National Research University Higher School of Economics. National Research University Higher School of Economics Main service for organizers

about the project
"Success Builder"

How to find your place in life, do what comes easy and brings happiness? To do this, you need to correctly apply the knowledge that the university and life itself have given you. In the “Success Builder” project, we talk about graduates of the Higher School of Economics who have realized themselves in an interesting business or an unexpected profession. The heroes share their experiences - they tell what kind of bumps they hit and how they used the chances given to them.

It’s a rare project that becomes profitable immediately, but if you learn from mistakes and don’t give up, success will certainly come. The Timepad project experienced ups and downs over the six years of its existence, but eventually became a leader in its market. In the “Success Builder” section, its creators, HSE graduates Daria Ustyuzhanina, Lyudmila Pavlova and Artem Kiselev, talk about how not to spend money on advertising, what is good about the Russian market and how to earn more than 100 million rubles without selling your idea.

Did you come up with the idea of creating an unusual platform for event organizers yourself or did you get it from foreign sources?

>2 million

tickets were sold through Timepad

Daria: The idea originated when we were all working in the Business Incubator and organizing events. Thanks to this, we created and tested our product right at HSE. At some point, it became difficult for us to cope with several events a week (and sometimes there were even more), and for our needs we came up with a tool that would help us in our work. By that time, we were very well versed in all organizational issues. Luda, for example, organized the Historical Dance Club, the Preference Club, and an art school - what is now called Studlife at HSE was partly done by us. Artem also participated in organizing the “Business in RU style” events - in short, they were involved in this, understood the process and knew that something needed to be changed here.

We made the first version of the project exclusively for ourselves, to relieve the burden on our heads and hands, and began to show it to our friends - they also led various student initiatives and needed help. Suddenly, people started using our product and praising it. This encouraged us to create a large and serious project based on our invention. So we started going directly to event organizers and showing them what a great idea we had.

Timepad is a complicated thing from a technical point of view: the procedure for paying for tickets, registering for events, etc. How did you solve program issues? And what is your main difference from the same ticket intermediaries?

Daria: In general, Timepad is made to help organizers create events - organize work with participants, invite, register, accept money for tickets and attract new audiences. Yes, there are kassir.ru and parter.ru - they, of course, also sell tickets, but our goals are different. Our resource is useful specifically for organizers who can see who will come to the event and obtain information about visitors in order to further work with them. And in the old ticket sales market there is only one scheme: you sold a ticket and you don’t know to whom. For us, selling a ticket is an important, but far from the only option.

Lyudmila Pavlova (Photo: Mikhail Dmitriev)

Artem: Initially, we had technical developments when we ourselves tried to organize HSE events. The first version of Timepad was created virtually on the knees, but when the service grew, I realized that I could not cope with all the requests alone - and we hired a technical team.

Daria: Our first hired programmer was the only paid employee in the project. We currently employ about 35 people, and this week we hired six.

How is your current activity related to the specialties you studied?

Daria: Luda studied at the faculty as an undergraduate and completed her master's degree, and Artem and I studied at the faculty, so we directly applied our university knowledge to business. True, Artem is still more on the technical side, and I’m more on the business side. Studying at the same faculty, we have completely different focuses in our work - for example, I program “like a monkey,” speaking in our internal slang. And I solve strategic issues very well.

Lyudmila: Everything is clear with Artem - he is the brain of programming. There are unique competencies that were initially assigned to him - this is everything related to development, technology and everything related to the creation of the product as a whole. At first, Dasha and I dealt with almost everything, but more - clients, finances, legal issues, raising financing and sales. Then some kind of specialization began to emerge - I have a financial history, Dasha has a background in general management and sales. Still, those tasks appear that we “throw” at each other. But we share key business decisions among everyone - we do not have a director who makes a verdict, rather a “board of directors” or a council of elders who makes decisions collectively.

At what stage did all this grow from a startup into a high-quality project new to the market?

Daria: It turned out that the idea organically turned into a tool that we used ourselves, and it began to look like a business project when we started showing it to our friends and received good feedback - then we began to confidently improve the product.

Artem Kiselev (Photo: Mikhail Dmitriev)

Lyudmila: This cannot be called a turning point, because the transition to the market lasted quite a long time. The process of growing up continues to this day, just like in humans. You cannot go from a child to an adult right away - you have to go through mistakes and successes, change qualitatively and begin to be useful.

