EnglishAirfare search service №1 in Ukraine TripMyDream about working with Roman.ua.
We needed someone to push us forward, so we turned to Roman.
Andrey Burenok
Hello. My name is Andrey Burenok. I am Founder and CEO at TripMyDream, YouTube blogger, Head of Viasat in Ukraine.
About the company
- Founding year2015
- Number of employees15
- Work fieldB2C
About 7 years ago, when I didn’t know a thing about email marketing, I was at some kind of email marketing conference with my current partner Taras Polishchuk, where Roman Rybalchenko was speaking very confidently. No one was taking selfies with him yet, but many were already asking questions, and he was answering them. Therefore, when I thought ‘I want to learn analytics’, for some reason Roman Rybalchenko was my top-of-my-mind candidate. I reached him, and he answered me a month or two later: ‘Dear Andrey, hello’, he was somewhere in Bali. And I was surprised, ‘Dear Andrey, hello, I’m so-and-so, very sorry, so-and-so.’ Anyway, after a couple of months, Roman returned to Ukraine and for several months taught analytics to two of my teams, Viasat and TripMyDream, and, in particular, mentored Taras and me.
Task
The story is, I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted. And the problem is that I don’t know which half it is. I believe that if you can’t measure something in our time of digitalization, online marketing and E-commerce businesses in general – button conversion, cost of a client attraction, cost of a client return, LTV of a client – shortly speaking, you need to know the margin of each button on your website and app, and so on.
At the moment when I reached Roman, I had poor knowledge of all of this, because it is not so simple to learn analytics on your own in our time. You need someone who will push you forward. And so I came to Roman for several reasons.
The first one was learning analytics deeper, that is, Google analytics in particular and a general approach to analytics.
The second one was setting up advanced E-commerce analytics for TripMyDream.
Result
And we did it. Yes, it was difficult, because our model implies that it’s not use who sell, but our partners. They transmit sales data via certain deep links, Google Analytics, or other web dashboards. This needs to be matched through internal analytics, transferred to GA, and correctly attributed. Therefore, there are a lot of opportunities – we say ‘opportunities’ when we mean ‘problems’.
And third, I wanted to set up a specific analyzing process in my team.
That’s what we started to do when Roman began to teach and help us, in principle. We basically started the process of analytics in the team. Back then we were just beginning to try E-commerce in Ukraine.
And then Roman’s spouse, Olya comes along — a wonderful, beautiful lady, the kindest girl — she appeared to be very competent in email marketing. We immediately switched our sight to Olya, who helped us set up automation for email marketing and conducted an audit. That automation worked for about a year. Now we have changed it ourselves, but it worked for a long time back then. And we were satisfied with it.
Do you want to get an audit of your online marketing?
We know how to find growth opportunities for your business
Of course, even if it’s a small agency that fulfills your tasks, any agency always needs to be pushed, but with these guys, it’s a pleasure, they take it normally, not aggressively.
These were the tasks we were working on, as far as I remember
Price
The training that Roman did for us was initially insanely expensive. This is a very expensive thing. I do not regret paying the money, but I think that training is expensive. Today they can be found at a cheaper price. But we bought it as two separate corporations, therefore, so I guess it’s an ok price for corporations. If you take it for yourself, face-to-face mentoring, then I think the price could be decreased several times.
How much is this on the market? I have no idea. Now, there are a lot of guys who teach successful success or analytical analytics, so I haven’t addressed anyone else yet. There are a lot of such specialists, but, unfortunately, it turns out that I still can’t find a good analyst for my team.
Have you watched the Billions tv series?
Then it’s hard for you to understand. There is such a character with a short haircut who always asks questions. In our world, when there are billions of answers when you really have billions of data. We have one and a half million visits on the website. We have about a million to one and a half million flight searches per month. Different people come and go. So, there is a lot of data: airline tickets, companies, prices people are looking for.
The most important thing is to ask the right questions because there are too many answers. We must learn to ask the right questions. This is the first key factor. The second one is to have the necessary tools in order to work with these questions and extract answers from them. That’s it, two things. In order to ask competent questions, you need to understand business logic as well. Many analysts lack the business thinking to figure out ‘Why do we need it?’. Think deeper, fly higher and look at the funnel, a little wider funnel, and a much wider funnel. Like that.
Any agency needs to look at three things, as in any service. The first one is cost. The second one is the quality of work. The third one is time.
In your case, I would look at the time when we were working together. Your cost is fine. The quality of service is higher than decent. I am satisfied with the quality of service. Regarding the time, sometimes it takes you too long to do something. Sometimes one has to remind you to be given priority.
Recommendation
Firstly, I already recommend you anyway. If someone asks me, I say that you taught me back in the day. Secondly, the main thing is that I do not advise against you. Believe me, in our time, when there are so many agencies and a lot of specialists, the most important thing is not to receive non-recommendations. It’s already worth it. Nowadays, when a black mirror is present everywhere, when one Facebook post can kill a person, kill a business, make a good person an enemy of the state in just one day or two, it’s better not to have non-recommendations. That’s it, I think.
Andrey Burenok
Founder and CEO at TripMyDream
https://www.facebook.com/burenok.andrey
