NxG Award 2021 - Finalist - Dmytro Gutsal
Dmytro Gutsal, 2nd Generation, Camion Oil, Ukraine. Founder of “ServicePlace.pro”
Dmytro is 2nd Generation, Camion Oil, Ukraine
Project Name: “ServicePlace.pro”
Year initiated: 2019
Project description: Web platform to develop your own service marketplace. We made an engine to launch a marketplace where anyone is able to find, match, book and pay online for services needed from thousands of service professionals. We already launched projects in automotive, beauty, architecture and sport industries.
https://youtu.be/pTvCSAbkFgs
About Dmytro
For two years Dmytro has been a member of the board of directors of a group of family-owned companies headquartered in Berlin, which distributes German motor oils Liqui Moly in Ukraine and Poland and produces in Germany its own motor oils under the brand Bizol, distributing it to more than 40 countries around the world.
Dmytro, on behalf of the board of directors, oversees the divisions of these family businesses in Ukraine.
5 years ago, Dmytro joined as a CEO a family-owned technology startup Autobooking.com – a marketplace of car related services.
After it was tested in Ukraine, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland, Dmytro convinced his family that it is a great opportunity to provide its IT platform to entrepreneurs from other industries willing to start a service marketplace.
As a result, Dmytro founded ServicePlace.pro – IT company that provides solution to start and develop a service marketplace business that is suitable for more that 30 industries.
Prior to that, for 9 years he headed jewelry salons "Abricos" in Ukraine, founded by his mother, participated in the opening of salons in different cities of Ukraine and the creation of his own jewelry production under the brand "Olga Veisberg".
How does your project provide a solution to a problem or satisfies a specific need?
To develop an online service marketplace typically you need to invest more than 100 000$ and it takes at least 9 month before you may start going online. With us it takes approximately 1 month and with much less investments as we provide our engine based on SaaS model (we take monthly license fee for software). Also we have a 6 years of experience in project from different countries, so we are not only providing a code as IT company but also transferring our expertise in operating such business as service marketplace
How do you create customer value?
By providing software and expertise for service marketplaces much cheaper and faster comparing to usual way of developing such project from scratch hiring your own team of developers or working with outsourcing companies. We give not only code and servers but also our expertise that helps partner to better understand risks and rules of "game" he is starting to work on.
How is your project innovative?
Providing software for service marketplaces on a SaaS model is a blue ocean. For sure there are many companies who do that for marketplaces of goods. But when you go to services we found less than 10 companies all over the world active in that field. None of them are from CIS region. And when we made a benchmark we understand that we have much more complex platform with unique features.
What is the most valuable mistake that you have made, and what did you learn from it?
An idea, that everybody has same perception as me. It was hard to understand that trends and ideas that obvious for me are not so for others. We need to spend more time and attention on explaining people idea behind our project and benefits everybody can get out of it.
How being from a family business has impacted you as a person, and which influence this has in turn had on your project?
Firstly - all my business education and development was inside of family business. My best business mentor is my mother. Our core family business is in motor oils. 6 years ago based on it we started a company Autobooking.com in Ukraine to support Camion oil. After it began to exist in Poland, Germany and the Netherlands. When opening a project in each new country, we made improvements and changes so that project managers in different countries were able to readjust their administrative panels according to the specific features of their markets. After we reconfigured the platform in this way 4 times, we realized that adapting the mechanism of our platform for other industries would be as easy as entering another market in the automotive industry. So basically even the idea of the project came out of Family business.