From Physics Student to CRM Business Owner: An Interview with Victor Dovzhik

Welcome to the interview series on my blog. I plan to feature conversations with different people who are building real things — so you can see what actual results look like and find some motivation for your own next steps. Today I’m talking with Victor Dovzhik, founder of Introvert, a CRM integration company — http://www.introvert.bz

Let’s go!

MADCPA:

Hey Victor. Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey — where you started, what you tried, and what you’re doing now.

Victor Dovzhik:

Hey. I didn’t actually start out as an entrepreneur. I got into MIPT — the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia’s top technical university. Moscow State University’s physics department had offered me a spot without entrance exams, but MIPT required additional exams on top of that. I had taken prep courses there, so I knew my way around, and after I got in I suggested to my group of about ten people that we go on a picnic in the woods — just to hang out and get to know each other. That turned into an idea to invite the whole year. I messaged one of the student organizers: come along, help out, tell us how you handle your studies — everyone would love to hear it. He took that to mean I wanted to gather the entire first year. Somehow we ended up with 350 people, when we’d planned for a hundred at most. And I loved it. Everyone shows up, they’re expecting something to happen, and you’re running around making it happen. I remember the sausages were only budgeted for 50 to 100 people and I had to sprint to a shop from the middle of the woods.

That experience dropped me into a circle of student activists at the university who organized events and brought in entrepreneurs as guest speakers. I got hooked. I decided I didn’t want to spend my life doing physics or programming — I wanted to work in something closer to organizing and management. So I left university to join three young entrepreneurs from St. Petersburg — they were around 25 — and we put on events together. Career fairs, mainly, connecting IT companies with IT students. I came on as a volunteer and worked as their Moscow assistant. They ran things from St. Petersburg while I handled everything on the ground in Moscow: logistics, paperwork, PR, business cards. Up until then I’d assumed that running a real business was something 45-year-old men did after a lifetime of experience. Then I saw these guys in their mid-twenties running events turning over around 5 million rubles (approximately $80,000). Geek Picnic, for example — they’d pull in 25,000 attendees over two days with revenues in the tens of millions of rubles.

In that job I started out earning 15,000 rubles a month (approximately $250) and I was genuinely happy. I lived with my parents, had almost no expenses, and was just saving money. Once a day I’d stop at a local café for a Greek salad and a coffee and feel like I owned the world. After a while I had some savings, started getting restless, and thought about starting something myself. I decided to team up with a lecturer I knew from MIPT to create a prep course for the standardized university entrance exams (similar to the SAT in the US) — teaching high school students, which was something I could actually claim some expertise in. We put about half a million rubles (approximately $8,000) into the product. The model we built was genuinely interesting — a “flipped classroom” approach. Students watch the theory at home as video lessons, then come to class to work through practice problems together. The logic was that in a regular school, teachers aren’t always able to make theory engaging, but if you record the best instructor in the country once, that one video can reach every student. And if you’re doing practice problems alone at home, there’s nobody to explain something when you’re stuck.

So we put in about $8,000, built a DIY recording studio in an apartment, and spent the summer getting ready for the September academic season. We stuck white panels on the wall, mounted a whiteboard, and started filming. It was 30°C outside, the window had to stay shut because of noise, the teacher was in a blazer and dress shirt — and absolutely nothing else below the waist because of the heat. And just off-camera there was a basin of water on a stool so he could keep wiping his face between takes. It was rough.

We spent all that money and then worked through the following year basically at break-even. We assumed that once we launched, it would just take off. But neither of us knew how to sell or build a marketing funnel, so we just stumbled around. Early on I’d try to sell over the phone the moment someone called to ask about prices:

— “How much does it cost?”

— “35,000 rubles (about $580). Are you in?”

— “We’ll think about it.”

— “Sure, take your time. Goodbye.”

I didn’t even call them back. Over that year we spent our initial $8,000 and ended up at zero. But I did learn how to sell, because we had a lot of contacts — around 400 leads. I worked out a system for myself: invite people to a free trial lesson, and from there a whole pipeline emerged naturally.

But there was no money coming in, so we decided to shut it down. I needed to work, so I decided to try building websites. I ran into an acquaintance who was doing something in that space, and I suggested we do it together. We were working from a coworking space and the people sitting around us needed websites. We already knew how to sell, and websites were in demand. That’s how we made our first 50,000 to 100,000 rubles (roughly $800 to $1,600). At some point we’d grown a six-person sales team inside a small marketing agency. Everyone was working out of Excel spreadsheets, pure chaos. At one point a sales manager showed up, worked half a day, went for lunch, and was never seen again. Nobody even noticed for about two days.

