Success Stories From the Baltic HR&ED Tech Accelerator: Billy App
Baltic HR&ED Tech Accelerator continues the acceleration program for HR-Tech and Ed-Tech talents. Throughout the 8-week program period, we will be sharing the interviews with participating startups that present their concept and share ambitious plans for the future.
The interview with Billy App highlights the third week of the program, dedicated to the Business Model & Financial Planning. Elena Kaminskaia, the CEO of Billy App, shared the exciting startup’s story. Read the whole interview to find out more!
Billy is a Slack and Microsoft Teams bot for building a culture economy. It lets companies grow a culture by rewarding good behavior. It is based on people rewarding people and data analytics tools.
Present Billy App & how did you come up with this idea?
Four years ago, we ran a startup with my co-founder Inal Kardanov and had 12 employees. It was a great experience, but the startups failed because of 2 reasons: no product-market fit, destructive and terrible management, and team culture. We realized it only two years later when we’ve been working in a company together as employees. We understood that there is always a culture in any team, no matter how it appeared — accidentally formed or was grown with love.
For that reason, we decided to try an idea of a thing we called a “culture economy.” Helping people to say “thank you” to other people and sharing thanks coins, which can be later used for perks, also benefits the “culture economy.” Of course, we add lots of triggers, hooks, and analytics to help companies to identify highly positive good behavior. The culture economy allows the team to see positive and negative and measure the team’s culture’s heartbeat.
An average company of 100 employees sends over 80 000 messages per month. That’s why we decided that the best place to run a “culture economy” is a messenger and created a Slack bot to validate our hypothesis. After two weeks, we found out it was working in a company we worked for. That was why we chose to leave and start sharing the idea of a culture economy with all teams that want a reward for positive behavior.
Why is it called Billy?
We wanted to make it more personalized, so employees will feel like they talk to another teammate. We decided to use a dolphin as a mascot — everybody loves dolphins, right?. Although the most complex part was to name it, it should be short, easy to remember and summon in messenger with @handle. Only after a week of discussions, we came up with a simple and short name for Billy.
A brief summary of the market you work in
We build a tool for great managers and HRs. Some people see us as a productivity tool. Others may think we’re in a remote work market. However, I would say that we are in a market of motivation and HR analytics. The market is pretty hard to measure because it is just starting to emerge, and in many countries, it’s not so common.
Competitive advantages of Billy App
Billy works because of simplicity. It is much easier to start using Billy compared with other solutions. It literally takes 2 clicks to install Billy, and 1 command to send first “Thanks” tokens to your teammates. As one of our clients said, “you need 3 economists and eight years of implementation to launch your competitors. While everything about Billy is just super easy”.
Another significant advantage — we’re integrated with a place where work happens — with team messenger. We don’t want to create “yet another website” for rewards and use bots and integrations with tools such as Jira, Trello, Github.
Last but not least, a tech-driven prediction solution — we can show problems in a team when they just start and not when it’s too late. For example, we can predict who may leave the company in the next 6 months and warn managers about problems with their employees.
Introduce your team members & your team story
We are only 3 of us because we don’t want to grow too fast and at this point look only for people with at least one superpower. We all have superpowers.
- Elena Kaminskaia — CEO. Superpowers — has the greatest execution speed and an innate ability to sell
- Inal Kardanov — CTO. Superpowers — can stop time and always hire the perfect person.
- Armen Davtyan — Developer. Superpowers — tracks downtime wasters and has a resilient mind.
We met while studying at university more than 4 years ago. Worked together on a startup, failed together, and learned a lot together.
Share the craziest story related to your customers
There were lots of crazy stories, but the craziest one happened just two weeks ago. One of our customers is a marketing-focused company with 100+ employees. They are experts in digital marketing and mostly offer marketing services for IT companies. They reached us and scheduled a call to talk about our product.
We thought they had some ideas of features they wanted to see in Billy, but the call was with the COO and CMO, and they offered us their help with Billy’s marketing and sales. FOR FREE! They liked our product so much that they want to help us tell more people and companies. We already had a couple of calls, and they still help us for free. That was very unexpected and somehow crazy.
The second crazy story is related to our mascot Billy. One of our customers used the bot in Slack for three months and then decided to move from Slack to Discord because of some internal reasons. Even though we don’t have a bot for Discord yet, we could not migrate their data. After four months, employees still use dolphin emoji to thank each other and use billy as a synonym for “thanks.”
Where do you see Billy App in five years?
I have never been a fan of a question: Where do you see yourself in five years? — during interviews, but this question caught up with me again!
Jokes aside, we want to be the most used tool for building culture in companies using messengers like Slack and Microsoft Teams. We see Billy as a standard de-facto as Jira or Github for companies now.
Eventually, we will come to an open ecosystem with lots of integrations, with a framework and toolset to build a great team culture and let it grow organically.
The market is pretty massive, and we genuinely believe that we can get around 20% of the 90m DAU of messengers listed above. Of course, we may end up as a part of Slack, Microsoft, or Asana teams, but that’s a different story.
Tell us about your biggest struggles at the moment
Time management is the biggest challenge because we have lots of things to do and to test, validate, develop. The second biggest problem is to build proper processes — especially in sales and marketing.
All founders are not marketing or sales professionals, and we learn by doing and doing many things in the wrong way.
We’re still figuring out how we can increase our sales and solve the problem with the fact that managers love our product, but often HRs only have a budget to actually buy it.
Thank your for the interview, Elena!
Discover social media of Billy App
Interviewer: Kristina Kirkliauskaite, the Communication Manager at Baltic Sandbox.
