Expanding to the USA and Getting a Thousand Clients: The Story of GoSklad and its founder Egor Kondratenko

Oopsale inc. — is a company that develops GoSklad, an internet service which allows launching online sales of any goods or services literally within a few hours, easily and quickly. Among the company’s clients there are organizations from more than twenty countries. Egor Kondratenko, CEO and founder of GoSklad,  shared how challenging setting up a business can be, explained how to start expanding to the USA, and what those who want to launch a highly effective product need to know.

Egor, how did you come to your current role? Why did you choose this particular field?

Personally, my choice was driven by developing an interest in technology and entering the venture capital industry. I got into it in an attempt to create my first business in 2014, which my girlfriend pushed me to do.

It was perhaps in the startup and venture field that I caught the entrepreneurial spirit. However, my attempts to organize my own business ended in failure: in 2017 I was left without any money and almost homeless..

Nevertheless, this crisis led me into the field of CRM systems and their implementation. That is exactly where my path as a product manager started. I created my own company focused on implementing SalesUp CRM systems, automating and digitalizing other companies. There, we created products that made life easier for both our customers and ourselves. 

For seven years, I worked in my own company, essentially as a product manager: I invented and launched new applications for the market. After that, I focused on the next new product I launched, which I am currently developing.

How is your job organized now?

Now I manage a small team that is developing a new product for the trade and warehouse accounting field. Simply put, I make a product with programmers.

How did you start your journey as a leader? What lessons have you learned along the way?

My journey started quite early — at the age of 19, I became a leader for the first time, working as a manager of a cell phone store. Then, I was literally learning on experience how to handle mistakes dealing with employees, clients, and processes. I did not take any special courses at that time — all the knowledge came through practice. The main thing that I realized was that a manager must keep everything under control, but at the same time refrain from putting pressure on people. Tasks and goals should be clear and understandable for each employee, and deadline control should be mandatory but unobtrusive.

How would you describe your management style?

I would call it manipulative, but in a good way. I know how to inspire people in order for them to work for a long-term goal, and not just for a “here and now” salary. At the same time, it is vital for the team to feel free to act: I do not control their every move, but I am aware who is doing what and what tasks they are facing. This balance of freedom and control helps to achieve results.

What do you prefer to focus on as a leader?

I believe that you cannot choose just one direction. Strategic planning, team motivation, and project development are three key aspects. If you miss even one of them, the “wheel” of business will run badly. It is important to keep an eye on all of these simultaneously and ensure a balance.

What qualities do you value most in your employees?

I value loyalty above all. Personally, I trust people, especially those I have been working with for a long time. Then, responsibility is also extremely important: if a person promises to carry out a task on time, they must do it. And, of course, professionalism is vital. Without professionalism, it would be difficult to work in any field.

What does communication with your team mean in your work?

This is a key part of my job. I don’t write code or do sales directly — others do that. In order for their work to be coherent and focused on a common goal, I need to constantly communicate with the team. To achieve this, we use various tools: programs for tracking tasks, internal chats, and services, such as GitHub, for programmers to work with.

What challenges in your current new role have been the most intriguing for you?

For sure, I would mention expanding to the US market, and getting the first thousand customers. In order to do so, one has to make extremely thorough preparations. Firstly, the product must meet the expectations of the clients we are targeting, and secondly, nothing must prevent the client from making a purchase when they are ready for it. 

Besides, relocating to the US and attracting the first investments to the project was a serious challenge, because until now we have been developing it using just our own money and money from sales. It seems to me that when you take other people’s money, the responsibility and seriousness of the approach to setting up a company increases.

Expansion in the US is your global goal. What have you already done to achieve it and what are you planning to do in the near future?

Over the past few months, we have realized what the main problem of our clients is. More precisely, it is just one difficulty among many, but it is more challenging to implement compared to the rest of the tasks.

Initially we tried to make a simple and convenient service for accounting of goods and working with sales. Then we thought about the fact that our clients would not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the development of online stores, applications, and their integration with our service. This is very costly in terms of money, time and human resources, which finally results in loss of profit. Our product already covers all these problems.

But at the same time, our target audience consists of small companies and entrepreneurs who are most often located in small towns in various states. As I mentioned earlier, they have another problem: inventory accounting. This is a separate and complex job, even if the service for it is very simple. Most often these tasks are imposed on the owners or heads of other departments, as our potential customers do not have the ability, financially and physically, to hire separate employees for this task. Available and competent specialists may simply not be present in the city where the company or entrepreneur is located.

So, we are planning to automate the tasks of such employees, transferring them to assistants developed on the basis of AI. We are now analyzing and collecting data from various sources on the most frequent and repetitive tasks performed by employees responsible for accounting for goods in order to further implement these scenarios within the service.

If we go even further ahead, we are still making a service that helps to increase sales to our clients and improve them, which means that there will be many tools for forecasting and analytics, pricing, and sales strategy.

