October 18, 2012 at 23:00Konstantin Kalinov, founder of Aviasales: we went to develop horizontally
On October 16, a master class by Konstantin Kalinov, founder of Aviasales.ru, was held at the HSE building on Pokrovsky Boulevard in Moscow. He flew briefly from Thailand, where the project’s head office is located. I have visited this event and offer you, as it seems to me, an interesting report. This is not a review article, these are questions from the audience and Konstantin’s answers to them.
Just a few points. First, I tried to convey the most accurate questions from the audience and the answers of Konstantin. The second - everyone turned to him on “you”, at his request. Well, there is a small number of vocabulary, but "you can’t erase words from a song."
I’ll add from myself - I liked what Konstantin spoke about.
Enjoy reading.
Question from the audience: Share what you did before? You must have a rich background.
Konstantin Kalinov: I generally got on the Internet around 1994. It was a very long time ago and then no one had this Internet, and people did not know what the Internet was. We sat on some hacked accounts, got modems to get on the Internet. They were engaged in such indecency. But it was a long time ago, I was young and did not weigh anything.
Then I somehow moved 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 the law enforcement agencies, and went to work at the plant, was engaged in economic security. But even there something did not grow together, because they were the same cops, only they were not in uniform, but in suits.
In 2000, I actually found myself without work. I thought so well, what would I like to do? And I remembered about the Internet. I was already quite an active user.
I sat down and thought: how is it, I pay for access to the Internet some 50-100 dollars, how do all these sites exist in general? What do they live on? They are free, I don’t buy anything from them, I use them, and where do they get the money?
With this question, I actually went to the Internet. Then there was no Google, Yandex was some kind, I didn’t even know then what it was. Was Yahoo! And at school I studied German and in English I did not know a word. I sat down and started to figure out how it works, found webmaster forums where everyone discussed this. What kind of marketing do they have there, how did the sites do, etc.
I was sitting with some kind of paper translator. Then I did not have online translators, I looked at the texts and tried to understand what they wanted to say? Well, since I did not know the English language, I could not make any sites, because I could not program and did not know anything. And I thought about sites about love: few words, but many deeds.
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 all over 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 a fairly large number of corporations that make very good money from it.
Some rumors circulated that the Hollywood pavilions, in which filming of films and programs take place, they themselves do not bring money. They bring money when they are rented out 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 on which YouTube is now running - once porn ran along them. And they were built so that porn would run through them. Because in those years it was 90% of the pumped traffic.
Because the text weighs a little, and the pictures weigh a lot. And that really moved the Internet industry forward. A contextual advertising came up with porn!
In fact, these guys - they are very seriously moving the Internet industry forward. It seems like they are just plain bad guys. All these stories about conversion, about manipulations with conversion - all this is from there. Because when you earn 50 thousand dollars and from them 45 thousand dollars you spend on servers on which everything is stored and downloaded by you, you have to count very clearly. Where do you lose and where do you win. And this business taught me a lot.
I do not advise you to climb there right now, the competition there is just hellish. And with such a massive distribution of free content - sales are 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 traffic was about 3-5 million people a day and hundreds of sites. It was very cool to understand how much traffic brings revenue.
We wrote a system that “ate” the logs on the server on the fly, understood how the user interacts with the site, clicks, which conversion 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, are we the only ones who came up with such a thing? Probably, you need to show it somewhere and try to earn money. So my software business came about.
About six months we suffered. 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 a foreign server?
The software was really very complex, it was written in C ++ and 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 pay only for the server.
And so I got a hosting company. My partner and I built a data center in Prague, now he already has a second or third. I have been doing this for a long time, there were many clients who buy 10 servers at once. These are customers who spend tens of thousands of dollars per month for your service. And accordingly behave accordingly.
They don’t care if you are sleeping or not sleeping, where you are, in which country. They pick up the phone at 3 a.m., and if they want to talk, they call you. You have to get up, go to the computer and communicate with them. It somehow infuriated me so much that I sold the business for 5% of the value of assets. I went out, got the money, with this money I lived a year and a whole year.
Question from the audience: What is your general attitude to venture capital?