Is Timepad's "growing up" more related to user requests or the projects you're developing?

Daria: If we talk about the beginning, there was simply an increase in the interest of users, and, accordingly, of us. We realized that we were needed, quit our main jobs and started working only on Timepad. Because they believed and saw the return - of course, not financial at that time. The base also grew gradually - now there are about 40 thousand organizers, for whom, of course, we now have more opportunities.

Lyudmila: We have several large and beloved clients for whom we have done something more than just a universal platform. This is, of course, HSE, for which we have developed an organization system - accepting applications, reports, evaluating reports, registering visitors. Other favorites are the Polytechnic Museum, which we help with registration and support of the process for the Children's University. Registration takes place for semesters - parents buy a subscription, and then they themselves build an individual learning track for the child in subjects. We help make this complex registration process convenient for everyone.

If someone says: let’s go smash everyone, of course we will cover up the event. But there are almost no calls for aggression, but there are rallies of Martians.

What investments did the project initially require, and how much of it was spent on advertising?

Lyudmila: We had several attempts to spend money on advertising, but none of them were successful. It became clear almost immediately: attracting an audience for us is an organic process based on recommendations.

Daria: A satisfied organizer advises another organizer to use the service, and it turns out that it is a very convenient tool. At the same time, of course, we had investments - we had to pay for the staff and solve technical issues. We started by investing our little money, and most importantly, our strength. At first, none of us received any income from what we were doing. And what they earned from their old jobs was invested in the project. Then in 2009 we received a grant from the Bortnik Foundation (Fund for Assistance to the Development of Small Enterprises in the Scientific and Technical Sphere). It turned out that the grant is quite a useful thing, although they say different things about government grants. We had enough of this support for the gradual development of the product and for the first full-time employee, a programmer, who, in general, ate up the entire grant. Then there were private investments and, as a result, an acquaintance with Afisha-Rambler.

Lyudmila: They became our shareholder. Afisha planned to develop Timepad as a ticketing service and a kind of poster for local events, but in the end we decided not to continue this cooperation.

Daria: Some ideas could not be realized within the framework of this cooperation, we simply managed to part ways peacefully and now we have a good financial investor - Target Ventures - this is a fund that bought a stake in Timepad, which previously belonged to Rambler.

Daria Ustyuzhanina (Photo: Mikhail Dmitriev)

The product is purely online, so I’m curious how you worked to attract an audience on social networks?

Lyudmila: Social channels are really the way that really works to attract people to events. This is absolutely our story. People most often find out about events through recommendations, it’s like calling someone and inviting them to a party. It would be stupid not to use network mechanisms, because they have all the options for inviting friends to an event or notifying about it. We actively maintain public pages, using social network mechanisms through the hands of users or organizers, we promote events and attract audiences.

For example, one of the relatively recent innovations is a widget that allows you to buy a ticket without leaving VKontakte.

15 kg

cookies eaten in the Timepad office in a month

Now a tactless question: how do you make money?

Artem: About business - a completely normal question. The path to making money was thorny, because initially the service was absolutely free. The product did not require money from either the organizers or users. At some point, it was time to stop investing and start earning money, and we did the simplest thing: we started selling paid subscriptions and additional paid features. A lot of effort was spent on billing, but the earnings were like a weak trickle. It was a failure. We started experimenting, and different affiliate programs appeared, to the point where we offered the organizer to print business cards and make badges for the event. Nevertheless, several experiments worked - the possibility of selling tickets through the website and advertising opportunities that we offer to the organizers.

Daria: Now we have two main sources of income: a percentage of ticket sales and fees for promoting the event.

Is there some kind of censorship of events? After all, for example, you may well publish an announcement of a peaceful picket of Orthodox activists against theatrical art.

Lyudmila: We also had pickets. In general, anyone can come and register an event on Timepad and start promoting it. We only block events that are completely contrary to the moral and legal principles. If someone says: let’s go smash everyone, of course we will cover up the event. There are almost no calls for aggression, but there are rallies of Martians. We as a service are available to any organizers, but we have a chief editor who, based on the given parameters, checking statistics and carrying out serious editorial work, evaluates how relevant this event is and how well it is described. For organizers, we have a list of recommendations like “how to please an editor or audience.”

