Eugene Lisovskiy has been working in global tech companies for over 18 years, implementing the latest technologies in marketing teams. He has played a key role in the success of LitRes.com, now the leading ebook platform in Eastern Europe, and growing MAPS.me into a widely-used offline map app with 150 million users. His interest in analytics and community building have led him to his current venture, Level Up Basketball, a basketball training platform that utilizes community engagement and gamification techniques.
In this interview, Eugene shares his opinions on growing a robust community in any niche, adapting your product to the metaverse, the power of outsourcing and the future of AI.
A big part of your career was dedicated to building community in mapping. Do you think we'll see a future where AI-generated maps supersede those created by humans, or do you think we will always need humans to capture what's important when we're building a map?
This is a question people are asking about a lot of AI-driven things right now, and it's a bit hard to predict. For now, and probably for the foreseeable future, we still need humans to add the "human touch" to maps. AI is great for generating basic maps and gathering data, but it still can't capture the nuances and details that are important to humans.
For example, if a new sushi restaurant opens up inside a building with other businesses, that might not be accurately recorded by AI, which can hurt the restaurant's traffic and confuse users. The only way for a map to "know" about the restaurant and get accurate information is for a human to walk in, take pictures and add them to the map location. This same principle happens for all kinds of map locations. This is why I don't really think AI will create better maps yet; I think we still need to work together for now.
Community seems to be the driving force behind most of your projects. Can you tell us more about why you're so passionate about building these virtual communities?
One of the common threads through all of the companies I've founded or become involved with is a community-centered mindset. This is especially true for Level Up Basketball, my latest project. Basketball has always been such a huge part of my life, so I love the idea of creating a global community of people who also love basketball and want to improve their skills.
I like the idea of using the internet to create communities because I think it's crucial to bring like-minded people together. The internet can be an excellent tool for connection, but it can be isolating too, especially if you're only consuming media about someone's life they want you to see. I think about connecting underrepresented groups of people when I'm developing new projects because that's a problem the internet is perfect for solving.
What are some important milestones you have reached during your tenure at LitRes? How did they affect the company's growth?
When I joined LitRes in September 2011, we had a 300K user base, $50K monthly revenue from the website and a marketing team of three people, including myself. When I left the company in 2016, we had 23M users, which is a 80x growth, and $15M annual revenue. I would highlight three core innovations that I bought to LitRes that made such growth possible:
1. An engineering approach to marketing:
I used the technical department as my resource. It was quite a unique approach in 2011 that helped to reach a full synergy of technical and marketing departments. Today we call this kind of top manager - CPO. With this approach, we integrated many marketing technologies into products that helped grow quickly.
2. Passion to team building and leadership:
I always dreamed of building my own marketing team of growth hackers who will share my passion for great achievements, and I did it. In 2016 the marketing team had 12 people.
3. Strong execution process:
Before LitRes, I had worked in several startups where I created my own task management methodology for startups using Google Sheets. This approach helped to execute everything I implemented in marketing and product.
Why is the engineering approach to marketing so important for you?
When you have thousands of titles in your digital catalog you must have very well-designed pages, folders, categories, and URL structures on the website to fit SEO, SEM, and direct marketing needs.
Good catalog structure helped us to create a unique engine that generated over 5M high-quality ads for Google/Yandex search ads. This business case was highlighted on the Yandex website. At the same time, we had a boost in SEO traffic, as a result of good structure and also focus on UGC (we incentivize users to leave reviews on books).
In 2012 I launched the development of 4 very important marketing services, required for fast growth:
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a personal recommendation engine that increased revenue coming from email marketing
by up to 18% of the whole company's revenue
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an automated high-quality ads generator
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a smart responsive direct marketing platform, that could send a smart email to web
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users, push notifications for mobile users and check each channel's health and users satisfaction
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cohort-based traffic attribution system, that helped to track each customer acquisition channel separately and reach better LTV/CAC numbers.
Also, I saw potential in the development of the app for audiobooks. We started the development of an app called "Listen!" in March 2012, launched the first version on October 2012, and in January 2013 we hit the top 10 overall grossing in App Store and Google Play, becoming the #1 app with audiobooks.
Mobile marketing was another very point of growth that helped us make 2.5x YoY revenue growth in 2012. By the end of 2012 50% of the revenue of LitRes was generated by mobile apps. I had no experience in mobile marketing in 2011, but I used my engineering common sense approach and asked myself: "who is the best in mobile marketing?" The answer is simple - mobile game developers. So I traveled to the biggest mobile games conference "Casual Connect" in San Francisco and we started our very successful mobile marketing journey in LitRes.
