Dmitry, RadioBOSS and radioboss.fm founder

Introductions
#1

I’ve been reading and writing to this forums for a while, and it seems that I forgot to introduce myself :smile:

I’m Dmitry, I released my first free app in 1998, just to get some programming and web publishing experience, and in commercial software world since 2003.

I’m founder of DJSoft.net, a company which creates radio automation software. When it started, it was intended to be a software for local radio stations in our city. The UI and idea was proposed by a guy who was a DJ on a radio back then. Then I realized that it has the potential to be used worldwide, if some features are added. I suppose it worked out, as now our software used in 150+ countries all over the world.

I also have another project radioboss.fm which is a stream hosting service. As our software usually need a streaming server, I thought it will be better for us and our customers to offer this service as well. This way we had solved a major problem: now we don’t have customer support nightmare, when our software and 3rd party server do not work together, and we start blaming the server, while other company blames our software.

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#2

Hey Dmitry,

Welcome. I enjoy discovering small software companies that serve a narrow niche, that due to the web, are viable. Every company like yours, mine, and others, due to the web, is automatically a global company.

If I may ask: How is it operating a company out of Russia? Do you have sometimes have trouble processing payments? Getting the trust of customers? Were/are you affected by the EU and US sanctions in the last year or so? Are you tempted to move the company (at least, in appearance) to another country?

1 Like
#3

[quote=“SteveMcLeod, post:2, topic:3279”]
Welcome. I enjoy discovering small software companies that serve a narrow niche, that due to the web, are viable. Every company like yours, mine, and others, due to the web, is automatically a global company.
[/quote]Yes, and that’s why it’s a fun thing to do, talking to people from different countries… even after 12 years I still answer some of the support emails myself.

  1. There are no problems with payments as banking system here is good enough. In some ways, doing business in Russia has its advantages, like 6% tax (this is the ONLY tax for entrepreneurs here), patents for software/algorithms are not valid in Russia (means you can use any patented algorithm and it’s OK, no law broken)… Also when you start you may not pay any taxes, and no one will care until you start buying lots of property - this is against the law, but in reality it’s not enforced here until certain money amounts. Hiring people is also easier, as average salary in most cities is $500. Usually salaries are not officialy documented (money simply paid in cash), so no taxes apply (approx. 35% tax in case of official hiring).
  2. Sanctions just driven all the prices in the shops up (electronics, cars etc) - it indirectly affects the live and business, but not much. It doesn’t affect small online businesses directly (yet?)… All “assets” (servers etc) are not in Russia anyway - this is the way most online businesses work in Russia.
  3. Trust is not an issue. We even have customers from .mil domains, US Air Force is one of such customers :smile: There are various reasons, main reason which helps in building trust, I suppose, is that we’re 10+ years in business. Scam can’t live that long.
  4. We have an office in Russia, but as many of us know, businesses like this can be run from anywhere, the only requirements are Internet and minimal bank system, Visa/Mastercard ATMs should be enough. Moving it in “appearance”, tricking customers that we’re in, say, US, by having a virtual address and a redirecting 800 number - I don’t think this will do any good.
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#4

Wow, 6% is really low. That’s from company profit to your personal bank account? I.e. sales tax + corporate profit tax + income tax/dividend tax?

Edit: Really like your business btw, like Steve says it’s always amazing to see the niches businesses can operate in nowadays.

#5

6% is paid for all the money received, expenses are not taken into account. Even if you sell something, then refund, you still pay the tax for the amount received. But as it’s only 6%, it’s still a “good deal”.

Thanks!

#6

Hey Dmitry, pleasure to meet you! Glad to see another Russian soul here. No, Jane’s not my real name, but a creative alias :slight_smile:

#7

What are some difficulties you have doing capacity planning for radioboss? Interesting how you have two types of plans here.

http://v2.radioboss.fm/plans/

#8

There are no difficulties… Listener or bandwidth limit is, essentially, the same. We have some general usage statistics which allows to calculate how many accounts the server can hold.

#9

Glad to hear about Russian companies :slight_smile:
Do you see any trends in desktop software? Increase/decrease,linux/windows/macOS, desktop/browser?

Sanctions
agreed, sanctions are not a problem, they do good things for us: RUB/USD exchange rate has increased from 30 to 70, it means 2x more money for us.

#10

Desktop software trends highly depend on what niche the software is… In our case, I don’t see many requests about a web-based edition, and there are very few requests about a Mac version. But our software is narrow-niched.

#11

same here. I released some cross-platform network tool for linux and windows, but got only 5% downloads for linux. so it could be a windows-only software.