In addition, within 2-3 years we are planning to start attracting customers to the platform, which we are currently developing on the basis of our product. When the product gains a critical mass of users, who are sellers, it will be possible to launch a platform for selling their goods. We are still only exploring this option as a future prospect, but we are already laying the foundations for such an implementation.

How did you come up with the idea for the product?

GoSklad emerged in a complicated way, where several cases and experience played a role.

In 2018, a client came to us. He was a company manager who, like me, did not enjoy long holidays, and had already gone to work on January 4. I started working on that day too and was monitoring requests, so I immediately noticed one from this very client.

What followed was several years of working together within SalesUp. During this time we had a fair share of clients selling various products, and we made a number of versions of a small product for working with inventory in one of the CRM systems. Over time, we started to realize that there was a demand for such a product, and a future service started to emerge in my head. However, I couldn’t find the time to implement it, and there was also the issue of resources, as all our people were busy working on various projects, and it seemed inexpedient to distract them from their work.

And so in 2021, this client from 2018 reappeared and asked me to make something that would allow him to track stock balances. At the minimum price that was acceptable to us, we created the first version of the product, gradually expanding its functionality. Then there were two new versions, and the product became public: apart from this first client, other clients could install it as part of the CRM-system. And in October 2023, we launched GoSklad as an independent service. For this purpose we added several new blocks of functionality, such as “orders”, “buyers”, “authorization” and account settings with billing.

Yet, we didn’t stop there and began to develop customers’ personal accounts. Initially the idea was the following: we wanted to allow our clients’ customers to quickly agree and pay for their orders, logging in their accounts via a link, skipping the process of complicated registration. However, with time it turned into another task, which was implementing the possibility of quick launch of sales of any goods without the need for lengthy creation of online stores, using personal accounts or applications, and so that all the setup and preparation could take a couple of hours. 

As a result, setting up an account takes 10 minutes, and customization of the entire service for any business takes from 2 hours to 3 days, after which our client can already receive profit from selling their goods and services.

Now our product has active users in 20 countries, and also our partners recommend and sell the service to their clients in dozens of countries, including the European Union, Asia, the USA and Latin America. Its popularity is growing every day.

Egor Kondratenko

Has there ever been a case in which you faced fundamentally new challenges? How did you overcome them?

I recall working with our first client from the USA — the MetraGrain. They saw our product and came to us through the marketplace of one of the CRM systems. However, they were using a different CRM. They emailed us whether we could develop an integration with their system and help them implement our product in their company.

It was not difficult to do, as we had several years of similar experience during our work in SalesUp. The difficulties turned up later, as our service was not designed to work with serial numbers of goods. And since the client was selling equipment, the same model could be situated in different warehouses in different states or even in Canada. When selling, it was necessary to take into account both the warehouse from which the sale was made and the machine being sold, i.e. its identifier — the serial number. In addition, two machines of the same model could be sold under one sale.

Moreover, since the company had customers in both the U.S. and Canada, different types of documents were required. For Canada, the metric system was used, and the equipment specifications had to be presented within that system, while for the U.S., the imperial system was used, and its requirements were different.

We were able to solve the issue with documents rather easily by setting up different templates and filling in different fields by equipment model for each of the measurement systems. However, we had to make extensive modifications in order to sell equipment by serial number.

In brief, implementing this task allowed us to add a model of equipment to the order, and within the already added model we could select from which warehouse and with which serial number we were going to sell the machine.

If there was no machine of the selected model in stock, the manager would be able to place a request for an order at the production site. And when the machine was produced and arrived at the warehouse, it would be added to this order and the manager would receive a notification. A machine produced under order could not be added to another order.

What advice do you have for those who want to successfully launch a product?

The most important thing is to act. It doesn’t matter what people tell you about your idea, what matters is that you like it and believe in it. Don’t wait for the right moment or the best conditions: you have to create them yourself. Action is the basis for growth and movement.

At the same time, a close-knit team that is united by one goal is vital. If there is no such thing, there will be no common understanding of what we are doing and where we are going, which is the basis of motivation. Employees must understand what they influence, what their work and its quality affects. 

Our team has a great responsibility: if there is a failure even for 30 minutes, it means that dozens of customers will stop shipments and sales for this time. And if sales are not so terrible, then shipments mean downtime of cars and couriers, violation of delivery deadlines, which results in penalties and other costs. Therefore, first of all, we are very careful about the quality and stability of the service, and without a united and integral team it is impossible to achieve this.

No less important is a clear action plan — even an employee at the initial position must understand what we do, why we do that and for whom, otherwise their actions will not be aimed at achieving these goals. And key employees without an understanding of further product development will simply not be able to foresee these changes in the future, which will result in a large volume of service redesign. We encountered this at the beginning of our journey, but since then we have made it a rule to think about the development of functionality five years in advance and immediately lay down the necessary tools and logic.

Last is understanding the people you are making the product for. You can spend thousands of hours creating it, but it will not be in demand, simply because it solves the wrong problems, or not in the right way, or the problems were not massive, and they could be solved by a hundred simpler and more affordable substitutes.