2013 was very challenging as we wanted to continue to grow as fast as in 2012. My new solutions were also unique: we dramatically increased our partnership activities by partnering with all popular loyalty programs in Russia. I came to Danone with the proposal: "You can reward every single customer for each product purchase and we don't need your money".
Top managers from Danone were shocked. Normally partners were asking for money from them. Our offer was like that:
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We selected 100 books and paid a 1-year retainer to copyright owners to use those books for promotional campaigns without any limits.
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Danone now could reward their customers with a selection of books, but customers had to register on LitRes website to use it.
From that point LitRes marketing machines were converting 30% of those leads to paying customers. We used this approach for as many partners as we could. Partner programs generated about 30% of the company's revenue on the web.
Another part of partnerships was affiliate marketing. As I mentioned earlier, the level of digital piracy in Russia was about 98% so a huge amount of traffic was located on pirated websites. It was hard to fight with them, so we decided to convert pirates to affiliates. Since 2011 we've built the biggest affiliate network of 4,000 websites that contributed to licensed content.
Another initiative in 2015 led the company to a new revenue growth. I noticed that 7K audiobooks were generating 20% of revenue, while there were about 100K of e-books. So I suggested creating a public audiobook production, assuming that there are so many talented people who can create audiobooks at home. And this approach worked and boosted revenues.
In 2015 the company generated $15M in revenue and became profitable. I decided to leave it to become the CEO of MAPS.ME and to expand my experience on a global scale.
My marketing team was a group of highly motivated people like me - achievers and hard workers. I thank god that I had those strong and passionate people building this company with me.
To make all things happen I used the execution approach created in other startups and polished in LitRes. It was pretty simple - we used the get things done methodology and KPI-based results tracking. Every single person in my marketing team had KPIs and about 50% of their monthly/quarterly motivation depend on their performance. So each person in my team was responsible for a revenue stream from a specific group of channels:
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SEO
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SEM
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Direct marketing
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Mobile Marketing
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Partnerships (cross-promo)
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External loyalty programs
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External affiliates and affiliate networks
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PR & SMM
We all worked as one machine: you put money in it, and it generates more money and users.
LitRes was named #1 company by revenue and installs in the non-gaming category in Russian mobile stores in 2013-2015.
Today I understand why I was so effective in LitRes. The reason is simple: The CEO of LitRes Sergey Anuriev saw my talent and gave me all resources and freedom in decisions and this inspired me as I had no limits in what I wanted to do in the company.
Do you have any advice for founders who want to launch tech or community-focused startups?
First, go work in a corporation for a year. I think it's better not to jump straight into entrepreneurship without practical experience. Take that time to learn about business processes and what it's like to be on the worker side of a company before you try to be a CEO.
Second, learn from a mistake I made: Always take the money when a VC offers it. In my first pitch to investors, I had a VC offer to close the whole round. I was shocked; I had only expected to raise a fraction of what we needed (and I said that!). The investor was offering me a lot of money, but, at the time, I thought I should have 4-5 investors, not just one, so I didn't take the money. In hindsight, I would say to always take what's offered as long as the investor is good and has your best interests in mind.
Third, embrace gamification. It's something that I believe will keep being popular, especially with Gen Z and the upcoming generations. Our world is all about incentives now, so most great products need those game-style motivators to encourage engagement and popularity.
One final piece of advice is to use lots of analytics. I'm a very data-driven, analytical person, which has helped me be more successful in all of my projects. Take time to collect, analyze and understand the data for your business, competitors and the industry overall.
There's a lot of buzz around generative AI and machine learning right now. Where do you think technology is headed? Do you think we'll become more or less connected to the community through this tech?
Personally, I expected AI to be even further along than it already is. When self-driving cars took off in 2018 or so, I thought that would be standard technology within a few years. Obviously, that didn't quite happen, but I have high expectations for what AI and machine learning are capable of.
As for how connected we'll be, I think that depends partly on how well the idea of the metaverse takes off. On the one hand, it could bring people from all over the world together in a brand-new space, which is exciting. Hopefully, we'll even have augmented reality basketball games with people all over the world coming together. On the other hand, it could also become a situation where people spend more time absorbed in technology than interacting with people in the real world.
As for generative AI (OpenAI, ChatGPT, Midjourney and others) - it's absolutely amazing technology! I use it a lot now for personal and business purposes and it works so well! I strongly believe that it will change a lot in 2023 and highly recommend starting to use it today. I've already encouraged my kids to start using it and learn more about how it works. We are also launching a virtual coach (we call him Dan, in the name of Dan Matic, famous professional basketball coach who was our first advisor in 2021) soon. Coach Dan is the smartest basketball coach on the planet, due to OpenAI and ChatGPT technology.
Overall, I think machine learning has a lot of potential to make our lives easier and more fun, so I'm excited to watch it evolving over the next few years.
