$833K/Month – Connecting People Globally with Gift Deliveries – Dmitriy Peregudov founder of giftbasketsoverseas.com and Giftsenda

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hey there, entrepreneurs. My name is Sushant and welcome to Trep Talks . This is a show where I interview successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, business executives, and thought leaders, and ask them questions about their business story, and also dive deep into some of the strategies and tactics that they have used to start and grow their businesses.

And today, I’m really excited to welcome Dmitriy Peregudov to the show. Dmitriy is the founder of, uh, gift baskets overseas.com and also, uh, Giftsenda. Gift baskets overseas.com offers global gift delivery in 200 plus countries worldwide. And Giftsenda is a global corporate gifting platform. And I’m going to ask a little bit more about the difference between the two during the interview.

And today I’m gonna ask Dmitriy a few question about his entrepreneur [00:01:00] journey. And all the strategies and tactics that he has used to start and grow his business. So Dmitriy, thank you so much for joining today at Trep Talks. Really, really appreciate your time.

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: Thank you for having me Sushant. I appreciate it.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So as you were just discussing, you know, you have, uh, these two companies and you of describing to me, you know, gift.

Um, one of them is kind of like a gifting service. Uh, and the other one is the technology platform. Uh, so could you please describe, uh, the difference between the two and, and what, uh, what services or what products

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: are you actually, uh, offering? Of course. Uh, so give basket services.com initially has been started as an e-commerce product.

Uh, basically a web based shopping experience. Was a main focus of that business. And there are several other brands under that business, but generally it’s, it’s an e-commerce sales people go on the website, buy a gift. So the main product is a gift [00:02:00] itself, uh, and the main purpose for people to connect with each other.

True. You know, true a long distance. If someone lives in one country and they wanna send the gift, Almost any country’s country in the world, they, they can go to give basket services.com and place an order. And that’s, that’s a service they get. So there are flowers, give baskets, chocolates, uh, you know, wine and you name it, basically all kinds of gourmet gifts.

Um, and, uh, Then the corporate customers also started coming in to give basket services and they started sending gifts to their customers, uh, clients, uh, business partners and, and so on, employees of different companies. So we ended up becoming also corporate on the e-commerce side. Um, and then, you know, eventually realized that the number of businesses actually wanted to have a lot more gifting in their.

Standard practice. And so, uh, number of companies came to us and said, well, you know, we’d love to have something that’s more streamlined that, that has [00:03:00] more automation around process of gifting. Um, and we’ve learned that there are a lot other use cases, um, that we’ve not had experienced in such as, you know, uh, sales development, business development and gifting is used for that, uh, to send us appreciation gifts to send.

Getting to know gifts just to get to know the person that you are trying to build a business relationship with. So that’s kind of led us to build, uh, a separate company and we, we call it Gem and Gand is basically a global gifting platform, as you mentioned, that’s focusing on sales. Business development and marketing use cases as well as, uh, customer employee loyalty use cases where businesses wanna integrate gifting into their assess sales sales funnel or into their, uh, uh, human resource management systems and so on.

So that’s,

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: that’s very interesting. Um, I definitely want to learn a little bit more about both [00:04:00] processes.

Your products and your, your platform is really around physical gifts, so this is not, has nothing to do with like, gift cards.

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: Actually, it’s, it’s interesting you’re asking, we have both today, uh, and uh, the baskets overseas, it’s mostly physical, but we do have gift cards as well for those brands that we, that we have.

So you could potentially send a gift basket, services gift card to, uh, someone over the email and then that person would then go to our website to redeem the card. That’s certainly an option. But gift Sunday is a lot more, uh, virtual in that sense. We do have gift cards from all kinds of brands, so people who wanna send a gift, they don’t have to choose a gift basket or, or a flower Bette.

They can send. A gift card, uh, or a, or a value card, a stored value card where someone can go [00:05:00] in and, uh, redeem it, uh, anywhere in the world actually, because there are visa cards who are, that are not brand specific. And there are also brand specific cards such as, you know, a Starbucks card or, uh, uh, you know, every BIE fish card, you know, some brands, retail brands and so on.

So if you know, uh, an interest of the recipient specifically to sports or to coffee or. To anything. Then you can send a gift, uh, to a specific gift card, uh, you know, a specific gift card in mind, and then that person, if for some reason you made a wrong bet, um, our platform allows the recipient to swap the card to something else.

They may swap it to another card, or they may swap it to a physical gift. Say a gift basket or, uh, maybe, uh, um, even to a donation gift, if they wanted to make a donation instead of the accepting the gift, the gift recipient has that option as well. So there are, uh, a lot of options around types of gifts that the recipient can pick for themselves.