Konstantin Kalinov:We tried to look for investments. Well, like "we", I tried to look for investments. All investors laughed: “what are you? This is some kind of garbage, it will not work, I will not participate in this. Who needs this? This is some kind of nonsense. There is Anywayanyday, here is Pososhok, which is 10 years old. There is a DAVS, which is some kind of an ancient one; it has 50 sales offices there all over the country. Here they are well done, but you don’t understand nichrome at all. ”
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 is possible to increase it, but it is difficult. Therefore, we went to other countries. We launched a product for China, now Germany is launching, then Turkey, then Australia and Thailand, where the head office is located.
Question from the audience:Why China
Konstantin Kalinov: China is a large country, 2 billion people live in China, this is 1/3 of the population of the entire globe. Last year, China signed a solid contract for the 900 Boeing 373, which is a short-range aircraft. China this year launched the assembly of its own aircraft.
Last year, China signed a firm contract for 800 Airbus 320 aircraft, which is also a short-range aircraft. China is developing at a frantic pace. Now it’s still possible to “jump into the carriage”, but time is running out.
Question from the audience: You said that the company was developing at its own expense. When did hiring people begin?
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 was 100% spent on salaries to employees. 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 the last time I did it a very long time and it turns out very expensive. My time is more expensive.
Question from the audience: Have you thought about leaving the company with money?
Konstantin Kalinov:Now I do not see a way out for myself. I do not know what should happen for me to sell the company now. It is growing, and growing at 300-400% per year. We are growing faster than the fastest growing fund.
Personally, this question does not bother me, I get a salary, and this is enough for me. And now we earn more than we can spend. We are just now looking for a point of application of force, 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 who want a lot.
Question from the audience: Is the headquarters location in Thailand a business decision or a personal one?
Konstantin Kalinov:Here both. About 6 years ago, I flew to Thailand to winter for 3 months - and now I stayed there. One of these six years I lived in Russia when my wife was pregnant and the baby was born. And at that moment the Aviasales was developing, these were the first steps - we moved the whole team to Thailand.
This is a personal motive, because I'm sick in St. Petersburg, although 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 of 700 square meters. meters on the beach, we pay 115 thousand rubles per month. Now compare with Moscow.
Question from the audience:You said that at one time investors reacted to your project mildly cool. And if a man came to you now and said that he wants to do such a service, what would you answer him?
Konstantin Kalinov: I would say that the train 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 won’t find everything, because many have already died. Well, do not survive. It’s just such a story that there can be only one player, well, at most two, the third has nothing to do there.
Question from the audience: What is your biggest difference from your competitors, what makes it possible for you to develop so quickly?
Konstantin Kalinov:Yes, they are also developing quite rapidly. It seems to me that this is the image of the company that manages to shape into people's eyes. We are ready for dialogs, we are ready for any contacts.
Any user on our website can write to me, and I will answer. If I am at the computer, I will answer in 5 minutes. It bribes many, they write to me, and I answer. Sometimes they write a lot, but I answer a lot. Try to write something.
Question from the audience: How are financial processes taking place, are they on your side?
Konstantin Kalinov: We do not take a card from a client, we are a search engine. We look for tickets at 45 ticket offices and send the user to buy there. Then we take their sales data, find out which partner brought which sale, and charge him a commission.
For a partner, this looks like a table with statistics. Where it indicates how many searches there were, how many sales there were, how much 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 in different ways, see what works better, what works worse. All this is built on a marker system.
Those. users coming to our site are marked with a special label. This tag drags him across the site. If he left somewhere, this label is transmitted with him, 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 give you separate access to the meter, which will only show your traffic. This is done easily, but there will be some errors. But for operational management, this is quite suitable.
Question from the audience: What part of the traffic comes to you through affiliate networks?
Konstantin Kalinov: It’s about 10-15% of affiliate sales. It seems to me that this is small, there is potential. We just do not really understand yet how to work with networks, with some it turns out. We have affiliate networks with $ 1000 per day of sales.
Question from the audience:You said that you cannot “play” with discounts. And what can you offer regular customers? For example, the categories of people who pay the most?
