Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra:: Talk about the two projects.

Nikita Sherbina: I was working in an AI-enabled tool company. It was for marketing and sales people. It helped communication between departments. For example, you can create multiple campaigns in sales. Marketing people can see all these statistics. We’ve 80 customers which generated $80 million of revenue. It was a B2B SaaS business. We were providing a software platform.

Another personal project is a cloud-based solution designed to simplify and make more accessible the display of content to any screen. You can download an application and connect multiple screens in one software. All screens can be managed remotely from any location or to buy offline functionality.

Sramana Mitra: This is for trade shows and conferences? What is the primary use case for this kind of technology?

Nikita Sherbina: It’s such a broad niche. We work in multiple niches. All screens that you can see even McDonald’s. Imagine you want to change your description. This is where we come in. We have CRM where you can double-click on pictures and change any type of content on thousands of screens.

Sramana Mitra: How did you come up with this pain point?

Nikita Sherbina: We’ve seen the rise in the market. I was working as a product manager and I was doing a lot of market research. I’ve seen the digital signage market increase day by day. I’ve seen the trend. People need flexible and scalable solutions. By just observing the reality and seeing that some restaurants have this pain point, there was no product that could broadcast in multiple screens.

Sramana Mitra: The fact that you were a product manager in a related space gave you lots of market research and visibility into the other related problems in the marketing automation space. That’s how you identified this problem.

Nikita Sherbina: It’s a little bit deeper. If you’re trying to find new businesses, it’s better to see where the different markets are going. You start doing research on a trend and trying to understand the whole niche.

Sramana Mitra: What process did you follow? Did you, straight away, start building a product? Did you have customers?

Nikita Sherbina: We knew about digital menu boards. They need to reprint a menu board. Even my father owned a restaurant a long time ago back in my country. He always had this problem of changing menus. It stuck with me and I always knew there was a problem. After I started exploring more and more, I can see people put labels on their menu boards because they don’t want to reprint it. You can see that it doesn’t look good.

The devil is in the details. You need to have a good eye. What can I solve? What kind of problem does this business have? If you think this way all the time, you start seeing patterns all around. You can see what kind of problems people have. The more you observe, the more patterns you can see around yourself.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen
1 2 3 4