Not only the [00:06:00] sender is now, uh, picking the gift, but the recipient has that option as well. Of course, sender can restrict that, but many senders that, uh, send with us say, like that option, and they. The recipient to have the option to swap the gift to the one of their choice.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Oh, very nice. So, um, before I go forward with more, more detailed questions on, on these, um, I wanna ask you a little bit about your own story.

And, you know, what, when did you get started as an entrepreneur and what really motivated you to get into entrepreneurship and, and specifically to start,

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: uh, these companies? Sure. Uh, well, I, I, uh, I immigrated from Europe back in, uh, late nineties. And, uh, my, I had an engineering degree, so I kind of wanted to do something in, it was engineering.

So I ended up, uh, getting a little bit more into computer science and worked in a number of engineering companies and in the computer [00:07:00] science field. And, and then, uh, ended up kinda. Building my own website to sell flowers and gifts online. And that that website was mostly focusing on European Eastern European delivery.

That’s the area where I’m from. But then eventually, uh, we ended up expanding that and built a flower business, international flower business. We called it, uh, good Choice Flowers. And that was, that’s still around, but we don’t really, uh, make that, uh, as a, as a main effort now. And, uh, that, that business kinda led me to understand the consumer.

Better to really, um, allowed me to par to polish my skills on, um, as a business owner and an entrepreneur. And, uh, from then on I kind of built the gift basket business so slowly from a tech guy who built website. I ended up being a marketing guy and eventually changing many hats to customer service. Uh, running a team of customer service people, eventually running sales teams and kind of [00:08:00] grew with the business, so to speak.

So, uh, Being a small business of one person, two people, then eventually becoming what we are today. We have over a hundred people on the team at the moment.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So initially you started out kind of with a simple idea of being able to give people the ability to send like flowers or something to someone. Uh, Who’s not in, you know, who’s in a different city or in different country.

And then from that, you basically kind of slowly grew the idea to, um, you know, uh, uh, more products and then eventually to creating this technology platform.

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: So that’s correct. I, I just wanted to clarify a little bit, um, early on, before I got to the point of understanding the business, uh, I myself was a customer of similar business.

Okay. So, So I, you know, I’m, I originally from Russia and, you know, I had family and I had a girlfriend in Russia. I was, uh, age [00:09:00] 22 at, uh, 2025. At the time when I, I had a girlfriend, I, I was sending her flowers and, uh, the service there was not, uh, was not very, uh, Good. So I realized that there is a gap in, uh, in the offering and, and the supply wasn’t ideal.

So I, I understood that it was very difficult to order online, back, back in those days. And, uh, so I’ve built, um, I’ve built a website that was basing, its. Its service model, uh, on what was already on the market, but better. And we focused more on customer service, on convenience of ordering. And so those things that mattered a lot in the future.

And that kind of gotten us to later expanding into corporate and so on. Yeah. So,

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: um, gift basket overseas.com, what is the, I mean, I’m assuming, you know, when you were trying to send that, uh, gift initially to your girlfriend, that was like 15. You know, I don’t wanna, [00:10:00] that was a, that was a few years ago. Um, now.

Okay, now, You know, we are living in a very developed e-commerce ecosystem where it’s, you know, it’s very easy to order these things online. And I think I went on your website and the thing that, or the value proposition that I kind of got got outta it was you can gift it and have the product delivered.

But I, but then I think, One or two or three days or something and you know, it could be a very far away place. Also. Is that really the value proposition of gift basket overseas as, you know, quick delivery? Um, how do you see, what’s, what’s the, the value

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: proposition that you’re offering? Uh, yeah. Thanks for visiting the website and certainly that’s one of the things that matters to people.

Uh, they. You know, they live far away and they want to impress, uh, being far away. Uh, of course there are a lot of, uh, services today that can do things quickly, [00:11:00] but so, so you’ve mentioned the value proposition of, of being quick. That’s certainly correct. But I would say that’s contextual because some people want to use us not only in one country, but in many, so someone sending a gift, let’s say to uh, India or some, the same person may have friends in Austria or Australia.

So, And then maybe, um, you know, uh, in Christmas they may have, uh, a list of friends or colleagues or, or customers and or various parts of the world. So with Goodas services, they can do it all in one, their one place and, and they don’t have to look for local services in each country. So it’s, it’s quick.

Not only that, we quickly able to deliver it, but also it’s for the customer who can quickly order it and have a very consistent experience. Oftentimes even be able to select a very similar gift across various countries. So if you have a certain budget and you have a certain gift in mind, you don’t have to get, you know, super custom and super creative.

If you have [00:12:00] several, you know, people and you just have very little time to do it, you can do very quickly with us. Uh, by doing bulk ordering, the bulk ordering options in several countries, uh, you can have a very clear picture of how much it’s gonna cost you. There’s no surprises with delivery. It’s flat.

Um, Delivery fee that’s not very high compared to what you would’ve paid if you sent something from here. Um, and, um, I would say we could be compared to a local service within that country because that’s who we are. Really. We, we, we deploy things locally. We have localized warehouses and partnerships that we, we leverage to get things done quickly.