Konstantin Kalinov: We need to offer them some additional value. Any. Playing with a price is a very dangerous thing that leads you from a business with a large margin to a business with a low margin. And it’s very dangerous to get involved in it.
The simplest, it would seem, tool. I made a discount - everyone came running. No not like this. They have come running now, tomorrow they will not come to you anymore and will go look for a new discount. And this audience is not the one that you have left.
With mailing lists we do this - we have several types of mailing lists. There is the easiest when the user receives a list of just all of their offers that we collected yesterday. This is the easiest type of newsletter.
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 bothered to search for this ticket, and I do not really understand if it is expensive or cheap. And now I don’t seem to have to buy yet and maybe I want, or maybe something will change. But I can subscribe to this fare, and every day a letter will arrive containing the exact price of the flight.
Thus, monitoring price changes can give a moment when this ticket will be cheap and you can buy it.
Question from the audience:Mobile app, 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 airline tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: In general, it is believed in the industry that if your site converts 2% of visits to the site into sales, it is a success. I think that this 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. They made an orange button, measured it. Nothing changed. Moved her to the right - slightly changed. Added a link to the basket, something has increased. Those. this is a very, very many short iterations. We have a lot of traffic and 2-3 hours are enough to evaluate the conversion.
And we have now developed a system that allows us to “roll out” changes very quickly and “roll back” them very quickly. We have it all on Ruby with Rails and now we have separated what the user sees from the internal engine and it’s very easy to roll out changes quite quickly. Actually, these are the manipulations.
Question from the audience: How do you analyze traffic? Standard analytics or do you have something of your own?
Konstantin Kalinov:We have our own system. We also use analytics and paid solutions, but more as informational ones. All the main analytics for searches, clicks, conversions, sales - all of it is ours.
Question from the audience: Did you have such a desire to stop being a metasearch engine and sell tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, it didn’t appear, because there is a conflict of interests. It is clear that selling your tickets brings more money and it will be more profitable to make a sale for yourself rather than selling tickets to ticket offices. And accordingly, I will not be able to restrain myself in order not to manipulate the extradition. Therefore, I do not want conflicts of interest.
Question from the audience: How much do you spend on advertising?
Konstantin Kalinov:What is considered an advertisement? We have contracts that we paid for a year.
We just don't think so a bit. We simply consider the money spent on the advertising channel. I don’t break it down for months, but we don’t have the concept of budgeting. I know how much we spend on context, for example last week - we spent 12 thousand dollars.
Question from the audience: And what is the most effective channel?
Konstantin Kalinov: What is considered 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 - 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, and for the name of the company to be heard.
Buying ads on social networks and bringing it to the site is expensive, we don’t even go to zero on this type of advertising. Now we are creating an audience around our community, but it is impossible to monetize it constantly, therefore we entertain the users more, give some beautiful content and sometimes give some kind of commercial offer. We are slowly starting 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 to force yourself to work at all?
Konstantin Kalinov:In the sense of forcing yourself to work? I force myself to rest! This business is like a child whom you cannot leave and sometimes you have to beat yourself, leave your computer, try not to take a mobile phone.
Question from the audience: How do you open representative 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, like that, over the Internet.
Question from the audience: Why 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 communications.
Question from the audience: Can you tell me something interesting about the increase in conversion on the site? For example, they made the inscription blue, or set the search elsewhere or something else.
Konstantin Kalinov: Yes. We used to have the search form on the right and occupied about 1/3 of the screen. When it was made over the entire width of the screen, the conversion increased almost 2 times.
We always try to convey to people that we are not selling anything, we are a search engine for air tickets. And we had it so that when you click on the buy button, a window with a list of partners opens. And then we removed the window and set the click "buy" to the cheapest place. Conversion increased by 2 times.
Question from the audience: Which business would you do? Which one would you go to now, but you just don't 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 sorts of such interesting services.
I flew on a plane, listened to an interview with the founder of GetTaxi, got off the plane, took the express train and called a taxi at the entrance to the station. Awesome works. A couple of weeks ago I really missed such a thing when I stood in the rain in Bangkok. And not a single taxi stopped, passing by.
