Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 7)

Katherine Kostereva: We do account-based marketing campaigns around those companies. As soon as we acquire the partner, we do onboarding processes. We invest in onboarding the partner and have them start developing the market. In some regions, we have unbelievable success. In South Africa, we have a partner who’s bringing several customers every month. Our direct sales force is doing nothing to get those customers. We just support our partner to do the job. That’s our channel number one.

To summarize, we do account-based marketing targeting system integrators. Those system integrators get into their existing customer base selling BPMOnline. The second vector is classical inbound marketing. We do lots of educational content. Every week on our website in the Insights sections, our prospects and customers can find new white papers or research. We use this heavily to share with our community and to attract leads. We use LinkedIn, especially CRM professional groups. This educational content generates quite a lot of leads. The number of marketing-qualified leads monthly nowadays is 10,000.

Sramana Mitra: Wow, great! How many people do you have in the US?

Katherine Kostereva: We have 20 people. The majority of those are in sales.

Sramana Mitra: Have you crossed to $50 million at this point?

Katherine Kostereva: Close.

Sramana Mitra: That’s fabulous. You’ve been able to get to close to $50 million in revenue starting from Ukraine and now you have a global business, that’s awesome.

Katherine Kostereva: If we didn’t have this revenue, we couldn’t have 700 people and huge R&D to develop our technologies and to get into the Gartner Quadrant. Thank you very much for your kind words.

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? Do you want to take this company public or sell it? What is your ambition?

Katherine Kostereva: We want to grow. My challenge right now is that the technology is so great. As an entrepreneur, I feel that it is my mistake that I didn’t go global earlier because with the technologies I have in hand right now, I could have had 10 times higher revenue that I have now. When I first met Paul Greenberg and he saw our technologies, it was quite a big PR.

He even traveled to Ukraine. After all this competition, we have such warm relations and correspondence. I invite him to travel to Ukraine. He was somewhere close and he visited Ukraine. He was telling me, “Why are you not in the United States?” It’s only now that I realize how big a mistake it was.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I am really thrilled that we had a chance to talk. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva
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