From Service to Product with Yaroslav Lazor and Sergiy Korolov, CEO & Managing Partner of Railsware
Manage episode 430411189 series 3585543
Today’s episode welcomes Yaroslav Lazor and Sergiy Korolov, CEO and Managing Partner of Railsware - a product studio with two main focuses – products and consultancy services. They’ve worked with brands like Mailtrap, Coupler.io, Jira Smart Checklist, Calendly, and Brightbytes and helped them become commercial products with large user bases, steady growth and ambitious plans.
Railsware was founded back in 2006 as a collective of founders that wanted to combine their expertise and build something new. Instead of growing their team, they ended up scaling down and eliminating members of their initial team. Yaroslav was there from the beginning, while Sergiy joined a bit further down the line, when there were 50 employees already working at Railsware. They initially scaled up to 75 team members until part of their team decided to go out on their own and start their own shop.
What differentiates Railsware is that they don’t just develop software - they fully build out applications and deliver to clients ready for commercial use. Clients love this model, which is evident when looking through the Railsware portfolio, which consists of big names that never churn. Standing out in a saturated market is no easy task - that’s why Railsware decided to go against the grain and market themselves like a software company would, making the customers journey their north star. Their strategic positioning gave them a huge upper hand when fighting for lucrative contracts and ultimately led to become the type of service that other providers try to copy and imitate.
KEY INSIGHTS:
03:16 Joining Railsware by accident
06:03 Developing vs Building software
08:32 Closing your first big logos
12:01 Niche down to scale up
14:25 Railsware’s approach to sales
19:17 Lead gen in a technical space
24:03 High volume vs high quality services
27:13 Pivoting from service to product
38:11 Railsware moving into the US market
44:13 Taking on the right clients like Calendly
52:39 Don’t be afraid to sell to the US
57:38 Running a unique, memorable sales process
59:02 Imposter syndrome is holding you back
Connect with the guests, Sergiy Korolov and Yaroslav Lazor
Connect with the host, Sergey Olexa
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