Denis worked for 6 years at a fast-growing food-tech brand. During this time, the company opened 800 stores in 16 countries. Denis find out that for many and many SMBs choosing the right locations is really a pain in the ass and they do not have a lot of ways to make data decisions. So in 2022 Denis quit Dodo Brands and started Getplace.io.
Tell me about the business - what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers and so on?
Getplace.io is a service that helps offline businesses to find the best locations for their new store. We combine different data sources, such as footfall, vehicle traffic, demographics, financial insights, competition, and many others to find the best spaces on the market and avoid risks of failure.
We work with SMBs across the UK. We just started, but already have 10 paying customers. We plan to sell the first 100 subscriptions in the next 3 months and 1000 of them by the end of the year.
Currently, we reach out to our clients just with a called outreach thru LinkedIn, but in a month later we plan to launch b2b2b selling model and partner with real estate agencies and financial series that work with SMBs.
How has the business evolved since its launch? When was this?
We launched the product in February 2023 and since then have had 10 paying customers. We think this is pretty good for a new B2B SaaS, with 0 marketing budget.
Tell us about the working culture at Getplace
We are currently a team of 3 people across 3 locations - London, Amsterdam, and Tel Aviv. We are fully remote, and fully passionate to launch something useful. We want to create a sustainable business, that can help thousands of clients around the world. We want to be profitable from the very beginning, not addicted to investor's money.
How are you funded?
Currently, we raised only one pre-seed cheque at the beginning of the year from Antler VC.
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how have you overcome this?
The biggest challenge for us right now is to find the right way for our clients. Neither myself (find me on linkedin), nor my cofounder (Sergey Scherbak) have a huge network in the UK, so we are working hard to build it as soon as possible. Also, my PC is super old and slow, so I need to earn money for a new one 😉.
How does Getplace answer an unmet need?
Currently, SMBs in the UK and across the globe have no access to high-quality data to make location decisions based on that data. Our competitors work well with enterprise clients and they solve their problem for a minimum price of £20K per year with upfront fees, which is super expensive for brick-and-mortar SMBs. We want to cover this niche.
What’s in store for the future?
We already launched 2 products - one-click location reports for £10 and a subscription for the footfall heatmap. In the near future, we will add other layers to the heatmap such as wealth level, crime level, noise level, the price level for real estate, and other sources of data. Towards the end of year we plan to go global and add more killer features, that will really surprise the market.
What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?
Be brave and remember that those who build big businesses are really not so much different from you guys. You can make a lot of amazing things!
And finally, a more personal question! What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
Each day I walk at least 10 000 steps, some times with a dog or my wife, eat several times, and write thousands of cold out reach messages to investors and potential clients.
Denis Chernobaev is CEO and cofounder of Getplace.