That was the moment we implemented a CRM system. We looked at what was available, settled on amoCRM, and set it up: automated SMS messages to clients, a monitoring dashboard so sales managers could see who was performing best. Clients would come into the office, see the dashboard, and ask if we could build something like that for them. At first we said no. Then we started saying yes. A small CRM division grew out of that. It went so well that the agency eventually shut down and I went all-in on CRM. I worked it for three or four months but leads were slow. I started searching social media for “amoCRM” to see what people were talking about. That’s how I found the page of Ayaz Shabutdinov — a Russian entrepreneur and blogger with a large following. I had no idea who he was, but I saw him post: “Anyone who can help implement amoCRM in Izhevsk?” He had a lot of followers and his own blog, so I wrote to him explaining what we did and sent over some case studies. I asked for 35,000 rubles (about $580). He pushed back and offered a different deal: he’d write a before-and-after post about the project. I agreed, flew out to Izhevsk at my own expense for a few days, and set up the CRM. I knew things were going to work out when I showed Ayaz that you could just click on a phone number and be connected to the client instantly — no dialing. This was 2014, and almost nobody was implementing CRM back then. Ayaz wrote two posts about how the system worked, and I got my first real clients. Each post got about 1,000 likes, and I was in the comments answering questions. Later, one of the founders of amoCRM noticed our YouTube videos. He reached out and offered to help us grow. I was planning to build a partner program at the time. We were among the first to plug into that ecosystem and essentially became an attached business to something much larger. The client flow helped us get started and start earning serious money. Today we have 25 employees and monthly revenue of around 3 million rubles (approximately $50,000).

MADCPA:

How is the business structured and where does the profit actually come from?

Victor Dovzhik:

We work on a project basis. Clients come to us — usually companies running on spreadsheets, or with a CRM that isn’t working for them. They want to do something about their sales process, and since the economic downturn there are more and more of them. Right now maybe 5 to 10 percent of companies use CRM, and the hype cycle is coming. Once every tenth business has something, everyone else starts assuming it’s the standard. People hear “CRM” as a buzzword and think they need it, and on top of that they genuinely want to fix their sales. That’s where we come in — we talk about transforming the sales process, changing how sellers and buyers interact, adding automated touchpoints, and taking the routine work off managers’ plates.

Classic project business. We started with small projects and have been moving upmarket: we’ve worked with Vedomosti (a major Russian business newspaper) and Like Holding (a major Russian franchise network).

MADCPA:

Are you still working with Like?

Victor Dovzhik:

Not anymore. We automated their franchise sales operation back in 2014. When they later launched Like Centers, they went with a different contractor who handled everything end to end: SMM, marketing, CRM. At that point they were significantly bigger than us. Then four days before the launch I got a call saying the team hadn’t done anything and it all needed to be built. We launched the CRM in four days, got the ads running, and applications started pouring in at six per minute. The system held up. But it had some rough edges, things got tense, and we parted ways. We’re not working together now, and I think they’re on their fifth or sixth integration partner by now — but that’s just how service businesses go.

MADCPA:

What sales channels do you actually use?

Victor Dovzhik:

We got lucky, because we have no real marketing budget. We’re plugged into amoCRM, which is much larger than us and spends heavily on marketing. We get a lot of referral flow from them, and our word-of-mouth network is extensive. Word of mouth works in an interesting way for us — a lot of it comes from earlier clients growing in their careers. A commercial director at a small company would work with us, then leave and join a larger company with a bad CRM, and come back to us because we already had a relationship. Our biggest projects have all come in exactly that way — we grow alongside the managers who hired us early on.

Content marketing also works well for us. We write articles for industry publications and run our own blog where we’ve published interviews with sales directors and entrepreneurs. We had a full-time editor who produced and posted these interviews, and then those executives would share the posts from their own social media pages, which drove traffic back to us. We now get around 5,000 readers a month on the blog.

We also have a YouTube channel with video content, and clients come in from there too.

MADCPA:

Is competition intense in this space, or is it mostly concentrated at the lower end of the market?

Victor Dovzhik:

It’s a young market, there’s not a huge amount of money in it yet — it’s nothing like real estate. And competition is still pretty thin. All the companies in the space are small agencies. We’re doing around 2.5 to 3 million rubles a month (approximately $40,000 to $50,000), and nobody else is really at that level. There are three or four companies doing roughly the same, but nobody’s significantly ahead. And we’re growing — in 2016 we were five times bigger than in 2015. This year the plan is to triple again.

If this is your first or second business and your goal is to build up initial capital, there’s something worth knowing: at this point I can’t usefully deploy large capital injections — the market is constrained. I can’t just pour money into marketing and get more output. There are no advertising channels where I have ROI and a shortage of budget.

But as a starting point — to get to your first $800, $1,600, or $3,000 a month — this market is very accessible. It comes down to work ethic and the ability to sell. There was a guy working in the same building as us who reached 200,000 to 250,000 rubles a month (approximately $3,300 to $4,200) on integrations within two months, working completely on his own. The hard part is building a company, because management skills are a completely different thing from sales skills — but once you develop them, you can go after a much bigger market.

