easily share their own content while following community norms and rules.

Web 3.0 is a fully decentralized system still under development.

Currently, we as a team are fully focused on software products for Web 2.0. Of course, I follow trends, and I am interested in blockchain technology, but above all, I am guided by current feasibility and potential profitability. For this, you need to be just a few steps ahead. Being way ahead of your time is not about business.

It’s not yet time to mastering the PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE due to the low speed and the small number of users, even compared to popular games. But artificial intelligence (AI) already deserves careful attention and will become widely used in the coming years.

— How do you choose a platform for working and developing your own projects?

First of all, I take into account the current number of active users and the growth prospects for the next five years. For example, when we entered Telegram, the number of active users only reached 100 million. When we decided to sell off all Telegram-related projects at the end of 2021, the monthly active audience there already exceeded 500 million.

— Telegram's audience continued to grow in 2022. Did you regret the early sale?

It was a conscious and timely decision. I entered an interesting project at the time, joined forces of our developers, and in the three years that we owned it, its capitalization increased more than fivefold. I think we could move and develop it further, but we have already made the decision to focus on a more promising direction with a wider audience, namely on Meta platforms - Facebook and Instagram.

It was a difficult decision because the team has accumulated a lot of experience over the years of working in the messenger.

Expert understanding of all algorithms of promotion in Telegram channels allowed several of our guys to make their volunteer contributions at the start of a full-scale war. At first, we sincerely believed that the Russians lacked awareness and that, having learned about the real state of affairs, yesterday's neighbours would stage mass protests to eliminate their bloody regime. Spreading the truth seemed like a good idea, and the skill and craftsmanship allowed us to set an internal record - eight million views of the most successful message we managed to measure before it was blocked. I'm not sure we could afford it if we still had business with Telegram.

Time has shown that only force can stop the enemy, and the military spirit has turned into a constant. Working, earning and donating, everyone at their own level - this is our new reality.

— Did you invest the profit to buy the finished product?

Similar ideas often arise from several developers if the market demands the creation of a product. We write some projects from scratch, and some we buy and develop. In this way, we avoid disputes about the authorship of the idea and save a lot of time for the initial development and testing of hypotheses. We bought the Adheart project because we were already following this path and started creating an analogue version.

 — Tell us more about Adheart?

We have collected the largest database of ad creatives with 2.5 billion media files from around the world, available on a subscription basis. This is open Big Data, provided you monitor the advertising activity of your competitors day by day. We have created a convenient online archive. Adheart.me has become a source of inspiration for marketers, an indispensable assistant for affiliates and an effective tool for saving advertising budgets. Careful analysis of creatives easily replaces several rounds of A/B tests and speeds up the creation of optimal advertising. Our resource is already available in five languages.

— It is obvious that the project is popular far beyond the borders of Ukraine. How did you start looking at international markets for expansion?

I simply create quality IT products that we lack for effective marketing. The demand in international markets comes by itself, so we just follow the client and try to simplify the cooperation.

This is how we opened our first office in Latin America. I would like to point out that we are talking about customer service because a support service specialist must understand the user's needs, breathe the same air as him and easily find a common language. For now, we leave all development in Ukraine. Thanks to the Armed Forces, I believe we will soon be able to continue working in normal conditions, but we are already used to extreme ones.

— How do you feel about IT outsourcing?

Frankly, we went through it. Working on other people's projects, they felt like slaves in the galleys. Yes, there was a time when we resorted to such forced measures to save the team and not take loans. My main priority has always been our own development, so when our next product launched, we completely refused third-party orders.

— Are you ready to involve developers from other countries in your team?

Our specialists are the best with a unique combination of hard and soft skills. (Technical skills, programming experience and the ability to work in a team, and establish communication — editor's note). American and Western programmers are highly specialized and, above all, trained to sell themselves better than the real ability to work. At first glance, representatives of Asia and the Middle East look quite universal, but we have different ideas about communication during work. As the owner and manager of the project, I always strive to have a real picture of the technical difficulties and deadlines for the implementation of each stage. In my team, I am sure that I will be one of the first to learn about any problem. This is the only way to achieve an effective result.

Currently, Ukrainian business has received a unique opportunity to take advantage of the temporarily reduced demand for the work of domestic IT specialists from Western companies. This became especially noticeable after the October shelling of critical infrastructure. So this is our common pain and an unexpected, albeit temporary, competitive advantage. Ukrainians know how and are ready to work, adjusting their schedule to work needs, not from ten to six. So, as a manager, I have to manage to bring Pascal Group to the level of profitability in order to properly face the new realities that will await the domestic IT sector after Victory.

— Summing up, do you rely exclusively on your funds and do not expect investments?

I am against early-stage angel investment. I won't deny it, but I'm far from those serial entrepreneurs who consider startups as a source for attracting venture capital.

It happened organically that I financed all my development projects on my own because they generated operating profit not even from the first month, which was enough to invest to my heart's content in further development and improvement of our products. That's why I never attracted "angel investors." And now, this is already my conscious strategy, arising from my own experience.