Hi Alex! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?



My name is Alexander Sumin, I’m 31 and I’m typing this out of my office in Sofia while sipping on my 6th or so cup of coffee for the day (I’ve lost count).



I’m one of three founders of a company called ClaimCompass where we help travelers get paid when airlines screw up their flights. We use tech and data to automatically process flight disruption claims and pay people up to $700 per flight, and we make money by keeping a cut out of each successful case.



My formal title, if I can even call it that, is CMO, but I mostly look after what’s best described as Growth - i.e. trying to move all those levers that will result in more customers, lower acquisition costs, more revenue, etc.





What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?



My co-founder and CEO - Tanya, came up with the idea. At the time, she was working for a law firm in Germany and thought that we could automate a lot of what goes into processing a flight disruption claim.



Prior to ClaimCompass, I worked for a chartered airline in Montreal doing customer acquisition. Later on, I moved to Berlin to work for a PR and Marketing agency and for a while, I also worked as an analyst for the Canadian Federal Government.



A lot has changed since we first launched ClaimCompass. We were an entirely distributed team working on the idea nights and weekends out of 4 different time zones, doing, among others, a lot of useless stuff, but somehow getting traction. It got to a point where we decided to quit our jobs and give this gig all of our energy.



That drew the attention of our first investors: in October of 2016, 500 Startups and one of their micro funds in Istanbul, invested $200K and asked us to join their program in Silicon Valley. For the next couple of months, we grew the company by about 10x and in March of 2017, with a couple of hundred in booked revenue and very little cash, we decided to move to Sofia, where we hired our first employees.



My past experiences are mostly solopreneurship type of stuff, like real estate rentals, trading stocks, and crypto before it was cool (yeah, like 2014). Can’t say I’ve been overly successful in any of the above.

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How did you build ClaimCompass?



I’ll have to disappoint you here. No formal process, business canvas or other, was used in the making of ClaimCompass. We just had a couple of Skype calls and decided what we’ll do and see what happens. I think we were saved by the fact that we were all relatively broke, so we were very cautious when it came to allocating resources. A big role played our CTO who not only built a pretty decent MVP, but had also set up the analytics right so we had an idea of what’s going on from the get go. From that point on we went on to try to get our first users, spamming people left and right, posting in hundreds, literally, hundreds of Facebook groups on a weekly basis (that was still allowed back in 2015), message boards, etc.



We did run into obstacles. We still had to figure out, now that we got our first customers to file claims, how do we collect the money we promised them. The idea was to make this an automated process, so that made things even more challenging. The first couple of months we worked out of a single Google Sheets file, trying to understand what the process flow would look like, where could we automate for sure, where would we run into trouble, etc.



Our first PR and media efforts came around the time we joined 500 Startups and raised our first round of financing. I wrote a piece which got us featured in Venturebeat, then we got the Techcrunch announcement, then we did a Product Hunt launch, which to this day I think we absolutely killed as we racked up around 1,500 free leads and got #2 Product of the Day. But to answer your question, no, we did not have a “launch” campaign.