And there is no risks of things getting stuck at the border. There is no risks of a recipient having to pay taxes or duty fees to accept the gift. It’s also pain points a lot of our customers have had prior to experiencing our service. And they came to us and said, well, you know, I’ve sent a gift. Well, this is in that company.

And then my recipient had to pay duties to accept the gift. That’s very embarrassing. So we’re [00:13:00] like, wow. A lot of those stories. So yes, the world is developed and there’s a lot of localized, uh, options now, but, uh, that’s also true and that’s probably what I would call the only competition I think we would have is, is local.

Companies that work within certain country, but then if you think of a global thing that’s not scalable, that’s not easy for them to scale. We’ve scaled that model across the world. And not only that, but we also scaled the quality of service itself. And oftentimes local company, let’s say in one particular country, uh, say we service Zimbabwe, and the concept of service in Zimbabwe may be very different than the concept of service, let’s say in the US or Canada.

Where we are from, right? So people from US and Canada, uh, may have a certain expectation for the service that they expect to receive, and we scale that service across the world. So although we do work locally in Zimbabwe, along, along with a bunch of other countries, [00:14:00] we, we raise the level of service to that of the US and Canada.

And so our, our consumer. We get that no matter where they order, if something goes wrong, we’re gonna be there to make sure that it’s redone to their satisfaction. And that if there’s anything, if they go with a local provider, oftentimes they’re not, they’re not very happy because those companies have their own standards of service that’s possibly not necessarily bad, but different.

And maybe they value one thing, but the consumer value something else. We understand what our consumer values. We understand that what matters, not only the timing, how quickly it gets there, but also the presentation, also the quality of goods and. Uh, and making sure that the communication is very clear.

We know when it gets delivered. We, we, we will notify using a text message or email, uh, when it gets there. And if some delay happens, we also keep in touch with the customer. So our [00:15:00] 24 7 customer service allows that to be a reality. Local service somewhere in the, in the country locally would not be able to, uh, to compare to us in that sense.

So a lot of consumers don’t mind to, uh, Go to company who is not truly local, but global and then get that localized experience that we can offer.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: That’s really interesting because I was thinking you’ve been able to solve like a very complex problem of cross border clearance. I mean, I think, I think there’s, it’s a huge pain point for a lot of e-commerce businesses right now.

Sending product from one country to another. And the way you have solved this is by mostly partnering with local businesses. Um, but to me that, I mean, in 200 countries plus, that to me still seems like a pretty complex challenge of how, you know, working with different partners and having a certain level of service expectation.

[00:16:00] Uh, how did you, man, how did you manage that?

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: Well, it took a while, right? So we’ve been around for 20, uh, 22 years, I think now. Yeah, 20, 20, 21 years, 22nd year now. So it’s been a while. Uh, and during that time we’ve, we’ve perfected the system. Our, our, uh, supplier network had, uh, matured a lot. So went through a lot of back and forth with some countries and we had to sometimes even disconnect countries from our list of serviced locations because we were not happy with, uh, what they, uh, were able to provide to us.

And. Wasn’t the service our customers have come to expect. But over, over time, uh, in all these locations that we service today, we had, we had to replace number of suppliers and a number of logistical partners. Sometimes shippers, uh, had to be changed as well. So like this, this whole logistical nightmare, although it is.

Sort of [00:17:00] offloaded from us, but it’s still our problem because if anything goes wrong, we are responsible. So we have to go through a lot of those iterations to make sure that we are happy with all the parts from putting the gift together, what goes on the gift, how the gift is designed, and how gets delivered.

So we are at all of those steps. Very closely involved in making sure that things go well. So today we do have some countries where we have localized presence ourselves and there are countries where it doesn’t make sense for us to have our own warehouses. So we would be then working locally with other suppliers that able to deliver to, to our promise.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: And does that, did that mean that you had to actually. Visit most of these countries or, or have you been working, I mean, at least the, the, the places where you have local warehouses, your own own warehouses. How do you, do you have like team that’s managing it there? I mean, to me, [00:18:00] can you share a little bit about the, the management, uh, you know, what does your team look like and how do you manage actually the different parts of the world and, uh, all these different relationships and

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: partnerships?

Yeah, so like, so basically it’s a, it’s a different, uh, it’s a different setup depending on the country. There are countries where the local presence and the local people on the ground, uh, that are part of our sort of team. And then there are some affiliates that aren’t really part of the team. Uh, so depending on the area, uh, and some countries where shipping is well developed, uh, then there will be like a one location that everything gets shipped out of.

Then in the US for example, there are, you know, a couple of locations from different parts of the cost. Different costs, right? Something on the west, something on the east coast. And for the, for the speed of shipping in Canada is a big country. So there’s, there’s, there are few places. There’s something in bc there’s something in Ontario, there, something in the middle of the country.

