Maksim Kamenkov

In the five years of startup of Belarusians has grown into a global company with revenues of more than $ 1 million.

Belarusian startup SplitMetrics became the official partner of Apple Search Ads with their product SearchAdsHQ. About the founder of a startup Maxim Kamenkov told on the personal page in Facebook, and in interviews vc.ru.

In the text from vc.ru it is noted that SplitMetrics is a service to conduct A/B tests apps in Google Play and App Store in 2015 has launched by Belarusian entrepreneurs Maksim Kamenkov and Eugene Neugene (one of the creators of the service MSQRD that in 2016, acquired Facebook; 2017 is a mentor SplitMetrics).

Five years ago marketers had conducted such tests manually created for your app, similar to pages from AppStore and Google Play landing pages with different designs and send them traffic.

Won the option in which most of the users clicked on the “install” button — it and applied for registration of the real pages in the AppStore and Google Play.

SplitMetrics will automate this process. Tests became easier and the product interested in large companies like Rovio, Wargaming and others.

In the five years SplitMetrics has become a global company with revenue of more than $ 1 million, which develops products in the field of mobile advertising to marketers and optimization experts app stores (ASO).

In 2019, the startup became the official partner of Apple Search Ads is a platform that allows you to advertise the application in the App Store search by key words of the user. Badge partner this service, received the product of the Belarusians called SearchAdsHQ.

Maxim Kamenkov said in an interview that it is “end-to-end platform costs to optimize ad network, Apple Search Ads under users ‘behavior”. He also noted that SplitMetrics “one of the three companies in the world that are officially licensed by Apple, and hanging them on the site.”

The question of how they managed to become an official partner, Maksim replied that for a long time they were unable to get through to Apple, so I had to go the other way.

— Asked friends to introduce us to their friends — a referral contacts. A license to Apple we got to 2018, and negotiations began a year and a half before this time, — he said. We understand how advertising works on other platforms, for example Facebook and Google. We have seen that there exist a long time affiliate program. And understand that at some point the affiliate program will appear in the Apple.

So we wanted to talk to Apple about this and to show the importance of such a program. And began to do, began to look for contacts. Don’t remember what we talked first, but the process looked so: I wrote to the Manager customer-success-team of the client. He said that this issue is a different person, and sent to him. Five of redirects we have got to a person more or less responsible for the affiliate program.

It is important to say that we worked a lot with Apple in technical and technological terms. The first successful contact with them there was the product: we were one of the first who began to actively use their API.

Then there were a lot of problems and every week we sent them bug reports — helped to find errors in the documentation and so on. I think it also gave me a certain push when Apple treated us with the perspective of the partner because the technical team to understand and know who we are and what we do.

Then Apple realized the need for such a program. She started to collect feedback from companies that use their API. We were one of the companies which prepared for them a presentation of the category: what we want from the partnership, as we see partnership and so on. After some time we met with the right people — and it happened.

Now, according to Maxim, 90% of revenue startups bring cold sales (outbound). The team also engaged in “training the market” to show potential partners the use of its products. In particular, is leading the project Lab App Growth Academy and now doing a course on Apple Search Ads and certification.

On the question of the average bill Maxim responded that it all depends on the product, but he “is in the range from 10 to 20 thousand dollars.”