Taxi marketing and personnel management. Who rules the Russian taxi market Define the target audience

Oftentimes, little attention is paid to taxi marketing, which is an integral and important part of the business. Start improving your business right now - this will attract additional customers to your company and give you special competitive advantages. In order to tie clients to your company as much as possible, the SeDi system already has interesting and extraordinary opportunities.

Services that can already be used for your clients:

  • Client's personal account on the group's website, personal personal account, personal card with information about the client, his personal discounts, history of his orders.
  • The ability to maintain a white and black list of drivers up to the choice of a specific driver for each client.
  • More than 5 options for discounts and bonuses for clients - individuals and corporate clients.
  • Automatic notifications about the status of the order, about the location and arrival of the car, etc. in your personal account on the website or by SMS.
  • The possibility for the client in various ways (by phone, via SMS, on the website in his personal account, etc.) to assess the quality of the services provided after the trip.
  • Estimating the cost of the trip as a standard feature of the system.
  • Possibility of advance orders to other cities.
  • The ability to generate detailed reports on trips.
  • ...and much more.

Our partners have the opportunity to create their services based on our technologies, and we are always ready to help them with this. Using and creating modern marketing tools in the taxi business, you not only develop your business, but also improve the entire transportation industry as a whole, increase the quality and attractiveness of taxi rides for end users.

Employee management is a job that requires a special approach. SeDi provides you with the necessary tools to control the quality of employees' work. All actions of drivers, dispatchers, managers of the company for the head - at a glance. A manager can at any time from any place where there is Internet access to control the functioning of his company and have the most reliable information in real time. If necessary, directly in the program there is the possibility of communicating with any employee via internal telephony or using the built-in messenger.

The system stores the following information:

About drivers:

  • The track covered by the car with all data on speed, parking, breaks, route changes, etc.
  • The real location of the driver at any given moment, distance from the order, status, etc.
  • Information about orders (completed, failed, current, etc.).
  • The driver's financial indicators and a complete history of payment transactions on his personal account.
  • Complaints about work, assessments of the quality of services provided, etc.

about dispatchers:

  • The number of registered orders (completed, failed, current, etc.)
  • The number of processed calls (how many are accepted, how many of them are with orders, how many missed, etc.)
  • Recording of all telephone conversations with the ability to listen and analyze.
  • At present, technologies of motivation of dispatchers are being introduced.
for all employees:
  • The System Event tool allows you to find out what actions were performed by this or that employee over a particular period of time.

In just a few years, mobile technology has revolutionized the taxi niche, escalating competition to the extreme. This made life much easier for passengers: the time of car delivery was reduced several times, trips became much cheaper.

Taxi market volume

The democratization of taxi prices led to the growth of the market, which by 2015 amounted to $ 9 billion (this is the November estimate of the analytical company Merku). Oksana Serebryakova, board member of the Association of Taxi Dispatch Services, does not agree with this figure. According to her calculations, the market volume is no more than $ 6 billion, or about 420 billion in rubles. Due to the crisis, the number of orders for different carriers fell by 40-50%, Serebryakova is convinced, and this year it will definitely not grow.

“The market size is very difficult to calculate,” admits the founder of Taxilet, Mikhail Vinogradov. - In our calculations, we are guided by 1 trip per day for 10 residents of cities with a population of one million. That is, in Moscow we can talk about a million movements per day. "

None of the players wants to share data on their volumes. The market for the most part consists of illegal and unrecorded traffic and participants. From our experience in the regions, we have derived a formula: usually the daily traffic volume is 10% of the city's population. The average check depends on the standard of living and the presence of a networker in the city (a large network of control rooms - ed.). In millionaires it is 100-150 rubles, in towns - 60-80 rubles. Therefore, we take 15 million trips around the country per day, multiply them by 100 rubles of the average check, and we get 1.5 billion rubles of turnover per day. About 20% of this amount is received by dispatchers, about 1% - by software providers for taxis. These are very rough numbers, but they can serve as a basis for understanding the market that cannot be accurately estimated.