And those who stopped said no, I won’t take you. I don’t understand why, because they know this fucking Thai so well. And there I suffered, I called this taxi service, but no one knows English and I can’t call myself a car.
Even when I take the car, I can’t explain the address to him, I show it on the map, but he doesn’t understand. He was born in the village. In Bangkok, I really need it, in Shanghai I need it.
Question from the audience:How difficult it was to form a team of the strongest specialists. How do you disassemble it?
Konstantin Kalinov: Very difficult. And hiring every programmer costs a few thousand dollars. That is exactly the search and hiring. We take specialists only with the highest possible level. In the meantime, you will find him ... Mostly these are Russians and Belarusians. Well, there are other countries, but all are Russian-speaking.
We have no turnover. We try to make sure that people are as interested as possible, the desire to work and our technical specialists do not "flow" at all. For all time, 3 people quit the company. I fired one, and two fired themselves.
Question from the audience: What are the biggest problems in the team?
Konstantin Kalinov:Yes, they fight, infections, on these motorbikes! But the rest is no problem. Guys fall from mopeds, especially when they just arrived. And the problem of hiring exists, we want cool specialists, as a rule, these are people who are already under 30 or more. They have wives, children. And location problems appear, they do not even consider moving somewhere. Although there is nothing complicated, believe me. I also have a wife and a child. And many in our company have both wives and children. The location problem is not a problem. This is the problem for them.
Question from the audience: 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 isn’t it an invitation of foreign experts - is this a principled position?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, as long as there is simply no need, we can cope. We tried to work with the Indians, but this is darkness, of course. This is complete darkness. They just have a completely different approach.
He heard that there is some kind of technology, say xml. He worked in the company, and at the next table sat some dude who knew something about xml there. And this one writes himself in the resume - xml.
Well, I'm exaggerating, of course. You send them a task, and the Indians are polite and he answers you why he wrote this. And he writes how he understood this task. Rereading what you sent him. What did he mean by that? The Chinese are better in this regard. But there they have with the English language just a very serious trouble.
Question from the audience: Konstantin, do you plan to become a business angel or maybe an investor?
Konstantin Kalinov: Well, as if for angelism or investing, I do not have funds yet. The company has no task to invest. And for those who turn to me, I help. Is free. Well, if I have time and if I am interested.
Just a few points. First, I tried to convey the most accurate questions from the audience and the answers of Konstantin. The second - everyone turned to him on “you”, at his request. Well, there is a small number of vocabulary, but "you can’t erase words from a song."
I’ll add from myself - I liked what Konstantin spoke about.
Enjoy reading.
Question from the audience: Share what you did before? You must have a rich background.
Konstantin Kalinov: I generally got on the Internet around 1994. It was a very long time ago and then no one had this Internet, and people did not know what the Internet was. We sat on some hacked accounts, got modems to get on the Internet. They were engaged in such indecency. But it was a long time ago, I was young and did not weigh anything.
Then I somehow moved 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 the law enforcement agencies, and went to work at the plant, was engaged in economic security. But even there something did not grow together, because they were the same cops, only they were not in uniform, but in suits.
In 2000, I actually found myself without work. I thought so well, what would I like to do? And I remembered about the Internet. I was already quite an active user.
I sat down and thought: how is it, I pay for access to the Internet some 50-100 dollars, how do all these sites exist in general? What do they live on? They are free, I don’t buy anything from them, I use them, and where do they get the money?
With this question, I actually went to the Internet. Then there was no Google, Yandex was some kind, I didn’t even know then what it was. Was Yahoo! And at school I studied German and in English I did not know a word. I sat down and started to figure out how it works, found webmaster forums where everyone discussed this. What kind of marketing do they have there, how did the sites do, etc.
I was sitting with some kind of paper translator. Then I did not have online translators, I looked at the texts and tried to understand what they wanted to say? Well, since I did not know the English language, I could not make any sites, because I could not program and did not know anything. And I thought about sites about love: few words, but many deeds.
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 all over 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 a fairly large number of corporations that make very good money from it.
