Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get your first customer? It sounds like you had a personal experience as well as observed experience of identifying the problem. How did you get to the first customer?

Nikita Sherbina: We outsource sales people and back in my country, we educate them. We educate those sales reps how to gather emails from LinkedIn. You go to Google Maps. You search 100 different locations with restaurants. You schedule those with your offer. You get a response.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these reps did you get?

Nikita Sherbina: One.

Sramana Mitra: Based on that one rep, how many customers were you able to get? How long did it take you to get the first customer?

Nikita Sherbina: It took under two months to get that first customer together with educating. We started adding one to two customers per month.

Sramana Mitra: These were prospects or customers?

Nikita Sherbina: They were just prospects. They didn’t know the solution. You own a coffee shop. They don’t know anything about digital menu boards. You need to understand the proposition really well before cold-calling. When you jump on a call, then you discover the pain point and say you can solve it. People like it.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the period where you were developing the MVP, how long was that? How many customers did you have at this point?

Nikita Sherbina: If you don’t feel embarrassed for your product, that means you came in to the market too late. When we started selling our software, we didn’t even have an MVP. You cannot even broadcast anything on the screen. We had this software built after the next two weeks. We go from there.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you sell that too?

Nikita Sherbina: One. Then next month, we talked to another one and so on.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you charge?

Nikita Sherbina: Not much. About $500 annual subscription. If you have 10 locations, it is 500 times 10.

Sramana Mitra: All of this was happening while you had your product management job?

Nikita Sherbina: When I started getting the first few customers, I decided to quit.

Sramana Mitra: How long into the process was that? How long did you do the bootstrapping with a paycheck before you quit?

Nikita Sherbina: In about five to six months.

Sramana Mitra: When was that?

Nikita Sherbina: Almost four years ago.

Sramana Mitra: That was before the pandemic.

Nikita Sherbina: It was a good time. When the pandemic hit, we started going a little bit down. People were not visiting restaurants as much.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, how many customers did you have before the pandemic hit?

Nikita Sherbina: About 20 customers. It wasn’t super hard because was it outsourced to people in the UK, so we had a good margin.

Sramana Mitra: Was it all bootstrapped?

Nikita Sherbina: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When restaurants started not functioning with the pandemic, how did that change your business?

Nikita Sherbina: We started looking for new opportunities. You need to adapt. So many opportunities crashed but the same amount has risen. You just need to understand where to go.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you go?

Nikita Sherbina: Healthcare. We started solving the problems for the biggest audience. In healthcare, you have different directories like building directories. You have different signs. For corporate, we started doing different applications. It was mostly healthcare.

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