The founder of the Gett taxi service, Shahar Weiser, predicted that in the next 3-4 years the Russian taxi market will grow to $ 15-20 billion, and this will happen due to online services. Another market participant is convinced that this figure does not reflect the current reality and was announced by Gett specifically for investors to show the potential and attract the next round.

And the head of Cat Taxi, Gennady Kotov, considers it incorrect to assess the Russian taxi market in dollars due to exchange rate fluctuations and the fact that the cost of transportation is absolutely not tied to currency. At the same time, he notes that for Gett and Uber, the fall of the ruble is extremely beneficial: external investments give them additional opportunities for dumping in Russia.

Number of taxi drivers

In October 2015, more than 180 thousand taxi cars were officially operating in Russia (Rusbase's interlocutors suggest that this figure covers only legal drivers). In Moscow alone, according to the city's transport department, about 55 thousand taxi drivers are licensed. Moreover, many drivers cooperate with several services at once.

According to Mikhail Vinogradov, the founder of Taxilet, there are about 100 thousand more taxis operating in the capital without licenses, working under charter contracts this is when the aggregator for money entrusts a private driver with the transportation of a passenger (moreover, the contract can be oral) - and that's not counting those who come from the region. “The number of illegal taxis, depending on the situation in the country, may tend to the number of all cars,” says Vitaly Makhinov, founder of the Russian Taxi Exchange.

Aggregators vs. classic taxis

There are two groups of players in the taxi market: taxi companies with their own fleet and aggregators of taxi services. The latter conclude contracts with taxi companies (Yandex.Taxi) or with private drivers registered as individual entrepreneurs (Uber, Gett, Maxim, Leader, Saturn). According to some estimates, taxi services account for more than half of all taxi services in Moscow.

There are no more than a thousand full-fledged taxi companies with their own fleet and economic base per country. As for the aggregators, they are divided into pure online (without an office and a control room - Gett, Uber, Yandex Taxi, etc.) and traditional control rooms that have their own mobile applications (Maxim and others).

Aggregators see themselves as IT companies that help driver and passenger find each other. Formally, they do not fall under the law "On Taxi" - there is simply no concept of "taxi dispatch service" or "information service" in it. Traditional carriers accuse them of unfair competition: aggregators are not responsible for road accidents, passenger safety, late arrival at the airport and technical serviceability of the car. In addition, having already entered the database of the information service, the driver can close the IP in order not to pay taxes.

Yaroslav Shcherbinin,

chairman of the Interregional Trade Union "Taxi Driver"

Apps create conditions for illegal activity by attracting illegal carriers. This is one of the main ingredients for their success. There is no accounting and deduction of taxes for working drivers, there are no requirements for ensuring safety, liability to the passenger in the event of an emergency. Consumers are attracted by the price of the trip. Most drivers do not understand the unprofitability of this type of activity and are drawn into this pyramid. It is difficult for traditional players to compete in such an environment.

Mikhail Vinogradov,

founder of Taxilet

Of course, the old taxi owners are offended. For decades they plowed, took risks, beat them, burned their cars, waited at the entrance, extorted money, strangled them with taxes. They survived, endured it all, became leaders. And now their guys in sneakers are tight. But no matter how much the archers went on strike, they cannot oppose anything to the submachine gunners.

Secretive leaders

The media field is dominated by well-known metropolitan aggregators - Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber. But on a national scale, the three federal dispatch offices are confidently leading - "Rutaxi", "Saturn" and "Maxim". They prefer to stay in the background, do not disclose indicators and practically do not communicate with journalists.

“These are the real leaders of the market, probably even the world one,” says Mikhail Vinogradov. "In fact, these are Russian Uber, moreover efficient and living without outside investments." The real owners of the market are still the gray cardinals in the regions, agrees the head of Cat Taxi Gennady Kotov. According to him, there is an abyss between the federal troika and the rest of the market participants. According to rough estimates, Rutaxi, Saturn and Maxim altogether make about 4 million traffic per day. Their shares in this volume are 40%, 35% and 25%, respectively.