MADCPA:

What are the most important things to pay attention to in this business?

Victor Dovzhik:

This industry has a lot of developers in it, so many people assume CRM is primarily a technical field and underestimate how much sales matters. You need to be a strong salesperson and a strong sales manager — you need to understand KPIs, hire and manage salespeople. The CRM itself is just the tool you bring to the job.

MADCPA:

What would you tell someone just starting out in CRM integration?

Victor Dovzhik:

Sell. That’s the hardest part — actually closing a deal. The delivery side is the easy part. In our business, the top compensation, equity stakes, partnership potential, and options all go to the salespeople — and that will always be the case. The technical work gets done by low-cost specialists, but a low-cost specialist can’t close a high-value deal — they’ll get shown the door. So you need to learn to sell. Get out there, make cold calls, go meet people.

MADCPA:

Can our readers reach out to you directly? Send you client referrals?

Victor Dovzhik:

Absolutely, reach out — we’ll pay a referral fee. But honestly, you won’t learn much from just passing clients along. You need to go out and make your own mistakes — there’s no other way. If you want to make quick money, honestly you’d be better off getting a sales job somewhere. The real path is to push yourself and keep raising your prices. In B2B, a project can cost almost anything. A project will absorb whatever budget you put toward it, so don’t be afraid to charge more. Add more depth, more expertise, a more thorough implementation. The more expensive the project, the longer it runs and the lower the risk for the client — because there’s room to course-correct along the way. A CRM will actually get properly implemented. For 30,000 rubles (about $500) you’re cutting corners everywhere, and all the risk lands on the client. Clients often actually want to pay more, because what they’re really buying is a reduction in risk.

MADCPA:

What does an integration actually consist of? Walk us through the process.

Victor Dovzhik:

Let me explain the core of it and why we charge what we charge. Say you have a ten-person sales team working out of spreadsheets. You want to change your sales system — and it’s always stressful at the start, even though it pays off. There are two ways to approach it.

The first: we come in and run a training session showing people where to click to log a deal. The managers immediately start to see it as extra administrative overhead, plus they have to generate contracts so clients can actually pay. They start assuming the whole thing is being set up to monitor them, and they begin filling things in carelessly, thinking nobody will check anyway.

The second: we come in and sell the managers on the idea of CRM. “This is your assistant, not your supervisor.” “It takes the routine off your plate.” “You hate generating contracts — instead of 40 minutes, it’ll take you 5.” “You’ll have real tools for working with clients: automated texts, reminders.” “You’ll be able to close more and earn more.” Selling the team on the CRM is the core goal of the project.

We work in a three-month structure. In the first month we configure the CRM to match how the business actually works today — we map the existing process into the system, including the phone integration and the sales pipeline, and let people get comfortable. Then we move into phase two: digital transformation. By the end you have an improved process — but we don’t walk away. There’s a third month: the adaptation phase. We check in, make sure everything is running correctly and that people are using the system right, and make small adjustments.

This is a genuinely complex process. Transforming a sales operation in two weeks is not realistic. Even just the setup takes time — you do an initial configuration, then discover that the managers interpreted something differently than you expected. At the start of every project we do an interview phase: we talk to the manager and a couple of the salespeople. Every single one of them has a different mental model of how sales should work. Then we sit down with the client and work through it: here’s one approach, here’s another, here’s a third. We choose, find ways to reconcile them, and land on a single agreed-upon version that everyone can commit to.

MADCPA:

You spend a lot of time in coworking spaces. Does your whole team work remotely?

Victor Dovzhik:

It’s me and three others here in person — the other twenty work remotely. We built the company that way from the beginning, partly because I wanted to be able to spend winters in Asia. I was there for three months in 2015. When everyone sits in an office, you get comfortable and stop feeling the need to build proper systems — everything feels fine because you can see people. At a recent meeting I talked to the owner of a law firm with five offices. He took a month’s vacation, came back, and found out that sales had dropped sixfold while he was gone. He hasn’t taken a vacation since. A lot of people implement CRM not to increase sales but just so they can actually take a holiday. I can leave tomorrow and nobody would even notice, because everything runs through Skype, Slack, and the CRM. We barely even talk to each other in person here — if I need something from the person sitting at the next desk, I’ll probably just message them in Slack so I don’t break their concentration, and they’ll reply when they’re ready.

We use these tools every single day. I can check in at any moment, see what’s happening and how efficiently everyone is working — and the person might be on the other side of the world, someone I’ve never actually met in person.

MADCPA:

Thanks so much for your time. Good luck with everything.

Victor Dovzhik:

My pleasure — I really enjoyed the conversation. And my advice to you: don’t let the blog go quiet. Keep at it, and it’ll grow.

 

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