Some rumors circulated that the Hollywood pavilions, in which filming of films and programs take place, they themselves do not bring money. They bring money when they are rented out 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 on which YouTube is now running - once porn ran along them. And they were built so that porn would run through them. Because in those years it was 90% of the pumped traffic.
Because the text weighs a little, and the pictures weigh a lot. And that really moved the Internet industry forward. A contextual advertising came up with porn!
In fact, these guys - they are very seriously moving the Internet industry forward. It seems like they are just plain bad guys. All these stories about conversion, about manipulations with conversion - all this is from there. Because when you earn 50 thousand dollars and from them 45 thousand dollars you spend on servers on which everything is stored and downloaded by you, you have to count very clearly. Where do you lose and where do you win. And this business taught me a lot.
I do not advise you to climb there right now, the competition there is just hellish. And with such a massive distribution of free content - sales are 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 traffic was about 3-5 million people a day and hundreds of sites. It was very cool to understand how much traffic brings revenue.
We wrote a system that “ate” the logs on the server on the fly, understood how the user interacts with the site, clicks, which conversion 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, are we the only ones who came up with such a thing? Probably, you need to show it somewhere and try to earn money. So my software business came about.
About six months we suffered. 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 a foreign server?
The software was really very complex, it was written in C ++ and 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 pay only for the server.
And so I got a hosting company. My partner and I built a data center in Prague, now he already has a second or third. I have been doing this for a long time, there were many clients who buy 10 servers at once. These are customers who spend tens of thousands of dollars per month for your service. And accordingly behave accordingly.
They don’t care if you are sleeping or not sleeping, where you are, in which country. They pick up the phone at 3 a.m., and if they want to talk, they call you. You have to get up, go to the computer and communicate with them. It somehow infuriated me so much that I sold the business for 5% of the value of assets. I went out, got the money, with this money I lived a year and a whole year.
Question from the audience: What is your general attitude to venture capital?
Konstantin Kalinov:We tried to look for investments. Well, like "we", I tried to look for investments. All investors laughed: “what are you? This is some kind of garbage, it will not work, I will not participate in this. Who needs this? This is some kind of nonsense. There is Anywayanyday, here is Pososhok, which is 10 years old. There is a DAVS, which is some kind of an ancient one; it has 50 sales offices there all over the country. Here they are well done, but you don’t understand nichrome at all. ”
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 is possible to increase it, but it is difficult. Therefore, we went to other countries. We launched a product for China, now Germany is launching, then Turkey, then Australia and Thailand, where the head office is located.
Question from the audience:Why China
Konstantin Kalinov: China is a large country, 2 billion people live in China, this is 1/3 of the population of the entire globe. Last year, China signed a solid contract for the 900 Boeing 373, which is a short-range aircraft. China this year launched the assembly of its own aircraft.
Last year, China signed a firm contract for 800 Airbus 320 aircraft, which is also a short-range aircraft. China is developing at a frantic pace. Now it’s still possible to “jump into the carriage”, but time is running out.
Question from the audience: You said that the company was developing at its own expense. When did hiring people begin?
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 was 100% spent on salaries to employees. 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 the last time I did it a very long time and it turns out very expensive. My time is more expensive.
Question from the audience: Have you thought about leaving the company with money?
Konstantin Kalinov:Now I do not see a way out for myself. I do not know what should happen for me to sell the company now. It is growing, and growing at 300-400% per year. We are growing faster than the fastest growing fund.
Personally, this question does not bother me, I get a salary, and this is enough for me. And now we earn more than we can spend. We are just now looking for a point of application of force, 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 who want a lot.
Question from the audience: Is the headquarters location in Thailand a business decision or a personal one?
Konstantin Kalinov:Here both. About 6 years ago, I flew to Thailand to winter for 3 months - and now I stayed there. One of these six years I lived in Russia when my wife was pregnant and the baby was born. And at that moment the Aviasales was developing, these were the first steps - we moved the whole team to Thailand.
This is a personal motive, because I'm sick in St. Petersburg, although 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 of 700 square meters. meters on the beach, we pay 115 thousand rubles per month. Now compare with Moscow.
Question from the audience:You said that at one time investors reacted to your project mildly cool. And if a man came to you now and said that he wants to do such a service, what would you answer him?