We invariably recommend trainings, concerts, workshops - events that really do not raise doubts. Traditionally, we announce many conferences - we greatly support educational events. In general, we are not snobs.

What we definitely do not plan in the near future is going beyond the borders of Russia and the Russian-language Internet space.

What can Timepad develop into from the format in which it currently operates?

Lyudmila: We are planning product development. But what we definitely don’t plan in the near future is going beyond the borders of Russia and the Russian-language Internet space. It is more interesting for us to work with the domestic market; here there is the strongest competitive advantage and potential, whereas in the West this market has been more or less developed. A phase of rapid growth is just beginning in Russia, with which it is most interesting for us, as leaders, to coincide and grow.

By the way, why didn’t you sell your idea, as is often the case with good startups?

Lyudmila: Maybe we’ll sell it - it’s just that no one has offered the amount at which we value ourselves (laughs).

“Either the hackers are coming, or Zuckerberg has arrived,” thought Artyom Kiselyov while he was trying to pick up the TimePad service that froze on Saturday evening. It turned out that Zuckerberg really arrived, the organizers of his lecture for Moscow State University students opened registration through TimePad, and the young service fell.

This was in September 2012. Now TimePad is a leader in its segment: in 2016, the company helped organize more than 100,000 events - from broom knitting training for 15 people to concerts for tens of thousands of visitors.

“The Secret” tells how a student project grew into a service through which tickets are sold for 1 billion rubles a year.

HSE startup

TimePad has three founders: Artyom Kiselev and his friends Lyudmila Pavlova and Daria Ustyuzhanina. Pavlova is a “great organizer”: while she was studying economics at HSE, she created a historical ballroom dancing club, a club for playing preference, and held tournaments on “What? Where? When?”, gathered people on extreme trips. She met Ustyuzhanina and Kiselev from the business informatics program in 2006 at the HSE business incubator - all three participated in its creation. Pavlova and Ustyuzhanina organized lectures and seminars, and Kiselev created a website. They did the same for several other student organizations.

Soon HSE began to host several open events a week, and many people from outside came to them. Everyone’s last name, first name and passport details had to be written down on a piece of paper and given to security, since the university has a strict access system. There were no Google Forms at that time (they appeared only in 2012), so the friends set themselves a task: to create a program that could quickly create a complete list of participants.

As soon as Kiselev solved this problem, another problem arose: the capacity of one mailbox was no longer enough to send out announcements. “When there were more than a thousand subscribers, Mail simply told us: friends, you are spamming,” recalls Pavlova. For some time they used three mailboxes, and later they had to add TimePad and the ability to send letters to participants to the prototype.

“We gave out access for friendship” - the first users were acquaintances from other student organizations who faced similar problems. Friends decided that the service could turn into a business, but they did not understand how to make money from electronic recording. So we decided to continue cutting the product. They invested half a million of their savings and registered the TimePad domain in August 2008.

The founders of the service were still studying, working and continuing to organize various events, so there was little time left for the project. Kiselyov worked on the system in fits and starts, and Ustyuzhanina and Pavlova went to all the organizers of exhibitions, conferences and other events that came into view, and tried to convince them that “there is no future for a notepad and pen, we need to try new technologies.” They resisted.

Most often, entrepreneurs received two typical answers. First: “Everything is fine with us, our three secretaries take calls perfectly, write everything down in Excel, and they also know how to make coffee.” Second: “The IT department wrote their system for me, here under my desk there is a computer on which it runs, I can see it and I am calm about its security. And somewhere on the Internet you don’t know where, you don’t know what.” Nevertheless, entrepreneurs brought in the first hundred users with their own hands - even before the official launch of the service.

Lyudmila Pavlova

Search for a business model

“I remember it was a shock for me when Artyom said that our system is essentially registration and mailing, and that’s all. I thought: “My God, what about all these social interactions, calendars and planners, video recordings, is all this really not necessary?”,” recalls Pavlova, one of the first versions of the product that had to be abandoned. Together with her colleagues, she had to learn to focus on the main thing and discard the unnecessary - and this turned out to be more difficult than adding new things.

