Customer Story: Unexpected benefit of e-Residency

We sat down with Kirill Soloviev, the founding member of EERICA and the CEO & co-founder of ContentQuo, a software company established in Estonia.

Kirill talked about his values when doing business and shared his story of finding a suitable service provider.

What business are you in?

B2B SaaS, we are developing and selling a highly specialized, professional-use software product for translation departments. Our customers are in the EU and the United States. The way I like to describe us: “We save the world from crappy translations, one translation agency at a time”. So that is what ContentQuo is about – helping manage and improve the quality of business translation at scale.

Are your team members located all over the world?

We have 4 different countries at the moment: here in Estonia, a bunch of people in Russia, some people in Ukraine, and recently a new member from Kazakhstan. Somehow the entire team is Russian speaking – it was a very natural way for us to grow.

Are your team members also e-residents?

Great question! We want to make them e-residents, but we haven’t done it yet. Somehow this year became turbulent and we just didn’t find time for that.

They don’t have to be e-residents, obviously, but we wanted to do this, because there are some background checks that the application process entails and some of our customers expect us to background check anyone working for us on the team (that’s part of their security requirements).

So, at some point we figured out that maybe it’s not a bad idea to just pay for the e-Residency cards for everyone, simply to be able to say that our entire team has been through background checks and we can prove it. This was one unexpected benefit from e-Residency that we discovered and make use of.

“We don’t need to figure out how to run our own background checks in a way that can satisfy our customers’ requirements. So once again e-Residency has more potential to take some hassle off my hands.”

How did you hear about Silva Hunt?

Heard from Christoph Huebner who is a friend. Even before Silva Hunt was officially launched, he told me privately that he is working with a group of people to create this kind of higher-level, higher-value service provider. I liked the idea and even shared some ideas on naming the company, but back then I didn’t think we would engage with Silva Hunt as a customer later on!

Did you try other service providers as well before settling for Silva Hunt?

We have been working with a number of those, because we started our company in 2015, so we had quite a lot of time to go through the different options including “no service provider”. So, it was more about the point where I understood, that we need to change.

We had been with another service provider for 2-3 years maybe, in late 2019 we started to kind of grow weary of each other. I was not happy with the service they were giving to us, and they were not happy with the tasks that we were making them do. In spring 2020 we both agreed that it was the right time to leave. The next service provider lined up was Silva Hunt, and their offer worked well for us. The team was very flexible in how they approached what we needed to do and were able to meet or exceed all our requirements.

How has the journey with Silva Hunt been?

So far so good! What I like about Kadri and the team is that they are listening to the challenges that we are sometimes facing. It’s not all wine and roses every day, sometimes things break. But what I‘m impressed by is how the team always manages to make it right: Fix it, work on the mistakes, offer alternative solutions basically do whatever it takes. We can run our business and don’t have to obsess about bookkeeping and all the stuff around it. This attitude, this desire of Silva Hunt’s team to take the hassle away from my hands, this is what is very important to me.

Lastly, what is your motto when doing business?

One is that I always try to get the team to solve the customers’ problems first, no matter how they do this. We are a software company, so the most natural way is to build more software. However, it is not always the fastest way. One thing I always say is, we have to solve the problem first and fix the bugs later. This is what always got us through difficult situations. 

I am very proud of how our customers like our customer service. The whole team is taking part in that and it is a part of our philosophy: everyone can talk to the customer, everyone can help our users and try to do something that resolves their situation, even if they can’t fix the root problem. We try to do good for our clients and users whenever we can.

“Life is too short to use complicated products”

Another thing is that we are trying hard to keep things simple. When you start to build a lot of software it is very easy to mess it up, make it very complex (it’s quite common in our Translation industry). So, when a product starts to grow, it becomes very difficult to use: you basically have to send your team to 2-day training courses just to start doing the baby steps. We are trying to be the opposite of that, making it as simple as possible and so far, we have been successful. We are growing too, so it’s becoming more and more difficult, but we are trying hard to keep this simplicity in the product so that our new users don’t need any training.

Thank you for an insightful interview, Kirill! We wish you and your business great success and continuous growth! 

Similarly to Kirill, we also value keeping things simple! when onboarding with Silva Hunt you´ll get all the tips and tricks of managing your business hassle-free and completely online. When needing solutions to more complex demands we got you covered! Find out more about Silva Hunt’s services and pricing here.