But generally, uh, [00:19:00] there are still very tough places to get to in Canada. Right. Uh, like Yukon and places like that where, you know, it’s not as many people, but. When you get the order, it takes a while to get there. So, so it depends on, uh, how that works. Uh, and depending on the country, it, it’ll be different setup up.

Some very popular countries will have more presence of our own people and some countries that have less of a demand, um, that maybe we get couple hundred orders in a year. Thus we, of course, we, we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t have like our own internal team, but we do have affiliates that are trained to work.

With our designs that are doing it, it’s almost like a franchise setup where the local provider would go according to our blueprint, and then they would, they would develop, um, physical products that are corresponding to our virtual, the presentation that we’ve, we’ve designed and put together. And then we would control the quality by doing a QA with recipients, by doing QA with partners [00:20:00] and.

By being somewhere in the middle of that process to ensure that it’s satisfactory. And if it isn’t, uh, uh, you know, we have a very small, uh, percentage that we allow for complaints or issues. So whenever someone exceeds that level of patience, so to speak, level of complaint, then we work on rigorous replacement and we are very quick and swift about that.

So, Or, or if we don’t find replacement, we may just kill the location for some time until we do find replacement, so that, that structure is very, uh, solid. But we do have a very strong partner development team and, uh, QA team, um, and uh, basically order processing team that’s involved in close relationship with partners to ensure that the gift quality is at the level and, and that the.

Um, proper designs are maintained and so on. So those things are very important for our end consumer, both [00:21:00] the recipients and the senders. And I think also

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: a big part of your business, even for, for this, uh, business that we’re, uh, discussing, uh, gift baskets overseas com. Um, to me it seems like operationally a big part of it is the software itself.

I’m assuming proprietary software that you know, you’re. Send orders to the right, uh, partners and, you know, quickly, and they’re able to process it and everything can be tracked and and so forth. Um, is that really the biggest, um, biggest, uh, I guess, value that, uh, or IP that, that your business has as the software and then the operations?

Of course, you build the partnerships, but without the software. You wouldn’t be like, it won’t be able, you won’t be able to operate, operationalize

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: it, right? I think over time the software gotten gotten better. Uh, it has [00:22:00] been very simple in the beginning. And just to get, you know, from point O, point A to point B kind of, it, it was like a bicycle in the beginning.

It, now it probably more like, uh, you know, like Tesla. Uh, but, uh, it does have. It did have a lot of iterations to, to improve. I think it’s, there’s some IP in that, but I think the biggest IP on the basket services is a team itself. And I think the culture of the team is very strong. Uh, you know, everyone works from home.

Everyone is, uh, uh, remote from the office and, uh, we’ve done it since day one. I think we also have a very strong team culture because we do meet informally a lot, uh, across the world. We do those corporate trips where we basically maintain, uh, a very strong connection with, with people. Uh, and uh, I think that culture combined with a software that we’ve built for the people to use in a convenient fashion.

I think those things together, [00:23:00] they are the ip I would say. It’s weird to talk about people as ip, but actually we, I think we’ve developed a secret source of how to make sure people are happy and how to make sure they are productive with, uh, within the environment. But then the software, yes, it comes with it.

Um, but I think software is an enabler of the true value, which is people. Mm-hmm. On side, I think software is, Secondary to people, but people make software better because every year we have a very intuitive process to improve that software and continue building on top layer after layer. And at the end people save time, they save seconds, minutes, hours of their time over, and that they feel that they are part of that creation.

They, they feel like they are the ones. Put a lot of input on how this should work as opposed to something out of the box where say, okay, work this way on it. No, no. They actually make part of that improvement from their own side, and that becomes a lot more theirs than it [00:24:00] would’ve if they were just using something.

I think, uh, well, I guess service side, I think software is an IP as well, because. Yes, is actually, um, a younger team, a younger company. We only have, uh, about 12 people there now. Uh, but, uh, that, that team is a very efficient in, in the way they’ve built the software and, and developed. I think software is there right now is, uh, is a focal point, but of course the team is also very strong culturally.

So again, the team plus software thing works again, but I think we are repeating our success. Um, but I think in the, the people came first, We didn’t have much or software and then people kind of figured out how the software should work to, to service customers the best. But on the Gand side, I think we’ve developed this platform first and with very few people.

And then we started layering with people and now we have kind of the same place, but a different angle with the same place.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So may I, may I ask a little bit [00:25:00] more? So, was your team remote even before Covid? And you know, you, I, I believe you, you said that your culture or your team, you found like the secret sauce of keeping people happy and motivated and productive and so forth.