So they are not at all afraid of competition with well-known metropolitan services. Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber occupy an absolutely microscopic share of the Russian market, - a representative of one federal network shares on condition of anonymity. "Each of us individually makes more shipments than all of them put together."

Applications do not rule

According to experts, in Moscow the share of ordering a taxi through applications reaches 65-70% (including small players), in St. Petersburg - no more than 30%, in cities with a population of over a million - no more than 8%, and in the outback - no more than 3%. The fact is that in the regions the population has much fewer smartphones than it seems from Moscow.

In addition, navigation is bad in the regions: the mobile Internet is lame in settlements with a population of less than 200 thousand. This greatly complicates the operation of applications - the driver simply cannot find the passenger. Taxi drivers in small towns work the old fashioned way, with radios. And Maxim, Rutaxi and Saturn thrive thanks to their well-developed dispatching and telephony integration.

To create a full-fledged online service in the regions, you need to invest heavily in local cartography in order to clarify the maps of rural areas and improve navigation capabilities, says Oksana Serebryakova, board member of the Association of Taxi Dispatch Services. Now taxi services from the hinterland rely on local drivers who are well versed in their native lands. According to the head of Cat Taxi Gennady Kotov, online does not come to the hinterland, not because of cartography, but because local taxis are in no hurry to make applications until a strong competitor (networker) arrives.

Player portraits

Now is the time to tell a little about the leaders of the online taxi market. If you think that we have undeservedly forgotten someone - add to the list in the comments.

All-Russian leaders

Rutaxi is a mobile application and a taxi ordering system for the services "Lucky" and "Leader". This federal network of dispatching offices operates in 90 cities of Russia and 3 cities in Kazakhstan (Almaty, Astana, Karaganda). According to experts, Rutaxi accounts for about 1.6 million traffic per day - it is the largest player on the Russian market. The network cooperates with both private taxi drivers and taxi companies, eliminating the need to maintain their own dispatchers. The application for ordering a taxi from a smartphone "Rutaxi", according to them, was launched in 2011. "Rutaxi" does not advertise the commission percentage and the number of cars.

In each city, the "Leader" has registered separate legal entities, their type of activity is formulated as "data processing". According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founder of almost all divisions of the network (including LLC Leader and LLC Vezet) is the Ufa businessman Vitaly Bezrukov (in some places together with partners). Apparently, it was he who founded the taxi service "Leader" in 2003. Bezrukov has not yet appeared in the media field of view. In 2012, he took part in the II All-Russian Congress of Taxi Drivers. His photo can be seen on the website of the Ufa Aviation Club:

"Saturn"

Entrepreneur Yevgeny Lvov launched the Saturn taxi service in Timashevsk (Krasnodar Territory) in 1998. Today the company has grown into a federal taxi network that operates in 43 cities across the country. The interlocutors of Rusbase calculated that it makes about 1.4 million shipments per day. Like its competitors, Saturn has a legal entity registered in each city, almost all of them are owned by Yevgeny Lvov himself. In 2012, the network launched the TapTaxi mobile application for ordering a car without the participation of a dispatcher.

In 2015, Evgeny Lvov, together with partners, launched the Fasten taxi call app in the United States, which will compete with Uber itself. The project was launched in Boston in September and will appear in Russia this year. Knowledgeable people say that the founders of the project have very big plans that will significantly affect the taxi market.

The history of the company began in 2003 with a small taxi service in the city of Shadrinsk (Kurgan region). The service was launched by entrepreneur Maxim Belonogov.

