Catalyst Conversations, Igniting the eCommerce & Fintech Ecosystems in the CEE: Ep.1 Ruslan Leteyski

Venture into the ever-evolving world of e-commerce with CatalystPay's new interview series. Join us as we delve deep into the entrepreneurial journeys of leading figures in the e-commerce ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe, uncovering insights on revenue growth, sustainable business models, and international scaling. Whether you're a budding e-commerce entrepreneur or a seasoned pro, these conversations are bound to ignite fresh perspectives and actionable wisdom.

In today’s edition, we’re interviewing Ruslan Leteyski. He’s been building websites since he was 10, and founded many companies along the way. He managed to bootstrap Checkout X to €600k MRR and 6000 customers. Then, his next company Vanga AI got acquired in just 18 months.

You may also like our interviews with Evgeni Yordanov, CEO of NEXT BASKET and Mario Peshev, CEO of Rush.app.

What is the secret to this success that even many VC-backed start-ups are not able to achieve?

The first thing that I did very well is that I launched something, and that’s probably 80% of the success.

And then I did a couple of things right: I was passionate about ecommerce, I saw a particular issue, I started building a solution to fix it, I was looking what my customers are doing and trying to gather feedback or look at data to make data-driven decisions, which made the product better a little bit every time. 

And in my case, I bootstrapped, which was very lucrative at the end. 

Can you walk us through the initial stages of developing the business models for Vanga AI & Checkout X? What did you learn from working on Checkout X that you applied to Vanga AI? 

It was a different situation then, but I can walk you through my current process, which is far more interesting. 

The first thing I do is that I try to look for a problem or an opportunity. If I’m looking at a particular space, the first thing to do is formulate a market hypothesis: a certain group of people have a certain problem or there’s a certain opportunity on the market. This first part is about going to people and talking to them without selling anything, and trying to ask them about it, and see what they’re saying and trying to not speak and just listen and write down pointers. 

The second stage is to figure out some kind of MVP for this, which should be very very minimal, and if you want to be really smart you don’t even have to build it, you can just fake build it. It’s enough to get a demo that looks like your product is ready. Right now I am trying to get money for this idea, so I try to sell something that doesn’t exist and see if people will pre-pay for it. I think prepayment is the best validation you can have. It’s very hard to accomplish, but I’m very inspired by entrepreneurs around me who managed to do it. 

For instance, a fellow entrepreneur just raised €2 million from their customers without having a product, and I find this impressive. After that, once I get customers that are willing to pay, I try to build a solution and watch them to see whether they really use it, as very often people will pay and then not use the solution. 

At each of the stages most of the time something fails to work, and my process is to look back and understand why - whether I am doing something wrong or I need to change different parts of it. 

This is a great idea, because in doing so you know you solve a really big pain from the start. 

The way it works is that at first you build something, and then you try to sell it. But you don’t sell a product really, you only sell a presentation of a product in fact. So you can have just a demo and sell that for starters. It’s much better than to build for months and come up with a fully functioning solution that no one will buy. I believe that it’s perfectly fine to fake it to get started, as long as you never lie to people or deceive them.  

In a blog post about the origin story of Checkout X you say: “The payment aspect was absurd - there was absolutely no way to accept credit card payments.” From your perspective, has the state of payment processing for eCommerce startups in Bulgaria and CEE improved over the years, what are currently the biggest barriers and pain points of local ventures?

The context here was around Shopify, which didn’t have a payment provider in Bulgaria. Thankfully mainstream solutions are now available in Bulgaria, which solved the majority of the issues, and there are also a couple of smaller solutions available now as well. 

The biggest pain point can sometimes be cost, and other times it can be a lack of flexibility, or just an array of pragmatic issues like being banned for no reason, especially if you’re doing something that falls into a risk group. 

Say you’re dropshipping and the provider decides that you’re a risk category and will ban you. Since you don’t have many alternatives, that would be a bummer, because there is no lady at the front desk you can go and complain to. You just have to write an email that nobody replies to and have $2,000 dollars on hold somewhere with nothing to do about it. 

With us, you’d always receive very prompt replies, regardless of your preferred channel. Providing exceptional customer service and support is number one priority for CatalystPay as you can see in our Trustpilot Reviews.

Besides ensuring redundancy, how can a founder structure their decision process about selecting their payment infrastructure? What are the most important aspects of a payment processing solution from an eCommerce perspective? 

The first thing is compatibility. If you’re using an e-commerce platform, you need to check what's available on the platform, otherwise you can’t use the solution in question. Then you should look for a combination of price and acceptance rate. This is very important but people often overlook it. Because you might get a better price, but if you have many rejected cards you lose a lot of orders down the line. 

Then there are multiple additional features such as support, whether you like the company and what it stands for, or what features it brings. But support, pricing and acceptance rate will help you shortlist a few providers to make an offer comparison. 

How would you describe the current e-commerce landscape in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? What unique opportunities or challenges does it present?

The biggest payment providers are the delivery companies, which I find insane. It boggles me how there isn’t a bigger pushback from merchants to collect money upfront. The problem is not with payments per se, but with people not paying instantly. As a vendor, most of the time you’ll send a parcel and hope that the person will accept it. If they don’t, you still have to pay for the delivery, and I would say this is a problem in the entire CEE and even in some parts of Central Europe as well. 

Where do you see the future of e-commerce in the next 5 years? 

E-commerce is a very broad topic, and I think about it a lot. Traditional e-commerce with a shop and items that you get delivered in a couple of days is at peak innovation and not going to change that much. 

Instant delivery is definitely a trend right, allowing people to get their items asap, so any form of instant delivery service where as a seller you don’t have to build a physical store might develop. 

But even here there are different types of orders. Ones that you don’t need immediately and you can buy online and receive in a few days, and others you need delivered immediately from the supermarket or the pharmacy. On top of that, there is an entire industry of digital items as well, along with specific ways of purchasing them. And I think this is going to grow - digital services like teaching and fitness and so on. 

For first-time e-commerce entrepreneurs looking to start their journey, what core piece of advice would you give them?

Start. Just start working and try to sell something online. The best way to learn is to start selling. You can watch all the videos in the world and you’re not going to get a full picture until you have to ship that first order. Then you learn everything about payments, shipping, customer success, but only as you have to deal with it, otherwise it’s just a foreign concept. 

 

At CatalystPay, we take a lot of pride in bringing value to our customers and becoming their business partners. To us, it’s very important to stay truly connected to the e-commerce and fintech industries, as it helps us become better at what we do. 

So follow us & our series of interviews with successful entrepreneurs to get free access to our first-hand insights.