Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are some examples of non-paid customer acquisition?

Timur Khabirov: Some celebrity who makes their own content. Let’s talk about viral effect. The first one was BTS. I didn’t know about this band before, but they started using Prequel. When I woke up, we were on the top. The BTS group used Prequel during the Grammys. Twitter was crazy.

Sramana Mitra: That gave you a huge lift.

Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about influencer marketing. What did you do?

Timur Khabirov: Influencer marketing is a bit complicated. If you’re doing user acquisition, it’s a clear traffic. You understand your consumers. You understand the conversion rate. With influencer marketing, it’s not that easy to manage this.

Sramana Mitra: But it’s worthwhile in your opinion?

Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Explain, step by step, how you brought this product to market?

Timur Khabirov: You need to understand what the market needs. We have social media platforms. What do they need? First and foremost, it has to be a time saver. Then, it has to be easy.

Sramana Mitra: Are we talking about a B2C product?

Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 1)

Timur has bootstrapped a digital app to $3M a month. Read on to learn how.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s paying?

Ritukar Vijay: The concessionaire, airport, and end customer. End customers are paying for convenience. They don’t have to pay any tips.

Sramana Mitra: Are you making your revenue from the airport payments or concessionaires?

Ritukar Vijay: All three of them. We are the single point of contact with the consumer where we are getting the order value.

Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Six months later after you got all the feedback and incorporated all the feedback, was there a big check?

Ritukar Vijay: It was a monthly subscription. We did a contract of a rolling window of six months.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of pricing structure did you set up?

Ritukar Vijay: It was around $3,000 a month per robot.

Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happened with Cincinnati airport after the one-month pilot? You now have some money to fix the usability issues. What were the commercials on that?

Ritukar Vijay: We were focusing on Robotics-as-a-Service model. There’s a fixed subscription for each month. These robots will perform deliveries. There’s potential revenue share. There was a lot of thought process going on during that time.

Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the use case for Cincinnati Airport?

Ritukar Vijay: To deliver goods. After the security check-in, there are gate-hugger personas. There are people who just fly off after the departure gate. We are not participating in any of the retail activities at the airport. 2020 was a time when the aviation industry was having a bad time. It was a nightmare.

They started looking at ways to engage people in more economic activities focusing on the non-aeronautical revenue. The airport came together to solve that problem. We did the first pilot in December 2020.