Maxim Belonogov

Now the company operates in 114 cities of Russia and 11 more cities in Ukraine (Mariupol, Kharkov), Kazakhstan (Aktobe, Astana, Petropavlovsk, Uralsk), Georgia (Batumi, Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Rustavi) and Bulgaria (Sofia). LLC "Infoservice" (legal entity "Maxim") makes about a million shipments per day. Judging by the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Maxim has a legal entity registered in each city. The founders of the regional divisions are Maxim Belonogov and Oleg Shlepanov.

"Maxim" works with private drivers, from whom it charges a 10% commission. They work with a proprietary application and a dispatch service (90% of orders are received by phone). The average ticket for a trip in the network is 100 rubles. The company earns 10 million rubles per day, according to Sekret Firmy in April. In 2011, an additional direction was spun off from the company - the dispatch service for taxi companies Taxsee.

"Maxim" is the leader in the number of cities, but in many of them he is present only nominally, says a critical source Rusbase.

Capital leaders

Taxi service from Yandex entered the market in 2011. It was the initiative of the son of the founder of the corporation Lev Volozh. The service works only with taxi companies - now Yandex.Taxi has 450 partners who unite 30 thousand cars. In April 2015, they processed 60 thousand orders per day. Current estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 trips per day. Today the service is available in 14 cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Sochi, Vladikavkaz, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Samara, Tula and Voronezh. Since 2016, Yandex.Taxi has been a separate company within the holding. Tigran Khudaverdyan became the CEO of Yandex.Taxi, who has been running the service since 2014, and before that was the head of Yandex's mobile products department.

Tigran Khudaverdyan

You can pay for the trip in cash or by credit card. The commission for taxi companies is 11% + VAT, the average ticket for a trip in Moscow is 533 rubles. The aggregator also offers the market a professional software package for taxi services "Yandex.Taxometer", which includes a program for taxi fleets and a mobile application for drivers. As indicated on the product's website, 1,000 companies and 200,000 cars across the country are connected to it. In January 2015, Yandex bought the Ros.Taxi service, which allows taxi companies to take orders, coordinate the work of drivers and keep records.

Israeli entrepreneur Shahar Weiser came to Russia with his GetTaxi service in 2012. Now Gett taxi (updated name) can be ordered in 10 cities of Russia - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar. In Moscow, the average check is 400–500 rubles, Gett commission is 15%. This is more than Yandex, but Gett's functionality is wider - in addition to aggregation and user support, the company is engaged in hiring and training taxi drivers.

The service works with taxi companies and private drivers who have a license for passenger transportation. In total, about 20 thousand cars are available in the Gett system. The Russian division of the company is headed by Vitaly Krylov.

The famous American startup took up the Russian market at the end of 2013. He works with private drivers, whose cars do not have taxi identification marks. A license is required to connect to Uber. Uber does not disclose data on the number of drivers and the commission charged from them.

The service is launched in 7 cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don and Sochi. The Russian office of the scandalous unicorn is headed by Dmitry Izmailov. “We are interested in all cities with a population of more than 100 thousand people,” he said in an interview with Rusbase.

LLC "City-Mobil" is one of the largest carriers in the capital that works with private drivers. Entrepreneur Aram Arakelyan, together with partners, created the company in 2007. The Citymobil service was one of the first to introduce software for the automated distribution of orders between the nearest cars, reducing the waiting time to 10 minutes. Now more than 20 thousand taxi drivers work with it, who pay 15% of the commission to the service. Citymobil is a Yandex.Taxi partner, so the service's drivers accept orders from both systems. In 2014, Citymobil received 10% of Moscow's orders. The service also operates in Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Kazan, and in the future plans to conquer the CIS countries.

"Russian Taxi Exchange"

In 2008, partners Vitaly Makhinov and Vladimir Chirkov launched Russia's first b2b aggregator of taxi orders for taxi fleets and dispatch services - the Russian Taxi Exchange (RBT). The story began with 15 partners who were offered to exchange "inconvenient" orders among themselves. At the moment, more than a thousand taxi fleets and dispatch services, as well as more than 50 thousand drivers, are connected to the RBT system. More than 10 thousand orders a day pass through RBT every day. The CEO of RBT is Ruslan Kalinov.

