News from Web&Tech Ready winners: GBooking

In 2011, GBooking reached the final stage of the Web Ready contest. Over the project duration, it has won investments from Yandex, Altair Capital, Vestor.In and the Untitled in the total amount over $1.5M. The project took the lead in the market, executed a contract with the Europe’s largest manicure atelier chain, and expanded its staff to 20 employees in different countries.

Comments from Aleksandr Naslednikov, the founder & CEO

About the project

GBooking is an online appointments service. It allows end users to book services as easily as buying goods. The “Register online” button can be placed at any website, where potential customers can be present, from a beauty salon homepage to a Yandex search results page.

About the contest

The contest literally became our free pass to business. It was at the contest 2011 that Yandex noticed us and made its investment, we earned some publicity and received valuable comments and experienced public communications for the first time.

Investment

With a chance for investment from Yandex, we were admitted to a prestigious acceleration program in Betaspring, USA, and later the company gathered several rounds of investment in the total amount over $1.5M, including such famous investors, as Igor Ryabenky, Pavel Cherkashin, Konstantin Sinyushin, and the Bright Capital’s seed fund. We were able to extend our staff and now have 20 employees in different locations around the globe.

Development pattern change

In August 2014, the company had a crucial pivot including change of the marketing and sales team in Russia, and a new sales and product concept. We shifted to the customer development model of operation and built our development strategy on understanding of problems of our customers and methods to solve them with the help of our product. As a result, we succeeded in creating the best product in this niche of the Russian market, attracting both medium-scale businesses and many large customers, such as the manicure salon chain of Lena Lenina, the largest chain of that kind in Europe. Our customers are small beauty salons, large private clinics in Moscow, and car service companies in regions of Russia. They also include many group training schools, ranging from archery and trampoline jumping to yoga and dance clubs.

Entry to foreign market and future plans

GBooking operates all over Russia, including distributors in 5 regions, and has launched operations in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Hungary, France, and Israel. Now our chief aim is to select the right direction among the wealth of offers. Our next application, a loyalty program for end users, will be released in October. We’re expanding actively through the partner network, in synergy with medical information systems, ERP and CRM systems for beauty salons in Russia and abroad.