In July 2009, TimePad announced its official launch. The service was similar to a social network: you could add users as friends, follow the event feed, and check in with them. But after a few months, it became clear that it was difficult to monetize an audience consisting of participants in various events. Competitors who chose a similar path quickly died. For example, the JustParty service, in addition to organizing events, offered to follow events in the lives of friends, exchange photos with them and create wish lists. It launched in June 2009, but already in 2010 not a single mention of the project could be found, although the founders expected to recoup the project in two and a half years.

The founders of TimePad decided to sell the product to event organizers, removing all the social features. Basic features like creating an event were free, but for additional features like a complex registration form, different subscription options were introduced: from 260 to 10,000 rubles per month. “It didn’t take off from the word ‘at all’. The number of paid subscribers grew from two to seven in a few months,” recalls Pavlova.

Another business model was found when entrepreneurs realized that their service could be a system not only for organizing events, but also for ticketing. Now the idea seems obvious, but at the end of the 2000s, the electronic ticket market in Russia was not developed, and very few paid with bank cards (about 40% of those who paid via the Internet, many used services like WebMoney and Yandex.Money).

"We constantly heard: 'What? Buy tickets via the Internet? How does that even work?' The mass user didn’t even have cards. And if they were, then to think that you could not only withdraw money from an ATM, but also pay on the Internet, was generally beyond good and evil!” - nevertheless, the most desperate and technologically advanced organizers decided to enable this function, and TimePad began to take a commission on sales - about 7–9%.

The real challenge in 2010 was the organization of an international conference for HSE: about 600 participants were expected, and all were foreigners accustomed to paying with cards. This was TimePad's first major client. By that time, the three founders were already devoting all their time to the project. One after another, they quit their jobs, hired “one and a half employees,” and every day came to the office of the business incubator, of which TimePad became a resident. The project began to generate revenue and, in addition, received a grant of 1 million rubles from the Bortnik Foundation and an investment of 1 million rubles from a business angel friend (he later left the company).

Main service for organizers

Several months of suffering - this is how the founders of TimePad remember the fall of 2010. The investments had come to an end, and it was not clear how to pay salaries in a couple of months. The entrepreneurs made a round of venture funds and business angels, but they were all refused: some did not believe in the market, others said: the wrong profile or the wrong stage, others wanted to give money “exactly in the portions you deserve” (that is, rarely and little). Competitors appeared and died, the mood was decadent, especially since the startupers understood: they could earn much more from hired work than at TimePad.

There was no breakthrough that corrected the situation. It’s just that after a few months, entrepreneurs discovered that their income was not falling. “We realized that we were staying afloat: we were getting new clients, the earnings were enough to feed the team, and the service was not dying,” says Daria Ustyuzhanina. “The perception of what is happening in our heads switched, we stopped being nervous.”

Almost no money was spent on advertising - word of mouth still works best. At first, the service tried all types of advertising on the Internet, but none of them worked. “We had a complex about this for a long time and stopped the moment we talked with our Western colleagues Eventbrite - this is the largest service in the world. Advertising doesn’t work for them either,” says Pavlova. Event organizers are a fragmented audience, and there is no place or targeting criteria that would allow them to reach it.

In 2011, the company became self-sufficient, and entrepreneurs began experimenting with the business model. TimePad decided to go offline and help organize events for its clients at venues. The service offered to greet guests, check tickets, print badges, and explain logistics to participants. “It seemed to us that there is a lot of money in events, big checks and this is a “tasty” direction in terms of earning money,” says Pavlova. And so it turned out, only the entrepreneurs did not take into account the huge competition. Each student can organize their friends, open an event agency and offer to meet guests at venues for little money.

Artyom Kiselev

Offline business required a lot of manual work, which TimePad was not used to. If a team of 40 people now serves almost 100,000 registered event organizers, then in order to organize at least five events a month, it was necessary to hire about several dozen people (and also go through all the difficulties of communicating with freelancers). A year later, TimePad abandoned this service and now offers it only to its oldest customers as a sign of loyalty.

