We’d like to help each restaurant to get rid of routine document management processes, in order to save time and money, and achieve spectacular business results
Open service is the company which services restaraunts round the clock. It gets calls from restaurant owners who have any sort of compaints. They tell about their problems and ask to help with reporting and accounting. When we see that some complaints and requests have a similar nature, it’s motivating us to work out a new solution in order to fight these issues. In 2015, we had an outsource department which was doing accounting for restaurants (we’re still doing it). There was a metric measuring how many consignment notes were manually introduced into the accounting system. After their number had surpassed 1,000, accountants started to ask about a possible IT solution. Besides, accountants working as “calculators” were in charge of several restaurants, and a manual mode of work allowed them to deal with five restaurants at maximum. However, automation lets them do accounting for 10-15. This is how the idea of DocsInBox which automates a small stage in the working process emerged. In the same way, 10 more startups appeared (biometrics, Face ID, Service Inspector, self-service kiosks, etc.). Some of them developed into big companies like DocsInBox, with 200 people working, or like Revvy, growing tenfold over five quarters. Some didn’t manage to turn into big businesses, like Service Inspector, in spite of being a very useful product with a low churn. But this product doesn’t have a high value, and it cannot be sold for a big price. That’s why it’s difficult to scale marketing and sales. That said the product is really profitable, but small.
Leonid Dovbenko on founding the project:
Team:
Stanislav Seleznev
Founder
Website:
The start of Open Service was quite innocent. There were founders and top managers, and there wasn’t a single CEO. There were only two founders, one in charge of sales, and another one in charge of technology. Growth became explosive after I had announced my decision to be a CEO. I had the last word and started to be responsible for the result. When DocsInBox was rapidly developing, Open Service had already been a mature company with regular management. It wasn’t needed from me to strive for product-market fit. Instead, administration was necessary, like weekly meetings where the team gets sure everybody has their goals and knows how to work towards them. A founder of a startup should always work on achieving product-market fit, which is the essence of any business. That’s why these two stages didn’t contradict. Of course, it is impossible to be a founder of two startups with both of them being in an early stage of development. Similarly, it became impossible to be a CEO of two companies in parallel after DocsInBox had started to gain strength. Open Service and DocsInBox have a very difficult business models, and compete with peers in a different way. I chose DocsInBox, as I thought this was where I could be more useful. Open Service got a new СЕО.
And on how to allocate responsibilities:
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