News from Web&Tech Ready winners: BUBUKA

In 2013, the BUBUKA service won the Best Startup nomination. From that moment, our business had grown significantly: the company has entered the international market and continues opening representative offices abroad. The company already has over 800 customers in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus only. The content volume exceeds 20,000 tracks.

A service for streaming music and video to public places

The BUBUKA service is a unique product for both the Russian and foreign markets. It is a system of remote management of audio players, providing legal music and video content for playback in public locations. A user can manage music broadcasting in any number of facilities from any place in the world where Internet access is available, change tracks, view the current playing track, and make a playlist for playback.

Business model

The subscription fee of the service is lower than the cost of similar products via copyright protection associations, because our company signs agreements with the rightholders directly. Users manage their content in a convenient system enabling control of playback in any facility at any particular moment.

Comments of the founder

Dmitry Pangayev, CEO:

Our company exists since 2012. In 2013, we won a Web Ready award in the Best Startup nomination. We took part in the contest mainly to present possibilities of BUBUKA to both the users and potential investors, and get featured in mass media. We’ve got a wave of publications in the leading federal publications: RBC, Expert, Business Journal, and many others have written about us, after which Wikipedia representatives contacted us with an offer to approve an article devoted to us.

What has happened in the following two years?

The content volume has increased, and we have signed many more direct contracts with performers, as opposed to record labels. Some performers register their compositions in the system on their own. We work a lot to develop our technical components: for example, we’ve designed applications for iOS, improved versions for Android and Windows. An application for the Raspberry platform, an area with good prospects for us, is under development. Sure enough, users involved are an important indicator of success.

Market

After the contest, we saw a lot of similar offers evolving, but all of them failed. Usually, our rival businesses did not succeed in moving on from their landing phase. BUBUKA is based on a rather complex technical mechanism, but we stake on convenience for users and continuously improve our system for that purpose.

Customers, intentions & geography

The number of customers increased by three or four times, and they are not only from Russia: besides its Russian version, the application has English, German, French, and Turkish versions. Now BUBUKA is actively preparing to enter the international market. Our official representative office has recently started operations in Turkey and gained first customers; Turkish partners have reached us on their own initiative. Our European office is about to open soon. At the present moment, we are in the process of moving our headquarters from Tomsk to St. Petersburg.