Hi, I’m Artsiom Liashanau. I’m CEO of bill_line – a fintech company from Ukraine, working all over the world. I’ve been thinking for a long time, what should be my first Medium story. But the solution was as simple as any other bright ideas everyone has at some point: if you want to start something, you should start from the beginning.
Last December I had an interview with dev.ua, about the history of our startup. At first I was like “I know all about the company I founded, but I don’t know how to spell it outside our team”. Eventually everything went well with an interview, but this speaking block was a problem to be dealt with and not to shelve because it’s uncomfortable. So I decided to repeat it here. There will be some referring points here with an article, but it’s more personal text.
So, we founded bill_line in a classic startup way: with an idea created by a team of friends with different business experience. All we had was a common intention to make something cool. Something we all recall as a product we want to use.
Like any classic startup story, we don’t have big investments to spend and, thus, no clear future. All we can rely on was ourselves and our skills and backgrounds. Initial capital was around 100 000 UAH (less than 5000 $ at that time ). Maybe it doesn’t sound like a big thing in the US, as well as in Ukraine, so I’m really glad it turned out to be enough to start the first processes and get first profits.
I often had a question to myself: why’s my business model working? The answer was simple: because we did the same thing other fintech companies did earlier, but we used different tools to reach the main goals.
I had 5+ years in fintech, especially on the tech side of payments. I managed product development in banks and non-banking institutions. The main thing I’ve understood is that you can build a very cool hi-end payment solution – but like any other complicated system, it will fail if you don’t create a service ecosystem around it. Where your team will perform a qualified and human-centric service at all stages – in which your IT product can reach its full potential.
That’s why bill_line is focused on business support and communication rather than on direct sales. We care about our partners, so at some point we named our approach – Partner Care.
In one sentence it’s like concierge service on a premium credit card, but for business. We believe payments should work without failures. That is why we identify problems before you notice them.
Our biz dev team doesn’t just get new partners and speak with consistent ones – they do basic consulting on what our partner can improve to earn more. Our support doesn’t just solve some problems – they give an analysis of tech failures on websites and helps our partners to fix them.
This Partner Care Program really works: we get maximum retention from our partners and build a loyalty program based on mutual benefit, not just some bonuses. That’s why it lasts – like bill_line, because we really find a way to direct payments.