But another experiment was a success. That same year, TimePad gained opportunities to promote events, which now generate 15% of revenue. Users have two options available: a mention in the newsletter across a database of 240,000 readers (10,000 rubles per issue) and placement of banners on the pages of all events with a weekly audience of 350,000 people (25 rubles per click). According to Pavlova, these services are actively used by organizers of free events. “When we held a free introductory webinar on working with sponsors, several hundred participants came to us using TimePad. Now we will definitely send out a newsletter on the 3D Journalism forum and see how the service base works for the target audience - PR specialists, marketers, journalists,” shares Pencil Group CEO Evgenia Ovcharenko.

80% of the income now comes from commissions on ticket sales - last year their volume amounted to 1 billion rubles (compared to 2014, this figure increased by about six and a half times). TimePad takes 1–3% from them depending on sales volume: more than 3 million rubles per month, from 300,000 to 3 million rubles per month, less than 300,000 rubles per month (all users pay 3% for the first two months). Organizers also reimburse 4.5% for payment processing costs and pay for customer service and technical support: 1% of the cost of each order over 5,000 rubles, 2% for order prices from 500 to 5,000 rubles, and 3% for orders under 500 rubles. Thus, the organizers give 6.5–10.5% of their earnings on tickets to the service.

The service earns another 5% from paid accounts (there are few of them left), organizing offline events and additional paid developments for the client (for example, making a complex registration system). TimePad does not disclose its revenue, but notes that it is more than 150 million rubles, and last year brought significant profits for the first time. According to Secret’s calculations, annual turnover does not exceed 130 million rubles.

Income allows us to keep the main functionality of the site free - 80% of clients do not pay for anything. By registering in the system, the organizer can create events, receive contacts of participants, send mailings to them and monitor registration statistics. If the event is paid, he can analyze sales statistics and manage pricing policy: enter promotional codes, discounts and affiliate programs. “We've been using TimePad since 2011 for a wide range of events - from free lectures for 2,000 people to paid workshops for professionals who upload their portfolio or answer questions. In addition to registration, this is a convenient tool for tracking offline audience growth - it’s interesting to see how many people registered for the event and how many ultimately came to it, whether publication time and format influence this,” says the project manager of the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design » Alya Datii.

“TimePad is a simple tool that is hard to get used to. True, it’s annoying that you have to pay extra for each deviation: for example, we don’t need a blue widget button, but a yellow one. The color changes through technical support for money,” sums up Evgenia Ovcharenko.

In 2016, more than 130,000 events were organized through the site, and in total, during the existence of the service, 375,000 events took place - they were attended by 10.8 million people. One of the largest is the annual concert on HSE Freshers' Day.

There are several main categories of organizers. The first ones organize large events for up to 10,000 people on their own - for example, a small group within the company organizes a conference for developers. The latter conduct many small educational events: psychology, public speaking, foreign languages. Sometimes these are independent organizers, sometimes they are training centers. Still others organize lifestyle events for themselves: a yoga class in the park or a coffee festival. Finally, the fourth are professionals who use TimePad to organize events for their clients. Many people use the service to register for online events - they account for up to 30% of the total volume of events.

Sharp turns

TimePad might not have survived until 2017 as an independent service - five years ago the startup was decided to be bought by the merged company Afisha-Rambler, now Rambler & Co (as part of the policy of full disclosure of information, we inform you that the publication "Secret of the Firm" is part of the Rambler & Co holding Co). The parties signed an investment plan, according to which in a few years the holding would own 100% of the shares of TimePad. During this time, the products of TimePad and Afisha-Rambler should have achieved synergy, explains Pavlova: “They had a lot of information resources and their own ticketing solutions, for example, Rambler-Kassa began to develop.” We could be useful to each other."

For almost two years, the teams worked on a development strategy, tested different work options and thought about how to make the products work together. The holding's share in TimePad in 2013 reached 49% of the shares, but at that time changes occurred in the company: Afisha-Rambler of Vladimir Potanin and Sup Media of Alexander Mamut merged, the latter became the managing partner (in 2017, Mamut bought 50% from Potanin Rambler & Co). The management team and development strategy have also changed.

“When we started working with Rambler, the holding was aimed at developing new products and searching for new business models. The new strategy focused on cutting costs and getting rid of everything that was not super-core and not super-profitable. We weren’t earning very much at that time, but we had to receive fairly large investments according to an agreed plan,” recalls Pavlova. Former top manager of Rambler & Co, Dmitry Malov, confirms this story: according to him, the holding really got rid of projects that required money, but did not grow in income. “There was also an understanding that the company should be monolithic. And we got rid of everything where we could not gain control and profitably drag the service into the holding,” he says.

