The moment for Russia — part 1
At the beginning of 2018, the AirBrush team was growing and we were thinking to where we could expand. I started reading about Turkey, Russia and Peru, and how these countries were becoming more and more relevant, not only in the world economy, but in what mattered to us, the mobile economy.
Finally, we decided to start exploring Russia and eventually Turkey. (we were not as successful as we were expecting for Turkey, we will share some things we learned on this later on).
One of the most important concepts here at AirBrush is: localization is our key to everything. We decided to start a team in Russia. Bear in mind, we had no previous contact with the country, apart from my name and my passion for Russian literature.
And so it began…
The strategy was, let’s first begin with influencers and work our way into more complex tactics later on. We've always liked to start doing influencers first, wherever we go, to get a feel on how well word-of-mouth works in different countries, as well as how accepting people are of the app.
This was Russia before we began:
This is us during the start of the campaigns:
By investing in influencers campaigns and localizing properly the app, we have managed to go from practically nonexistent to top 10 in a few months. From these results we started to also look at Russia as a market to grow and we have since expanded our efforts.