What will happen next?

Where is the Russian taxi market going? The market participants we interviewed agree that cooperation based on innovation is replacing tough competition. Moreover, these changes are based on cost reduction. New players bring fresh ideas to the industry and pull passengers not from other taxis, but from public transport (helping to unload it). They transfer taxis to those who could not afford it before.

Outsourcing and separation of roles optimize the costs of companies. Taxi fleets will be responsible for cars and drivers, agile tech companies for marketing, sales and logistics. In the regions, this will be implemented when there are enough smartphones. Technologies and ideas come to taxis from related markets: cargo transportation, navigation and traffic monitoring. Technological cooperation will help overcome the crisis in the taxi industry, experts say.

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Companies spend millions to grab the attention of shoppers, but they often don't want to take the last step - driving to the office or store. CallToVisit solved this problem by turning taxi ordering into a marketing tool

“Thank God, online has not yet completely replaced the real world. We still get the strongest consumer emotions offline: we buy an apartment or a car, go to a massage and go to a restaurant. But in order to get off the couch and get this living experience, people often do not have enough time or willpower, - says Nikolai Shestakov, co-owner and investor of CallToVisit service. "We've built a bridge between online desire and offline action."

The founders of CallToVisit, 28-year-old Sergey Alumov and 27-year-old Dmitry Egorov, offered the business to bring customers to points of sale by taxi at their own expense. More than 100 companies took advantage of the idea; in February 2018, the service's turnover amounted to 3 million rubles. In addition, he was able to attract 20 million rubles. investment.

How it works

CallToVisit service is an intermediary between business and taxi aggregators. When a potential buyer visits the website of a CallToVisit client (developer, car dealer, bank, etc.), he sees a button “order a free taxi”. By clicking on it, you get to a page where you can enter your phone number, a convenient time and the address where the Yandex.Taxi machine will arrive and take it to the point of sale (some companies pay for the return trip as well). The company pays for the trip from its personal account in CallToVisit, to which it pre-transfers a certain amount (usually about 50 thousand rubles). The average bill for one trip is 400 rubles. The CallToVisit service itself earns on the sale of licenses to use software (15 thousand rubles per month) or on commissions from the cost of trips (now - 30%).

The road to the bot

The idea of \u200b\u200ba free taxi for business came to the head of the marketer Sergey Alumov during the January holidays in 2017. “The thought was simple, but then it was like an electric shock to me,” he recalls. - There is a callback function, a call center, there is an online chat and a million more tools that, in theory, should convince the client to come and buy. But it is much more efficient to just pay him the way to the store. "

Sergey Alumov got into advertising by accident: he graduated from MADI and worked for three years in a department of the Ministry of Transport. I decided to change the field of activity in 2015. “I have always been attracted by the IT world, but I didn’t understand anything at all about technology,” Alumov admits. For help, he turned to his school friend Dmitry Egorov, the data director of the international advertising company Weborama: “Dima and I lingered after work, he taught me the basics. My head was cracking from the amount of new information. " In August 2015, Alumov got a job as a purchasing manager for online advertising at Weborama, and a year later he was already a project manager.

But gradually the work turned into a routine. Alumov was prompted to the idea of \u200b\u200ba free taxi by the case of one of Weborama's clients - the PIK development group. “They had no problems attracting customers to the site, but not everyone got to the objects - it is usually a long walk from the metro,” says the entrepreneur. - I thought: since it is so important for them to attract people to objects, why not say - come to us for free?

Alumov studied the market and realized that you can become a pioneer. Some companies have already organized a transfer for clients, but he did not find a special service that would automate this process either in Russia or abroad. For example, Anna Polyakova, the owner of the Bikini House swimwear showroom, offered free taxi rides to the owners of her store's premium cards. “I used the services of Yandex.Taxi and Uber, on average the trip cost 400-1000 rubles. with an average check of 14 thousand rubles, eight out of ten customers made a purchase, - says Polyakova. “The taxi costs paid off, but the process itself was inconvenient. We did everything manually: first, we called the client on the phone, then called a taxi, then we told the client the number of the car. It happened that the driver and the client could not find each other. " As a result, Polyakova refused this service.