What, how did you come to that secret thought? Or, or can you share a little bit of, you know, what it is that, um, that enables that

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: culture? Well, well, that’s a secret, right? I’m just joking. So, but actually in reality, the, uh, uh, what, what we’ve learned over time is that in the structures that we have, we were remote from day one and, and CO didn’t change much of that, except we gotten like two times bigger in the size because we gotten very busy in Covid and we get, we grew like crazy without.

Without particular planning to grow, we just sort of grew. Um, market took us there. Like for [00:26:00] many e-commerce companies is, is probably the case, but we were providing the wave, so to speak. Um, but I think the culture part has been a big, a big part of that, uh, because, uh, once you have the right group of people in the very beginning and this, these people are motivated to do well.

Then the new people that join, they are like-minded and they share the same values. So we figured out we have certain values as a team. When we were much smaller, we were about 30 people or so, in size, 25, 30 people. And at that time we, we kind of got together and we, uh, somewhere in Cypress, I think we uh, we had a corporate ship and we, back in, uh, 2016 it was, I think, and we kind of gotten together and figured out who are we as people, what do we care about?

What are the things we as humans value individually and collectively? And we’ve written them down and we figured out, okay, we, we care about [00:27:00] flexibility. So we like to work from home. We like to figure out our schedules. We like to have flexibility of travel, so that’s important. Flexibility. Uh, we care about customers.

So customers first. Customer focus was very important for us. We wanna like each other and we wanna work with people who like us. So respect, mutual respect. Um, diversity. We have a very multinational team. We have people from Asia, people from Latin America, people from, you know, us, Canada, Europe, all over really.

And so respect for other cultures is very important for us. So we kind of look at those things and we care about ownership a lot. So we want person who is entrusted something to really own it and really not to drop the ball. So those things were written down and we. Figured that we care about them. And we also figured out that we are going forward to not just delivering gifts, but connecting people.

So we care. We understood that. We care [00:28:00] about creating that connection as opposed to just sending, you know, clicking buttons, sending emails, or, you know, arranging gifts, delivery or sending baskets. Right? We want to be, uh, a human connector. We want to be. Helping a person in country like Canada, sending a gift to a person somewhere, you know, maybe far away in, in, uh, Europe or Asia, and, and, and, and by doing so, uh, by, by sending a gift, we enabled that.

So once we realize that it’s not just about sending gifts, but it’s much bigger purpose, it’s about building relationships, then I think the culture became much more meaningful. It wasn’t just about bunch of friends or, or colleagues, you know, having a good time clicking buttons, but it was about us driving towards something much more important.

And there was this, uh, study, you know, in, uh, Harvard that they did, I think back, back in the early [00:29:00] 2000 where the study is actually 100 years old when they were measuring happiness of people over a hundred years. And they were looking at income, uh, like, uh, race, uh, Past experience, education, all kinds of things, right?

They were looked at by multiple variables and, and the only thing that really stand out from that study is that people who were the happiest, not the ones who had the most money, not the ones who had the best jobs, but the people who actually were the most connected with their friends, family, and. That’s not always mean, local connection.

That doesn’t always mean someone that they going to school with, like right there in the, on the backyard, but maybe someone very far away, maybe someone that they’re still talking to. So once we realize how important it’s, so those, those people were healthier. Healthier, and they leave the longest are all the people in the study.

Okay? So if you think about it that way, we actually, our gifts help people to stay [00:30:00] connected and we think by definition that help them to stay. Healthier and happier and live longer. So once we think that we are part of that big thing, it’s much more meaningful to do this job. Definitely.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Um, so I’ll come back to that question of competition again.

Um, so you know, now if I want to send a gift to someone, let’s say, you know, you know, my family in.

How do you know, since you’ve created this business, I’m assuming there are competitors in the market that are offering some sort of similar services or you know, can I just go to like an India based website of gifting company and basically select a gift through that website and you know, just put the address of the person in India and ship it out.

So how has your business, um, [00:31:00] Being able to withstand this competitive landscape where now people have more and more options and, and not just more and more options. You know, there’s like, people can create their own gift packages and so forth. You know, I mean, you know, somebody can go on Amazon and select a few bun items and just, you know, gift them out or things like that.

Um, has, has that, has this really impacted your business or you, you have been able to continue growing your business, uh, consistently over time. Or, or was that one of the reasons why you kinda pivoted towards more of this, you know, technology based, you know, gifts and, uh, kinda a business

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: model? Sure. Good question.

So we’ve grown organically, uh, you know, up to probably last year, uh, well pre covid we’ve grown organically. It wasn’t very fast, but it was, you know, good 10, 15% a year. In the last, you know, few years prior to Covid in the Covid, we more than doubled. We, I think we’ve grown two and a half times. Uh, so, uh, [00:32:00] we went, uh, very rapidly up, uh, picking somewhere around 2022.

