StartUs Presents: ECOIS.ME

ECOIS.ME – a new story of Ukrainian success

It is always nice to see success of your friends. Especially, if they come from your motherland, Ukraine, where the “brains migration” is so high that up to 8 mln young people left the country in the search of new opportunities during last 20 years. So when I heard the first successes of Ecois.me, I just had to interview the founders to share their story with you!
Meet Alexander Diatlov, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Ecois.me – a new Ukrainian startup in the field of home energy efficiency.

So, Alex, nice hearing you again after we met each other at Pioneers Festival 2014. Tell us, please, what’s Ecois.me?

Ecois.me is a device you connect to your home electricity controlling panel, which measures and analyzes the energy consumption of all your devices. After analyzing this information, the device sends it to an app on your mobile phone, showing you how much energy is being consumed by which device and reminds you to turn them off, if you forget to do it.
Pretty nice, so when and how did the story of “Ecois.me” start?

It started 2 years ago when we went to an event, which is called “Tesla Camp” organized by two brothers, Roman and Andrii Zinchenko, who are one of the biggest ecological startup enthusiasts in Ukraine. We came there with a totally different idea – a startup, where a drone would fly and examine the earth in terms of where to place alternative sources of energy. But during this ecological hackathon, the idea of “Ecois.me” was born. The name “Ecois.me” actually means “eco is me”, so “ecology is me” and also “economize me”.
Sounds cool, and how did you start working on implementing the idea? Did you have any difficulties establishing your team? How big is it?

No, we didn’t have any problems actually, since me and my co-founder were both pretty active in the startup-community. Now our team has 8 members, including 1 hardware engineer, 1 embedded software developer, 1 full stack developer, 1 designer, a communication officer, PR manager, CEO, and me, performing the CMO function. We have won several local competitions, which made us well-known in the startup-community and raised us some funds. After that we took an acceleration program in a business accelerator hub:raum Krakow, which is founded by Deutsche Telekom. There, we actually found our first investor, Deutsche Telekom, who invested USD 80.000 and got 15% of shares. And that’s how things went on.
What is your vision? Where would you like to see yourself in 5 years?

Well, now we started a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo, where we are planning to raise EUR 50.000 and we raised 85% of the sum in 2 weeks, so we are pretty optimistic, people seem to love our product. After this campaign the main task will be to set up a serial production of our devices. We plan to do this in March of the coming year. The next task to be afterwards would be expanding our sales geography. The market is amazing – from the USA and EU to Australia and “Asian tigers” both, in terms of B2B and B2C market. Our vision is to become the leading company on the market of home energy optimization devices in 10 years.
Wow, that sounds ambitious. Don’t you have competitors? Aren’t you afraid of difficulties in the way?

Of course, there are competitors, but we have a great team, we haver made a decision, and we are very motivated to achieve our goals! Also we have a powerful technology, based on power and spectrum analysis allowing to detect us even devices with power consumption that varies (like TV or Xbox) while our competitors can detect only simple devices like kettle or iron. We have already faced difficulties, but it is always about making decisions. For example, at the same time when we were in the process of negotiations with Deutsche Telekom, we have received an offer at Dubai. But after taking into account the factors, like cultural differences, business ethics customs etc. we have made a decision for Poland. It is not only about the money what is crucial, but also seeing ourselves as a part of European startup-ecosystem that matters.
Well, I can’t add anything more and can only wish you luck in the achievements of your goals! Thank you for a nice interview, Alex! Let’s connect the European startup-ecosystem together!

Thank you, Seva! I wish all the best for StartUs from my side!

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