The startups realized that they had three options: give up everything, sue over possible failure to fulfill shareholder obligations, or find a buyer for the holding’s share. They chose the latter path, and this time the search for familiar investors ended successfully - the shares of Afisha-Rambler-Sup were bought by the Target Global fund in January 2014. The fund also additionally invested funds, receiving more than 50% of TimePad (such a large share in the company is an exception for Target Global). According to RBC Innovations, in total Target Global invested more than $1 million in the company.

“We have the opportunity to acquire a share on very attractive terms. Now the company’s growth rate is close to 100% per year, and this is very good,” comments fund partner Alexander Frolov. According to him, when Target Global invested in TimePad, only a few large organizers used the service. The fund relied on the growth of this segment, and in three years TimePad has really expanded its base - now about 500 large companies like Skoltech, Oracle, RVC and others hold events through the service. From his portfolio project, Frolov does not expect competition with such aggregators or ticket agents as Ticketland, Ponominalu, Kassir: “They have different segments. The main potential of TimePad is enormous - it is the replacement of old and ineffective formats. The service competes with Excel spreadsheets and hiring receptionists to manage event management, not with ticket sellers for entertainment events.”

According to the analytical unit of the Moscow Department of Information Technology, the volume of the Russian market for electronic tickets for events is $900 million (this is about 35–40% of the country’s total ticket market). Of this, $400 million are concert tickets; a significant share is also taken up by tickets to movies, theaters and sporting events. Educational events, which TimePad primarily deals with, cannot compete with them in terms of sales volumes. But in general, the penetration of electronic tickets in the educational segment is the highest: experts say about 95% “in the field of various master classes, seminars and trainings.”

The founders of TimePad do not see any serious competitors. Back in 2015, they acquired their main rival - Eventmag.ru (so the founder of the service, Natalya Atyasheva, and the investment company ru-Net were among the TimePad shareholders). Now the main direct competitor on the Russian market is the TicketForEvent company. Its former CEO Alexander Kulebyakin compares them like this: “TimePad is like a mass market, the service has many small clients and a small average bill. And TicketForEvent is closer to the studio, the company has fewer events, but from large organizers, and a larger average bill.”

Timepad is a company that helps hundreds of people across Russia organize events and fill the lives of other people with new experiences, impressions and emotions. The world of events is very vibrant and diverse - conferences, children's events, music concerts and festivals, master classes, trainings, excursions, comic-cons, webinars on any topic.

Timepad– service No. 1 in Russia for organizing events, registering participants, selling tickets and attracting additional audiences. The company has existed since 2008, helps 140,000+ organizers create cool events and distributes more than 300,000 tickets every month. More than 23 million people have already attended events organized using the Timepad service.

Many of our users are surprised when they learn that a very small team is working on the development of Timepad - only about 65 people.

In such a small team, each person greatly influences the results of the entire company. And it’s incredibly cool to realize that thanks to you, every day the lives of millions of people become more interesting and richer! We believe that an ideal job should look like this.

Also, working in Timepad means:

Interesting and challenging tasks
Opportunity to learn and develop in interesting directions
Individual work schedule for each team member
Working in a young and passionate team
Cozy office 5 minutes from Kurskaya metro station

Our customer service team consists of people with diverse backgrounds. Among us there are both specialists with extensive sales experience and recent students. The entire team participated in organizing events before working at Timepad, many continue to participate now, attending many different events. We love events and understand event organizers and participants like no one else.

What inspires us at Timepad? Why is working with us so interesting and exciting?!

You will work with organizers of enchanting, interesting and useful events - from large conferences, music festivals, sports competitions with a complex registration procedure to intimate events and creative courses. Every event planner working with the Timepad platform is unique, so no two calls or meetings will be the same. Each of us is a consulting expert and super-pro in organizing registration and ticket sales for an event. We are constantly learning and attend many educational events ourselves. The opportunity to develop in a team and work is a great value for us.

The second round of investments from the Target Ventures fund, the volume of which, according to various estimates, exceeds $1 million. CP spoke with the co-founders of the service Lyudmila Pavlova, Daria Ustyuzhanina and Artyom Kiselyov about plans for the future, monetization of the service and how the event management market is developing in Russia .