Konstantin Kalinov: I would say that the train 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 won’t find everything, because many have already died. Well, do not survive. It’s just such a story that there can be only one player, well, at most two, the third has nothing to do there.
Question from the audience: What is your biggest difference from your competitors, what makes it possible for you to develop so quickly?
Konstantin Kalinov:Yes, they are also developing quite rapidly. It seems to me that this is the image of the company that manages to shape into people's eyes. We are ready for dialogs, we are ready for any contacts.
Any user on our website can write to me, and I will answer. If I am at the computer, I will answer in 5 minutes. It bribes many, they write to me, and I answer. Sometimes they write a lot, but I answer a lot. Try to write something.
Question from the audience: How are financial processes taking place, are they on your side?
Konstantin Kalinov: We do not take a card from a client, we are a search engine. We look for tickets at 45 ticket offices and send the user to buy there. Then we take their sales data, find out which partner brought which sale, and charge him a commission.
For a partner, this looks like a table with statistics. Where it indicates how many searches there were, how many sales there were, how much 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 in different ways, see what works better, what works worse. All this is built on a marker system.
Those. users coming to our site are marked with a special label. This tag drags him across the site. If he left somewhere, this label is transmitted with him, 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 give you separate access to the meter, which will only show your traffic. This is done easily, but there will be some errors. But for operational management, this is quite suitable.
Question from the audience: What part of the traffic comes to you through affiliate networks?
Konstantin Kalinov: It’s about 10-15% of affiliate sales. It seems to me that this is small, there is potential. We just do not really understand yet how to work with networks, with some it turns out. We have affiliate networks with $ 1000 per day of sales.
Question from the audience:You said that you cannot “play” with discounts. And what can you offer regular customers? For example, the categories of people who pay the most?
Konstantin Kalinov: We need to offer them some additional value. Any. Playing with a price is a very dangerous thing that leads you from a business with a large margin to a business with a low margin. And it’s very dangerous to get involved in it.
The simplest, it would seem, tool. I made a discount - everyone came running. No not like this. They have come running now, tomorrow they will not come to you anymore and will go look for a new discount. And this audience is not the one that you have left.
With mailing lists we do this - we have several types of mailing lists. There is the easiest when the user receives a list of just all of their offers that we collected yesterday. This is the easiest type of newsletter.
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 bothered to search for this ticket, and I do not really understand if it is expensive or cheap. And now I don’t seem to have to buy yet and maybe I want, or maybe something will change. But I can subscribe to this fare, and every day a letter will arrive containing the exact price of the flight.
Thus, monitoring price changes can give a moment when this ticket will be cheap and you can buy it.
Question from the audience:Mobile app, 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 airline tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: In general, it is believed in the industry that if your site converts 2% of visits to the site into sales, it is a success. I think that this 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. They made an orange button, measured it. Nothing changed. Moved her to the right - slightly changed. Added a link to the basket, something has increased. Those. this is a very, very many short iterations. We have a lot of traffic and 2-3 hours are enough to evaluate the conversion.
And we have now developed a system that allows us to “roll out” changes very quickly and “roll back” them very quickly. We have it all on Ruby with Rails and now we have separated what the user sees from the internal engine and it’s very easy to roll out changes quite quickly. Actually, these are the manipulations.
Question from the audience: How do you analyze traffic? Standard analytics or do you have something of your own?
Konstantin Kalinov:We have our own system. We also use analytics and paid solutions, but more as informational ones. All the main analytics for searches, clicks, conversions, sales - all of it is ours.
Question from the audience: Did you have such a desire to stop being a metasearch engine and sell tickets?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, it didn’t appear, because there is a conflict of interests. It is clear that selling your tickets brings more money and it will be more profitable to make a sale for yourself rather than selling tickets to ticket offices. And accordingly, I will not be able to restrain myself in order not to manipulate the extradition. Therefore, I do not want conflicts of interest.
Question from the audience: How much do you spend on advertising?
Konstantin Kalinov:What is considered an advertisement? We have contracts that we paid for a year.
