In 2021 the combined revenue of our software and data products crossed 40M RUB. I'm writing this because I've never seen an honest account of what it actually takes to get there without a funding round — only the polished retrospectives that begin at success and work backwards.
Where we started
The company began as a systems and network administration consulting operation in the early 2000s. Not glamorous. We built and maintained corporate networks, configured servers, and did the unglamorous infrastructure work that most of Russia's growing e-commerce sector needed but didn't want to hire full-time staff for.
That work gave us two things: a deep understanding of how internet infrastructure actually operates, and early access to e-commerce businesses that were just beginning to need price intelligence and advertising optimization tools.
The first product: price monitoring
xmldatafeed.com started as an internal tool. We were managing advertising for e-commerce clients and needed to know what competitors were charging. We built a scraper, it worked, clients asked to use it directly, and we turned it into a product. The first paying customer came through referral, not marketing.
Parallel tracks
By 2015 we were running three parallel products: xmldatafeed.com (price monitoring), an early version of what became clickfraud.ru (ad fraud protection), and offlinecrm.ru (free CRM for small businesses). Each was growing slowly. None of them was a hockey stick.
The portfolio approach was deliberate: we didn't know which product would grow fastest, and we didn't have the capital to bet everything on one. Small bets, maintained carefully, compounding slowly — that's the actual shape of bootstrapped growth in Russia.
The year we tried to grow faster
In 2018 we hired a marketing team and ran paid acquisition campaigns across all three products. The result: revenue grew modestly, costs grew substantially, and we ended the year with worse unit economics than we'd started with. We cut the marketing team, returned to organic channels, and never looked back.
What actually drove the 40M
- Habr publications — technical content that built credibility with engineers who became clients or referred clients
- The state grant for clickfraud.ru — which funded ML development that significantly improved detection quality, which improved retention
- Word of mouth in Russian e-commerce communities — once a few well-known retailers were clients, referrals came consistently
- Not churning existing clients — we've had clients who've been with us for 8+ years
What 40M looks like operationally
It's not dramatic. It's a small team doing repetitive, unglamorous work: maintaining scrapers, responding to client questions, updating detection models, fixing bugs, writing documentation. The business is profitable and self-sustaining. It is not, and has never been, a rocketship.
The honest version of our story has a lot of flat lines on the revenue chart and a few stairs. The version I could tell to sound impressive would look like a different company entirely.
— from the video: Zero to 40M, January 2022