After the New Year holidays, Alumov began to communicate with taxi aggregators. Wheely and Gett were the first to respond, but failed to find common ground. The entrepreneur hoped that the aggregators would share the travel profits with him, but this did not suit them. Alumov came to the meeting at Yandex.Taxi with a new business plan: the aggregator only needed access to its IT system, and the entrepreneur decided to make money on client companies. Yandex.Taxi approved this scheme. “In April 2016, we launched a b2b product for the corporate segment of transportation, Yandex.Taxi for Business. Now the service has 8 thousand clients: someone uses it for employee trips and business trips across Russia, and someone uses it to build their own business, such as CallToVisit, "commented Evgeny, head of Yandex.Taxi for Business. Sinelnikov.

Having agreed with the aggregator, Sergey Alumov connected Dmitry Egorov to the work. “Thanks to a free taxi, you can easily identify the advertising channel through which customers come and optimize marketing costs,” Egorov explains his interest in the project.

The entrepreneurs hired a programmer who wrote a pilot software for the service in three months - a total of 600 thousand rubles were spent on development. The first CallToVisit clients in May 2017 were the Virgins and Burlesque nightclub chains. “Technically, the product was still raw, and each order had to be driven in by hand,” recalls Sergey Alumov. - People go to clubs at night, so Dima and I gathered at my place, took a beer and began to wait. We sat there until the morning, but did not receive a single order. "

Then the entrepreneurs decided to call customers who started but never completed the trip. It turned out that people were annoyed by the service interface. The partners changed the external design of the window and placed their first order next weekend. “It was in the middle of the night, and when I received an SMS notification, I was so glad that I almost fell out of bed,” Alumov laughs.

In June, Sergei Alumov rented the first office from a relative - 15 sq. m for 15 thousand rubles. on Kalanchevskaya street in Moscow. As a sales manager, he hired his younger brother, Maxim Evstafiev. As a result, eight companies joined CallToVisit: PIK, Sovcombank, Elena Malysheva's Medical Center, and others. By the end of July, the project received its first profit - about 100 thousand rubles.

“During the entire period of using CallToVisit, 1600 people came to us by free taxi, more than 30% of them signed contracts for the purchase of apartments. The average cost of buying an apartment in PIK is 3.4 million rubles, ”says Roman Abdullin, advertising director at PIK Group. According to Boris Leskov, general director of the construction company Concern Rusich, in the segment of economy class real estate during advertising campaigns, one call from a client (lead) costs developers 7-8 thousand rubles, so a potential client should pay a taxi for 700-800 rubles ... they can quite afford it.

The road to the investor

The founders of the project understood from the very beginning that their service was affordable for companies with high average check. The scheme was suitable for developers, large banks and private clinics, but its convenience required improvement. “To come to a medical center for an MRI, for example, a client still had to first call the call center, make an appointment and only then call a taxi. The chain was too long, and we wanted to achieve maximum automation, ”Alumov explains. To reduce the number of actions performed, it was necessary to integrate with the CRM systems of their clients, and this required new serious investments in the development of the program.

The friends introduced the partners to the investors: Nikolai Shestakov, a former Yandex top manager and founder of the Adventum performance agency, Vitaly Groznov, co-owner of the Air marketing group, and Vladimir Margolin, ex-head of the Gazprom-Media Internet division and co-owner of an advertising agency Brainrus. “I immediately believed in the idea: it lay on the surface and was easy to implement,” says Groznov. - A free taxi is an effective factor for narrowing the sales funnel (a marketing term describing the process of selling a product or service, at each stage of which a part of potential customers is eliminated. - RBK), over which all marketers are fighting ”. In August 2017, the founders agreed that new partners will invest about 20 million rubles in the project. within a year, having received 44% in the legal entity CallToVisit LLC "KTV".


