Our story

Idea

All 3 co-founders of PromoRepublic (Max, Mike and Val) were many years involved in digital agencies as employees and founders.

We have built hundreds of successful social media marketing campaigns and promotions with various content strategies for our customers: large companies like Danone, Ferrero, Philips, PepsiCo, Johnson&Johnson. For Kimberly Clark’s brand Huggies, we even created a niche social network, that is still leading on its market.

For agency’s customers, social media marketing is one of the main channels in their marketing strategy. Being experts we knew exactly that SMEs could benefit from doing social media marketing even more!

However, given agency’s business model, we never could help SMEs with their social marketing because small businesses do not have budgets for that. Sadly they also don’t have knowledge to do it themselves. They cannot hack all those Edge Ranks and other algorithms and methodologies of social media marketing to make this channel work!

To fix all that we quit our cool agency jobs and started PromoRepublic, that makes professional, agency-level content marketing on social networks affordable and accessible for SMEs. With PromoRepublic, even a beginner can feel like a content marketing guru and create outstanding, effective and viral posts in social networks.

We believe professional content marketing can become easy and fun, even for first-time marketers without technical, design, editorial, and social media marketing skills. Joining forces of small businesses in PromoRepublic will make them more competitive and successful.

“Our goal is to let entrepreneurs focus on business and not waste time studying marketing and monitoring trends on social networks. Due to automation you can spend only 30 minutes a months for planning and managing social network presences”, – CTO of PromoRepublic Mike Baranovsky.

Watch short video on how simple content creation for social networks should be. With PromoRepublic, of course!

Path to success

In its first version (2013) PromoRepublic was a platform for creating promotions and contests on social networks. After a few months after launch the startup generated ca. €30,000 in revenue, and its services were used by more than 1,000 companies.

PromoRepublic’s results were noticed by venture funds and business angels. At the first stage the startup received investments from Eastlabs business incubator, digital agency and by a group of business angels including a managing partner of TechstarsSemyon Dukach and business modeling guru David C. Lottenbach.

“We were making good money in our first year, but building a global SaaS business with monthly recurring payments wasn’t an easy task. No one needed contests each month, and we operated sales and tech support manually. But we noticed that small businesses needed help with content marketing on a daily basis and we decided to give them a readymade solution for their problems”, – Val Grabko, CEO of PromoRepublic.

Startup exited Ukraine and participated in an Estonian acceleration program Startup Wise Guys. After this program PromoRepublic made a pivot to content marketing SaaS for SMEs, and started working on overseas markets.

After successful relaunch, the project went through acceleration programs Startup Chileand Startup Sauna, got to know LatAm and Finnish business ecosystems, accelerated its growth and attracted €100,000 in grants and investments.

“We decided that Helsinki will be a base for our global expansion. We raise Seed Round and next year we plan to develop our service in the American market, where we have just launched. We have quite ambitious plans on growth and R&D for 2016.”, – Business Development Director, Max Pecherskyi.