Time is the most valuable asset your audience can share with you
Roman Sergeev, Founder of RomanSergeevCom
It is my and my team’s mission to help businesses to create content the audience will watch. YouTube is the main platform we do it for.
For example, we built a pipeline for producing animated videos for business, psychology and personal development books. How does it work? You go to our Youtube channel, watch a book summary, understand what the book is about and get ideas you can use in your life and business right now.
Some of the Russian authors - Igor Rybakov, Maxim Batyrev, Radislav Gandapas - are already among our customers. We have also worked with such international authors as Nassim Taleb, Dave Logan, Itzhak Adizes, Jeffrey Liker, Daniel Kahneman, Erik Larsson, and Loretta Breuning.
Our view count numbers show that people need this type of content. We have 500 K subscribers and 22 million views. I am convinced that time and attention are the most valuable asset the audience can give you.
It takes 6-8 persons and about 8 weeks to make just one summary. It is a laborious and expensive process, and it is difficult to upscale. Thus, we decided to make a platform for automation of production. We have not yet reached the stage where we no longer need humans, but we can make the process cheaper and faster.
Living in Skolkovo
Our company is not tied to any particular location, so it doesn’t really matter for me where in Russia to live, but most of our customers and partners are located in Moscow.
I am renting apartments right at Skolkovo. There are plenty of advantages: a 5 minute ride on an electric vehicle to get to office, enough parking space, and the apartment itself is really cool and modern. Here I feel safe: you can book a car pass via an application, the territory is provided with CCTV and security guards.
The rent includes all utility payments, 24/7 reception desk, and even an E-Class Mercedes-Benz as a taxi across the whole territory of the Innovation Centre. However, I rarely order a taxi, I use my EUC to get to office in the morning. In fact, I can simply walk to get to office, but I do like electric mobility concept, in particular, Segway-Ninebot.
All my electric vehicles perfectly fit into living in Skolkovo. When I was granted the resident status and moved here, I realized that I need something to move across the territory. It all started with Max G30P kick-scooter 3 years ago, which a friend of mine recommended me to buy. I used that kick-scooter anywhere: to move across the Skolkovo territory, in the subway, and even had it with me when I was travelling on the Sapsan express train. Then I bought Drift W1 electric roller skates to move across the office, then a unicycle, a segway and a lot of other stuff. Each of these devices has its own application, both in terms of practicality and the fun factor.
I am renting an office space at the Technopark co-working. For residents it is a convenient and cheap option: 24/7 access, coffee and cookies, color printer, nice co-working managers and other companies around you. It’s great that here you can have as many workplaces as you need. By the way, here I can see my apartments out of the co-working windows - I live right in front of my office.
One of the features of what we do is we read a lot of books, and after we are done, the books remain with us and often lie around. Some of them I bought myself, some were left after the events we held, meetings with authors or publishers. To make those books useful, together with Leonid Biryulin from the Technopark’s team, we arranged a library in the community capsule. I’ve donated about 600 books for this library. Many of them are unique, you won’t be able to buy them anywhere, many books are with autographs. Now any of the Technopark’s resident can borrow books from this library free of charge, and we gradually add new books.
In general, there are lots of pleasant stuff in Technopark. For example, they have a cool robot Fibbee able to brew truly amazing coffee.
Just a stone’s throw away there is a surfing center - it is not about sports skills, but about building a community as well. Where else you can get acquainted with Fedor Ovchinnikov, a founder of Dodo Pizza and show him how to ride roller skates?
Entrepreneurial way
Being an entrepreneur to me is like in that meme video of a child eating an onion thinking it’s an apple - he is crying but keeps on eating this onion. Sometimes I wish I could stop eating the onion.
As an entrepreneur I pass through crisis cycles. I do my best to feel the right way about them. Crises are about resetting: you leave behind all that doesn’t work, and change the way you work.
Three years ago I realized I had had it with spending money on promotion. When your advertising budget is wasted away, nobody cares, except you. Thus, I decided that crisis is the best time to start learning, and took an e-marketing course from Yandex.Praktikum.
I had always been short on time, and then I basically had none. New tight deadlines were added to my schedule, a lot of studying and many sleepless nights working on a project. However, the time and effort I spent were more than compensated for after I got a diploma. My business started growing: we kept churning up more content, our KPIs were getting better and better, but when I thought that I had finally made it, life taught me a new lesson.
After the events of February 2022 we’ve lost many of our customers. Animated videos became too expensive for many clients, and I had no money to keep paying my devs. I did not have the skills necessary to do the developing myself.
As I said, however, crisis is the best time to keep learning. So I started a new cycle: took another course from Yandex.Praktikum, now in data analysis. Learning is like the beginning of an adventure.
About three months into the course I had an idea how to automate content making and analyze the results by connecting to a Youtube-channel via an API.
When I offered this solution to Yuvelirochka’s Director General, she loved it. And I got myself a pilot project to be completed in one month, with a 300,000 ruble budget. I think this is a good ROI indicator - in just three months I could repay a one-year learning course, and still some money left to work in the development.
Yuvelirochka is having a live broadcast with a review and sale of jewelry. We made a system able to ‘cut’ videos right from the live broadcast, removing the unnecessary staff, adding spacers, video footage and posting them on YouTube.
The only thing left to decide was how to analyze the results. I got the help with this issue from Ekaterina Terentyeva who also graduated from Yandex.Praktikum. As a result, all the data are downloaded from YouTube as they are generated, and displayed as a marketing funnel: from views to subscribers and clicks. The report, which is available through a link, helps business owners to understand how well their YouTube channel does.
After we had presented our pilot project to the customer, we were awarded with 2 more months of work with a budget of RUB 1.2 million. More content, more data analysis. I think this is a great traction. And it promises more opportunities for businesses in terms of automating content production and analysis.