Sergey Alumov and Nikolay Shestakov (Photo: Vladislav Shatilo / RBC)

We agreed to spend investments in three areas: technical improvement of the platform, marketing and going outside Russia. The partners rented a new office and hired 15 employees to interact with clients, and began advertising in Yandex, Google and social networks. Outsourced programmers took over the development - their services cost 700 thousand rubles. per month.

In February 2018, entrepreneurs launched a service that allows companies to independently integrate a free taxi option into their website. “You don't need to call managers, issue invoices and wait for instructions on how to connect the widget - the whole process is automated,” Shestakov explains. "This step was necessary for scaling: otherwise, each new ten clients would require us to hire two new employees, and growing the staff to infinity was not part of our plans."

Thanks to the partnership with Yandex.Taxi, CallToVisit immediately entered the regions: now the service operates in ten cities in Russia, although 80% of trips are in Moscow. Now the entrepreneurs are planning to cover all the cities with a population of over one million in Russia, in which Yandex.Taxi is present, and to enter the Dubai market. The company received the status of a resident of the Dubai Internet City startup cluster, which is completely tax-exempt, and then plans to move to Europe and the United States.

The road to small business

For ten months of work CallToVisit connected about 100 clients, the number of trips reached 3 thousand per month. Among the clients are mainly large businesses with an average purchase check of hundreds of thousands and millions of rubles. “But we understand that there are hundreds of such large players, and hundreds of thousands of small companies, and it is on them that you need to stake,” says Sergei Alumov.

To attract small businesses, the partners have developed an alternative payment model: they began to charge not a flat fee for a license, but 30% of the cost of a trip. One of the first "small" CallToVisit clients may be, for example, the Barberia barbershop located next to the Moscow City business center. “300 rubles. taking a taxi for an establishment with a check of 1,500 is a lot. But the guys are sitting 1.5 km from the "City", and in bad weather no one will walk to them from the office. Therefore, it is more profitable for them to bring a person at their own expense, bind them with good service and recapture these investments for the second or third time, ”Shestakov argues.

Another way of expansion is cooperation with advertising agencies. CallToVisit plans to place a "free taxi" button not only on customer sites, but also on advertising banners. “So that it was like this: a person sees advertising on the Internet, immediately jumps into a taxi and goes to buy,” Shestakov says. "This way we eliminate company websites as an unnecessary link."

In the meantime, the company is developing on investment money. Of 3 million rubles. turnover in February 2018 RUB 2 million makes up a payment for a trip, which CallToVisit transfers to a taxi aggregator (this money is in accounts in clients' personal accounts), 1 million rubles. - proceeds from sales of services of the service itself. At the same time, the net loss reaches 1-1.6 million rubles. per month. “Now we are not chasing operating profit and are investing in development everything that we earn. For a startup, speed matters. It's like with an airplane: if it flies too slowly, it will fall, even if there is enough fuel in the tanks, ”says Nikolai Shestakov.

Alexei Popov, director of corporate programs at the Stockholm School of Economics in Russia, believes that the key risk of a startup is that its business model is easy to copy. “CallToVisit needs to capture a significant market share as quickly as possible. The most logical way is to build a network of representative offices in large cities, ”he says. According to Anastasia Komarova, founder of the marketing agency Cleverra.ru, the project will have the worst if aggregators themselves want to enter the free taxi market - Yandex.Taxi, Gett or Uber.


Sergey Alumov and Nikolay Shestakov (Photo: Vladislav Shatilo / RBC)

However, Yandex.Taxi assured RBC that they do not plan to create a similar service yet. “From the point of view of the business model, it is more interesting for us to globally develop the Yandex.Taxi for Business platform and establish partnerships with small projects of the CallToVisit format than to occupy this niche ourselves,” says Evgeny Sinelnikov.