Co-founders of TimePad

What does TimePad do?

Lyudmila Pavlova: TimePad is an online service for event management. We provide organizers of events of any type and scale with a full-cycle working tool: publishing their event, announcing and promoting it through various channels to notify potential participants, collecting registrations, selling electronic tickets, forming a participant database, analytics, as well as meeting directly at the event using free mobile application integrated with the registered database.

Most of TimePad's functionality is free for users - the business is built on receiving a commission from sales of electronic tickets, as well as providing services for promoting events through various channels available to TimePad.

So you're just automating manual processes?

Lyudmila Pavlova: Yes, they are the ones who “eat up” the main resources in the field of event organization. When you don’t have to worry about collecting registrations, setting up notifications, accepting payments and accounting, the organizer focuses on the most important thing - the event itself, its product.

For the rest of the Internet audience, TimePad is an aggregator of information about events of any format in any region. Today, this is perhaps the only place where you can find out about upcoming events of cultural, educational, business, entertainment and other content.

Let's learn more about the commission and services for promoting events. How much is the commission? What other monetization methods are there?

Lyudmila Pavlova: For paid events, the commission of our service is 7-9%, depending on the sales volume. But, unfortunately, this is not our profit, because... This commission includes processing costs (cards, accounts, electronic money), taxes, accounting support for all payments from legal entities, customer support and much more.

If we talk about monetization of the project, we are moving in three directions - a percentage of ticket sales, advertising and projects tailored to client requests “I want a non-standard registration form and a completely branded mailing list for participants.”

What event promotion channels do you use?

Lyudmila Pavlova: As for our promotion channels, TimePad is perhaps the only resource in Russia that can reach any audience - visitors to business events, medical forums, music festivals. We offer several types of promotion - mailing to an active subscriber base (500 thousand people), portal advertising opportunities (banners, priority placement, branding), our groups on social networks and resources of partners with whom we have favorable agreements.

By the way, about the subscriber base - these are all real people who bought tickets through us and signed up for new events, so the efficiency of mailing to them is much higher.

How much did you earn last year? How many events are organized through your service?

Daria Ustyuzhanina: To date, almost 30 thousand event organizers work with us, about 110 thousand events have been held. Judging by the last months, we serve 10 thousand events every month throughout Russia

According to our estimates, in 2013 the volume of the event ticket market in Russia (purchased online and offline) amounted to $4.1 billion. At the same time, the share of electronic tickets accounted for only 15% ($615 million), which suggests that our market is only enters a stage of active growth. That is why it is so interesting to investors. We expect that by the end of 2014, the share of electronic tickets will increase to 20%, and in 2016 - to 45-50%

Lyudmila Pavlova: We do not disclose the total turnover of the company. I can only say that our revenue from electronic tickets for 2014 will be about 150 million rubles. But this is not all of our income - a very significant share comes from event promotion services.

Is the money you earn enough to live on? How many people are on the team now, and in what areas do they work?

Lyudmila Pavlova: TimePad has been a company that has been making money for a long time, but since we are actively developing and growing, investments come in handy. The team now has about 30 people. A little less than half are involved in product development and development, the rest are involved in customer support, sales, and accounting.

By the way, about investments. How much did the company raise?

Lyudmila Pavlova: Recent media reports about Target Ventures' second round of investment in TimePad included an inaccurate figure that was quickly circulated. We were talking about the fund's total investment in our company in the amount of about $1 million. In fact, the actual volume is much higher, and this figure is closer only to the second round of investments, in which Target received an additional minority (less than 10%) stake in our company .

How do you plan to spend the raised funds?

Daria Ustyuzhanina: Several main directions can be identified.

Development of an existing product, expansion of channels for promoting events and working with the final audience; development of new products; marketing - market development and attracting new organizers. We'll make an announcement about new products soon.

Artyom Kiselev: If you look at the product, from the very beginning we try to cover the maximum of tasks that an event organizer faces when he wants to hold something. There are quite a lot of them - from coming up with the concept of the event, organizing work with participants, and ending with a letter thanking the participants for visiting after the event has passed.