We just don't think so a bit. We simply consider the money spent on the advertising channel. I don’t break it down for months, but we don’t have the concept of budgeting. I know how much we spend on context, for example last week - we spent 12 thousand dollars.
Question from the audience: And what is the most effective channel?
Konstantin Kalinov: What is considered 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 - 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, and for the name of the company to be heard.
Buying ads on social networks and bringing it to the site is expensive, we don’t even go to zero on this type of advertising. Now we are creating an audience around our community, but it is impossible to monetize it constantly, therefore we entertain the users more, give some beautiful content and sometimes give some kind of commercial offer. We are slowly starting 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 to force yourself to work at all?
Konstantin Kalinov:In the sense of forcing yourself to work? I force myself to rest! This business is like a child whom you cannot leave and sometimes you have to beat yourself, leave your computer, try not to take a mobile phone.
Question from the audience: How do you open representative 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, like that, over the Internet.
Question from the audience: Why 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 communications.
Question from the audience: Can you tell me something interesting about the increase in conversion on the site? For example, they made the inscription blue, or set the search elsewhere or something else.
Konstantin Kalinov: Yes. We used to have the search form on the right and occupied about 1/3 of the screen. When it was made over the entire width of the screen, the conversion increased almost 2 times.
We always try to convey to people that we are not selling anything, we are a search engine for air tickets. And we had it so that when you click on the buy button, a window with a list of partners opens. And then we removed the window and set the click "buy" to the cheapest place. Conversion increased by 2 times.
Question from the audience: Which business would you do? Which one would you go to now, but you just don't 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 sorts of such interesting services.
I flew on a plane, listened to an interview with the founder of GetTaxi, got off the plane, took the express train and called a taxi at the entrance to the station. Awesome works. A couple of weeks ago I really missed such a thing when I stood in the rain in Bangkok. And not a single taxi stopped, passing by.
And those who stopped said no, I won’t take you. I don’t understand why, because they know this fucking Thai so well. And there I suffered, I called this taxi service, but no one knows English and I can’t call myself a car.
Even when I take the car, I can’t explain the address to him, I show it on the map, but he doesn’t understand. He was born in the village. In Bangkok, I really need it, in Shanghai I need it.
Question from the audience:How difficult it was to form a team of the strongest specialists. How do you disassemble it?
Konstantin Kalinov: Very difficult. And hiring every programmer costs a few thousand dollars. That is exactly the search and hiring. We take specialists only with the highest possible level. In the meantime, you will find him ... Mostly these are Russians and Belarusians. Well, there are other countries, but all are Russian-speaking.
We have no turnover. We try to make sure that people are as interested as possible, the desire to work and our technical specialists do not "flow" at all. For all time, 3 people quit the company. I fired one, and two fired themselves.
Question from the audience: What are the biggest problems in the team?
Konstantin Kalinov:Yes, they fight, infections, on these motorbikes! But the rest is no problem. Guys fall from mopeds, especially when they just arrived. And the problem of hiring exists, we want cool specialists, as a rule, these are people who are already under 30 or more. They have wives, children. And location problems appear, they do not even consider moving somewhere. Although there is nothing complicated, believe me. I also have a wife and a child. And many in our company have both wives and children. The location problem is not a problem. This is the problem for them.
Question from the audience: 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 isn’t it an invitation of foreign experts - is this a principled position?
Konstantin Kalinov: No, as long as there is simply no need, we can cope. We tried to work with the Indians, but this is darkness, of course. This is complete darkness. They just have a completely different approach.
He heard that there is some kind of technology, say xml. He worked in the company, and at the next table sat some dude who knew something about xml there. And this one writes himself in the resume - xml.
Well, I'm exaggerating, of course. You send them a task, and the Indians are polite and he answers you why he wrote this. And he writes how he understood this task. Rereading what you sent him. What did he mean by that? The Chinese are better in this regard. But there they have with the English language just a very serious trouble.
Question from the audience: Konstantin, do you plan to become a business angel or maybe an investor?
Konstantin Kalinov: Well, as if for angelism or investing, I do not have funds yet. The company has no task to invest. And for those who turn to me, I help. Is free. Well, if I have time and if I am interested.
