In September of 2015 we started working on a new company called — LavishShoestring.com. In LS we help people from over the world buy vintage and antique homewares without a hassle. We have a warehouse in a small village close to Oxford, and we develop IT infrastructure and work on marketing from Saint Petersburg. I want to tell a whole story about how we started working on LS and what milestones we have already passed. But at the beginning I would like to tell you a little bit more about who I am.

I co-founded Biz-cen.ru in 2011, service that helps potential leasers find an office space without spending to much time on this task. On our web-site potential leasers can set-up parameters of desired office and immediately get a list of free spaces. All information is presented in a very consistent way: for each business-centre we create a mini-web site, take professional photos of interior and exterior, gather information about infrastructure objects and draw floor plans where we mark free offices. What is more, we consistently update information about free offices.

There were several huge real estate international companies that operated on the office market in Saint Petersburg. Today they act the same way as they did in 2011: they work only with clients who are looking for huge office spaces, mostly because if they close a huge deal they earn a bigger commission. But there is a limited amount of clients who are seeking for big offices. There are much more clients who want smaller offices. If you use old fashioned methods, like holding a lot of meetings between leaser and landlords, you will spend quite the same time on closing deal on a small office as or a big one. You need to have far different business processes in your company than international companies have. So we built them mostly by using automation in different part of our business.