Recently, we have created a fairly good and flexible registration and ticket sales system, which is used equally effectively at very different events. But in terms of tools for checking these tickets, and in general ways of interacting with participants at the event, we have a lot to improve.

Therefore, thanks to a new round of investments, we have launched several products that are aimed specifically at these tasks - to help the organizer quickly and efficiently do their work already at the event. And this, first of all, is a task for mobile products - applications for checking tickets, on-site check-in systems. So we can assume that the development of mobile products is one of the main directions for the near future.

The second direction is the development of social tools built into our solution. We provide the organizer with tools that he can use wherever he is present online (his website, social networks, even his own mobile applications). Therefore, we can help him set them up so that they themselves promote his events among his own participants.

We have been working on social tools for a long time and have already accumulated a set of working solutions in this area. Now we want to update and rework them so that they become even more effective and bring even more participants to our clients. Fortunately, now there are resources for this.

Do you have any competitors?

Daria Ustyuzhanina: The market for Internet services for event management in Russia, as well as in the world as a whole, is still very young. In different countries, there are usually one or two players who are pioneers. In Russia this is TimePad - we own more than 90% of our market. New players are appearing, but so far we don’t feel any serious competition.

In addition, there are many poster sites on the market, but, firstly, they are engaged only in entertainment events, and secondly, these are not services for event management, but essentially only online cash registers. Therefore, for us this is only a related market, since they somehow take on a certain part of the sales of electronic tickets.

Are you planning to expand beyond Russia? CIS, Europe, USA, Asia?

Lyudmila Pavlova: Now our focus is the Russian-language segment of the Internet, that is, first of all, Russia, especially its regional part, as well as the CIS countries. But the event market itself is still much smaller in them.

We do not plan to enter foreign markets yet - we are concentrating our efforts on the actively growing local market and developing our product.

Daria Ustyuzhanina: I would like to add that some players are making attempts to enter foreign markets, but so far we have not seen any successful cases.

Are you planning to launch side projects?

Daria Ustyuzhanina: Yes, right now the TimePad Event School project is at the launch stage, within which there is an online component - a communication platform has been launched for sharing experience in organizing events - and offline activities, seminars on event promotion, informal meetings of organizers of various types of events (concerts, trainings), which we have already begun to conduct.

We understand the importance of creating a growing market, and this responsibility falls on us, as its pioneers, so significant efforts are directed in this direction. We plan to attract more well-known people in the industry so that the quality of event preparation increases and knowledge about the possibilities of online services spreads more actively.

Where is the project office located?

Artyom Kiselev: There was a funny incident with the office. When we no longer fit into the previous office, we decided to approach the choice of a new one in a scientific way. In addition to choosing according to a standard list of criteria (size, distance from the metro, layout), we decided to make it convenient for all employees to get to it. To do this, we marked on the map who lives where, connected opposite points with lines, looked at who travels on which metro lines and streets, and made adjustments. The lines connected 100 meters from Artplay on Kurskaya. They rented a room there. Now here’s the problem - this is the most convenient place to work, but we need to expand again.

You have a rather atypical founding team for an IT startup: twogirls and one young man. Can you tell me the backstory?

Lyudmila Pavlova: The reason for everything is our own pain and suffering - we ourselves spent quite a long time organizing events at HSE and not only, and at some point we realized that we were devoting a huge part of our young lives to routine work like calling potential participants, manually collecting applications from them and entering them in Excel, and decided that something urgently needed to be changed. When they didn’t find a ready-made solution to their problem, they decided to do it themselves, and so it went.

Daria Ustyuzhanina: We were solving a very real problem in the event management industry. We realized later that this was an IT business. In general, after an IT and business education, working in a system integrator and business incubator at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, TimePad became a very logical continuation for me at the intersection of experience and interests.

Is life easy for IT startups in Russia?

Daria Ustyuzhanina: When we started with TimePad, it was within the framework of the HSE business incubator that we were developing business infrastructure. At that time, there were not many funds or incubators that were ready to invest at a very early stage. Now the situation is much more favorable for startups.

What are you driving?

Artyom Kiselev: I have a first-generation Kia Sportage (the only body-on-frame SUV of three generations). It is very good to drive on Russian roads outside the Moscow Ring Road - and this is my favorite pastime in my free time.