The last year. Uh, we had scaled down a bit since, uh, because e-commerce, then people started traveling a lot. So a lot of times, When people have haven’t traveled during the covid, they used give basquez by as a means to connect with loved ones a lot more often than they would’ve normally. So the new normal have changed, but so we’ve scaled down since, but we have not scaled down all the way back to pre covid.

So it’s, it’s a bit lower than in the peak, but we’re still very busy, um, relatively speaking and. As for the competition, I think there, there were some competitors who actually died during Covid because they couldn’t sustain, uh, you know, themselves. They, they didn’t have the right model for Covid, uh, because they were more physical than virtual and they were sort of more, more functional, the local market.

And that was sort of closed in many [00:33:00] places. We had some countries that were closed more than others, like China was difficult sometimes. And some other countries were more difficult than others, but generally we didn’t really close the doors ever. We actually been much more busier than the opposite. So I believe we, um, we actually gained some market share during the Covid.

Uh, well since then, of course there were some new entrants to the market and there were some competition from local shops. I believe that’s still gonna be the case, and there’s nothing new in that I believe that competition is, has its merits. And it’ll always be, uh, there to some degree. But I haven’t yet found a notable competitor, um, in the space who were, who was able to repeat, uh, our success on a global level.

Um, and there were some countries that, you know, who may lose some number four this time to time, and we’ll gain again some other year. But, uh, globally, we’ve been growing very steadily. [00:34:00] Um, and. Comfortably, uh, organically, I would say for the most part we’ve not really over invested, but we’ve not under invested either.

We, I think we’ve been growing well. Uh, could we grow faster? We probably could, but I believe the way to do it is through Emda. And Emda is, is a more, uh, is a different market. It’s a different way to sell what we sell, the connection between people. Um, so. And I, I see a lot more demand on the corporate side lately, uh, that we could respond to.

We, we also could continue working on, on B2C side, and we are working on that, but I also see a lot more demand on the corporate side. And a lot of our customers, they want a good solution. They want a good platform. Some of it that we offer is currently free. We have a free platform option, and some customers who want more integrations like c r M integration into [00:35:00] Salesforce or HubSpot, we offer integrations for extra fee as a license.

Those customers can get a, a very reasonably priced platform, uh, licensed. But those who don’t want licensed, they can still use us for free as a very convenient tool for automated gifting. Um, so. I do see a lot of opportunity on the corporate side, and that’s why G Send is sort of a, a parallel company that has its own resources and is not just another project that we have.

It’s, it’s a very big separate effort that we invest into and have received investments for. And, and

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: you said that Sender has a team of about, uh, still, you know, 1212 or so? Um, When you started that developing the product, you know, the whole agile, you know, product development, life cycle, uh, I don’t know if you’re using agile [00:36:00] or, or different methodology.

At what point did you actually start, you know, going out and, and pitching this product to, uh, businesses and when did you actually get the first customer?

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: Sure. Um, well, we had some customers who were sort of in a, in a, in a queue, uh, waiting for a platform when we were working on it. So we, we had a quickly couple who joined right after we built, uh, the, the software.

Um, so it took us about a year to get to a comfortable place where we could say that this is a, a decent prototype that can be functional, uh, well prototype we had earlier, but like something we, we, we were not shy to share. Uh, it took us about a year, I would say. So I think year 2022 last year, we, we’ve launched, uh, like a production version.

Um, and couple of customers, uh, joined that, uh, platform fairly quickly. Uh, we didn’t really feel like charging them a lot for it. We, we [00:37:00] did, you know, a pilot with them, uh, and they were pretty happy. And then later, you know, more customers have joined. GSN is still pretty small. Uh, but it has been growing and lately with our newest offering, the, the free platform that we, we recently added a free platform version that, uh, is somewhat less featured but still very, very usable and a lot of people love it.

So we are seeing a lot more influx of customers since then. Uh, did, were we Agile? Yeah, I think we were mostly agile, but we didn’t formally code that way, but yes, methodology was closer to that.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yes. Yeah, I think, I think Agile is, is is, uh, different in different companies. Like every, every company has, has its own way of doing agile flavor.

Um, yeah. Yeah. How do you do, do you have a sales team that actually goes out, going out and targeting businesses when pitching this, this product? How, how are you acquiring customers specifically for like, gifts and, uh,

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: this, uh, software product? So it’s a combination. As a [00:38:00] combination of things. We, uh, we obviously.

Have some outreach, uh, campaign around LinkedIn, um, certain positions, certain companies who are, uh, in the right place for us to target. And we, we do that. Um, but outside of it, we are fairly, uh, inbound for the most part. So we have a very strong marketing team, uh, that is building, uh, you know, lead generation engine and we.

We’ve done pretty well there. Uh, we, you know, we, we are being, uh, easier and easier to find, um, on all the search engines. So, uh, a lot more visibility is from there. And so the income inbound leads are a lot easier to work with. Of course, we have a decent conversion, uh, compared to something we would get outbound.

