Hello, can you reveal which country are you based in?
Ukraine
Thank you for your answer! And can you reveal your team members?
What information are you interested in?
Photos of our team -
https://proprofi.com/#section-teamToday (07.03.2017) will be a live video conference at 7.00PM GMT, you can see our team live and ask any interesting questions.
Like more information, team history and skills, it's just photos and names now. Not complaining, just asking.
Our team is 4 people at this moment - Taras (Founder & CEO), Artem (co-founder & developer), Yaroslav (sales manager), Valentine (designer). Finally the team formed in Autumn 2016.
The history of ProProfi project has its start much earlier in 2012. Taras and his partner Artem in 2012 faced with a problem of searching professionals for home improvement. For contractor recruiting they brought in friends, acquaintances, they contacted people from advertisement in the news papers and on internet. But unfortunatelly they didn't manage to find quality contractors. The crisis of 2008 has been finishing, the construction sector of economy started to recover and most of them were already employed. Some contractors were occupied for months and could get their job six months later. That timings were unsatisfactory. Other contractors raised the price bar twice and couldn't carry out their plans, because of lack of quality professionals in team.
Eventually, that issue took them 2 months and no quality pro were found.
After home improvement and market research had finished, they analysed the sitiation in construction sector and decided to develop a project, which can tackle an issue with searching available and trusted professionals, and could also help the customer to realise the relevance of their prices to avarage price on market.
In 2014 was carried out and launched the testing site omastere.com.ua for local Ukrainian market. The project has been developing for 2 years because they didn't have enough free time and were shorthanded. Despite everything, without investment and using only crowd-marketing they got much registering of contractors on site and helped more than 3000 customers to find their contractor. However, there detected a lot of issues while working. The project turned out to be pretty raw, some functionality were excessive, some of that didn't solve the problems tasked with. For example, there were no need to create a forum or bulletin board on site, although, professionals were interested in estimate calculator.
In the end of 2015 Taras and Artem brought me - Yaroslav (sales manager) and my colleague - Valentine (designer) in this project. We sold climatic appliances for some time and also have an experience in home improvement and construction sector. WIth regard to political situation we decided not to finalize omastere.com.ua, but to reach international market with that idea of ProProfi. In the beginning of 2016 the requirements specification for future project was done and there we took in account all gaps and functionality required. In the end of Summer 2016 the web-site design was confirmed and in the early Autumn Artem started developing of site.
Rest 3 people of team joined around creation and adaptation of site structure and services data base of US market. After analysing of regional structure of market, we chose cities where to start our campaign. They are small cities with poorly represented big competitors in construction services. Unfortunatelly we can't tell you the names, it's our commercial secret. Also we prepared data base of local contractors in that area and whole US. To start working in selected regions we do need $700-800 thousand. This amount of money easy calculated from = $60 000 per month for 1 year. It's enough for advertisement chanels that we chose. Ofcourse we could start with less amount but it will take us long time. Received resources we plan to spend on attracting customers and contractors and also on popularisation project in regions. We will share our plans of how attracting and what advertisement we use later. After reaching self-sufficient point and getting first profit, we plan to enter other regions of USA and compete with big players of service market.
Our ultimate goal is to get 1% of US market (big one isn't it?) or to be sold to large competitor.