Uh, you know, some conferences help, um, you know, connections there, build relationships. And of course we use give [00:39:00] sender to build gand. So when we do get a good customer, uh, oftentimes, or, or a good lead who is potentially a customer, we might develop that with give sender gifts. And sometimes there are opportunities.

We send it to a code list and number of people who want to have a conversation about give platform, uh, we would send them gifts to start that conversation. So, GS send is used to develop relationship with Gsem future customers. Wow. That’s,

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: that’s really awesome. Um, what’s coming to my mind, you know, as you’re sharing all these different things is, um, how do you manage all these things?

Because it seems like there’s, you know, so many different things. You know, you’re managing like these, uh, two or three different gift, uh, you know, gifting website, and then you have like this, you know, software platform. What, what are you responsible for and how do you manage all these different. Aspects of your, of your business

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: overall?[00:40:00]

Yes. Early on that was a big challenge, uh, because I was, uh, I was basically in charge of everything and, uh, with my focus initially being tech, uh, software side and also marketing, I was mostly focusing on those areas and then kind of managing other teams. But, uh, as, as, as company grown from the size of 20, 30 people to a size, 50 and eventually larger.

I was no longer able to maintain that and be it, do it well. So I started building a management structure under me that, that was efficient. And, and a lot of people who were with the company for some time, they, they took that responsibility to step up and become, you know, team leads and managers and directors.

And now we have, uh, you know, not a very deep. Structure, but with a hundred people, you gotta have a management, like a lower management level, and then like a director level. And then there’s me. [00:41:00] Um, so I’m, I manage directors and managers of certain teams, uh, on both bus side. And also I have a strong leadership on, uh, On the Gand side, we have, uh, three managers there who manage their respective teams.

And, uh, that’s working well. They, I trust them, you know, with my life. So, so they, with my money of course, as well. So they, you know, they do well. Um, I think, and, uh, I believe we are growing together, uh, as managers, as leaders, and, you know, I couldn’t do it without them. So they really are the core of that company.

Of those companies, both of them, yeah.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: The one question that I always ask founders is, you know, there’s, I mean, you, you, you’ve been a founder, uh, CEO running companies for a long time now. Um, I mean, there’s always mistakes made, lessons learned, failures. Um, what is, [00:42:00] you know, throughout your entrepreneurship journey, like what has been.

Some lessons, um, lessons learned that you, you know, learned as an entrepreneur through failures or mistakes made. Um, you know, I’m sure there you have like thousands of examples, but like at a high level, what, you know, what did you learn as an entrepreneur that you can share with other, uh,

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: entrepreneurs are just getting started?

Sure. I think, uh, one big learning is. Not being afraid to scale. When you feel, when you see the light, a small light like, uh, the end of the tunnel, oftentimes we, we are careful naturally because some of us are more risky than others, and I think I was certainly more on a risk averse side myself. But if I’ve followed my instinct and be more brave, been more brave early on, I think I would’ve scaled faster.[00:43:00]

When I’ve seen the light, I was still somewhat shy about scaling. Another thing is, you know, trusting people, uh, is a big thing. I mean, I think it took me some time to, uh, fire myself from a job that I was doing and get myself hired for another job that I was doing, and it took longer than, you know, I wish it did.

But today I, I’m much quicker with hiring myself from one thing and hiring into another if there is one. But generally, hi, you know, hiring other people to do my job is, is not easy. Um, was not easy for me because initially you think, well, you know, you, you, you’ve done it so well, you know, nobody can do it better than you are.

Then you can, but then eventually you find pe people who is initially who, who aren’t better. But now they, every one of them is better than me, uh, and all the things that they’re doing. And I think it took me some time to really. Believe that early on today, I know that as a, as a true fact, and I’ve repeated many [00:44:00] times, and not only me, but my managers sometimes repeated that as well.

When they went and left their jobs and got promoted and then got promoted again, perhaps they had to go to the same process of letting go and finding themselves from a previous job they have. And I think that takes an effort. Mental belief in, and also a spiritual belief that someone is gonna do eventually better than you have.

And that’s not always comfortable, right? Mm-hmm.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So definitely that’s, that’s kind of the, the control, right? The

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: control freak, letting control go as a stop for entrepreneur, I think. But not only for entrepreneur, even for managers, for leaders who have done certain things for a certain number of years, so many years, and then like all of a sudden they said, well, I gotta move on.

I gotta do something else. Trusting, interesting to someone else, especially in the beginning. It feels pretty weird. It doesn’t always feel comfortable.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Definitely. Uh, now we’re gonna move on to our rapid fire segment. In this segment [00:45:00] I’m gonna ask you a few quick questions and you have answered them maybe in a word or a sentence or so.

So one book recommendation for entrepreneurs

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: and why. Definitely delivering happiness, um, by, uh, Uh, by the, yes, by, by the founder of, uh, the famous, uh, Zappos brand who’s no longer with us. But, uh, he had a great message to deliver about the culture, about the strong team, and about the, you know, private ations, uh, of, uh, of the brand and how they evolved as a team, as a company.

Uh, a lot to learn from Tony. Um, so. I love that book, and I, we’ve used it as a bible for our company, at least in the early stages when we were developing and, and growing the team. So I would highly recommend that that book, um, delivering Happiness,

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: uh, an innovative product or idea in the [00:46:00] current e-commerce retail or tech landscape that you feel excited about,

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: innovative, that we use? Uh, well, I mean, Chat gpt. Certainly the, uh, everyone talks about that nowadays, right? I’m not an exception. Um, we use it, uh, in many places, uh, in the company and, uh, to empower ourselves to make ourselves more productive and in our day-to-day, but also to, to help our customers. For example, we, we have recently developed a prototype of a greeting card.

Generator tool that allows you to put in a couple of basic pieces of information for your recipient. Let’s say you have a friend or a, or a family member in India and you wanna send a greeting card without even sending a basket. You just want to come up with something creative. Uh, and let’s say you don’t care to do it yourself for some reason.

You don’t really have a wipe [00:47:00] right now to get something very. Uh, creative done and you just want to get some help, right? So you put in their name, maybe what they love, what kind of food they like, or maybe what movies they love and whatever. Just couple things. Maybe personal, maybe, maybe generic. And then you press a button and the style, you want the poem, the pros or whatever, and this thing does it for you.

So we have this tool that we, we’ve developed, uh, that allows customers to not only customers, anybody actually to go in and, uh, And try it. So, um, and then they can use it themselves directly in the email or they can send a gift with us and put that card in with the box when the time comes. So.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. A business or productivity tool or software that you would recommend or a productivity tip?

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: Um, well, we’ll, we’ll like project management tools, uh, and I think the combination. Of [00:48:00] Asana and Google spreadsheets work very well for us. Okay. Uh, yeah, we like Asana because it has, it helps organize projects into subtasks, but as far as like sub items within it, I think sometimes the Google spreadsheets is good.

It’s nothing very innovative lately. It’s been around for a while, but I think there’s a lot more in it that a lot of people don’t leverage and I think they can, um, Not only around forms, but uh, um, different scripts and actions you can integrate and call back and so on. So there’s a lot of things that, it’s very powerful stuff.

Um, Google spreadsheets. Yeah, and I think it, even the Google spreadsheet itself could become, if you design it well, it, you can make it product management system outta it if you customize it Well, yeah. So I really love it and we use it across the company a lot, um, in many places. So, Nothing super, but, uh, just wanted to mention that.

Yes. Awesome.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Final question, best business advice [00:49:00] you ever received or you would give to other entrepreneurs?

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: I think the, the, uh, the advice to focus is a very important one for me because I’m naturally not a very focused person. So if someone tells me to focus and, and. To find a niche and really kind of go deep in it as opposed to sort of going wide. It’s kind of funny to hear from me because I’m, you know, we are worldwide global, but we are niche in a way because we are going for a very certain kind of customer, uh, very focused in who we are looking for.

And I think we continue focusing. So the big advice came early on from the book, uh, by Seth Gordon, who who’ve written the book. Small is a new big. That’s the book. And you know, the idea is pretty simple. If you’re a small business or you’re just starting out a medium business, know if you’re not a [00:50:00] conglomerate, basically you have that issue of resources.

You never have enough money, never have enough people, never have enough time. So how do you get all that? How do you compete with big brands? How do you do that? Well, you gotta find a small niche and focus on that niche and do it so well that the big guys can’t. They can’t compete with you. That’s how you compete.

You compete with them on a small scale and then you penetrate, you go a little bit wider. But the idea is you stay focused. And that’s in many places has been our success metrics. We, we’ve done well on certain focused areas. We’ve not done well on certain other areas, but as long as we keep focusing most of our attention on those, That we care about, we’re gonna keep succeeding.

So that’s, that’s the advice I, I would pass on to other people to focus on small thing and do it really, really well, better than big guys.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Definitely. And a lot of the founders that I interview on my, uh, podcast, they have done exactly that, you know, really just focused on a certain, uh, very narrow niche, really become the best on that and, and, and found, [00:51:00] found success through that.

Well, Dmitriy, thank you so much for, uh, for your time today. I know you’re probably very, very busy and so I really appreciate you taking an hour of. Um, and answering some of my questions, sharing your story, and also business advice. So thank you so much again, um, and wish you all the best, uh, in your

Dmitriy Peregudov of Giftsenda: business.

Thank you Sushant and good luck with, uh, podcast. And uh, uh, I would, uh, I’m looking forward to being on the listening side as well. Definitely.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Thank you so much.