Eugene Lisovskiy, Level up Basket Founder: “Community Is the Core of Everything; It Inspires Growth”

Eugene Lisovskiy has been spearheading global tech companies for over 18 years, building communities and raising capital everywhere he goes.

From working on LitRes.com, now the leading eBook platform in Eastern Europe, to growing MAPS.me into a top offline map app with over 150 million users, Lisovskiy’s passion for analytics and bringing people together have combined to lead him on a unique journey to his current project, Level Up Basket, a basketball training platform powered by community and gamification. 

In this interview, Eugene shares his opinions on growing a robust community in any niche, adapting your product to the metaverse, the power of outsourcing, and the future of AI.

Let's talk about your backstory first. How did you get started in the tech industry?

I started my career in 2004. Believe it or not, my educational background is actually in biotech and engineering rather than business!

When I began college in 1999, I felt like biotech and medicine would be my future, and I expected to graduate and end up wearing a lab coat and creating things in a lab somewhere. 

Life had different plans, though. My first kid was born right before I graduated from college, so, of course, I needed to make money and find something stable.

I already had some entrepreneurial experience, so I took that and combined it with a side project I had at the time developing websites.

This was fine as a short-term fix, but I knew it wasn't what I wanted to keep doing. 

As I was looking around for system administrator or web developer jobs (again, because they were easy, reliable income), I got an offer from an international company to be their internet marketing manager.

Did I have any experience with that? Absolutely not, but I thought it sounded like an interesting opportunity, so I went for it. 

It turns out that I was good at internet marketing, and I built a network in Europe that let me eventually move on from that global software company to grow my experience.

In 2010, I moved from internet marketing to the tech startup space. From there, I co-founded two companies, co-owned Russia's top e-book store, LitRes, and became CEO of Maps.me, which is what people primarily know me for.

I've also been involved with a few other tech startups, and I'm currently the co-founder and CEO of a new basketball training app company called Level Up Basketball.

Since Maps.me became so popular under your leadership, let's talk about that a little more. What types of problems are you solving with projects like Maps.me?

A lot of people don't realize that giants like Google Maps don't have very up-to-date or complete maps for lesser-traveled regions, and they are expensive for commercial use.

While it makes sense for there to be a better map of New York City (a densely populated urban area) than, say, a village in Nepal (a small, remote location), it's still just as important to have an accurate, complete map for both.

First responders and humanitarian organizations rely on GPS and map tools to find people who are lost or to undertake search and rescue missions after natural disasters, so these maps can literally be a life-or-death thing. 

Here are the problems Maps.me solves: 

First, it puts mapping tools directly into the hands of anyone with a smartphone. Anyone can add or edit map locations and write reviews.

Free, accessible maps are a core tenet of the OpenStreetMap project, which is what Maps.me's data is built on. 

Second, it creates a fun, rewarding community that encourages users to take charge of mapping out their locations. Nine months after the editor tool was added, over a million edits had already been made across 231 countries.

The desire to help was there; people just needed an easy tool like Maps.me to make it happen. I like to think of it as "Minecraft for adults," also serving the greater good. 

Access to complete, accurate maps is critical and beneficial for the global community. What do you think other businesses and regular internet users can do to address this problem?

Yes, these maps are absolutely vital. Without accurate mapping, NGOs have a much harder time coordinating their efforts and aiding those who need it most, and first responders can't do their jobs as well or as quickly.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria was devastating Puerto Rico. The community came together to map the entire area within a week so that emergency teams could find where buildings and other structures had been to help people who were stuck or suffering much faster.

I think one of the best things companies can do is remove things like copyright barriers and proprietary hardware or software requirements.

It should be a relatively easy, inexpensive task to access a reliable map, regardless of where you are.

Another thing that would be helpful is more cooperation. OpenStreetMap and Maps.me work so well because people from all over the globe cooperate to help improve the maps. Businesses could learn from this. 

As for users? I think raising awareness that this is an issue would be a helpful step. Most people don't think twice about just opening Google Maps to get to their destination; I'm sure some still don't even know an open-source alternative exists. Something else to do would be to make their voices heard on the topic. The internet is great for sparking real change, so I think if more people were vocal about map accessibility, we could see a paradigm shift. 

You’ve also been working on LitRes, the leading eBook platform in Eastern Europe. What are some important milestones you have reached during your tenure there? How did they affect the company's growth?

When I joined LitRes in September 2011, we had a 300k user base, $50k monthly revenue from the website and a marketing team of just 3 people, including myself.

When I left the company in 2016, we had 23M users (that’s 80x growth!) and $15M annual revenue. That happened mainly to these three innovations:

1. An engineering approach to marketing:

I used the technical department as my resource. It was a unique approach in 2011 that helped to reach a full synergy of technical and marketing departments.

Today we call this kind of top manager - CPO. With this approach, we integrated many marketing technologies into products that helped grow quickly.

2. A passionate approach to team building and leadership: 

I always dreamed of building my own marketing team of growth hackers, who will share my passion for great achievements, and I did it. In 2016, the marketing team had already 12 people.

3. Strong execution process:

I worked in several startups before LitRes, where I created my own task management methodology for startups, using Google Sheets as the tool for it. This approach helped to execute everything I implemented in marketing and product.

Why was the engineering approach to marketing so important? 

When you have thousands of titles in your digital catalog, you must have very well-designed pages, folders, categories, and URL structures on the website to fit SEO, SEM, and direct marketing needs.

Good catalog structure helped us to create a unique engine that generated over 5M high-quality ads for Google/Yandex search ads. This business case was highlighted on the Yandex website.

At the same time, we had a boost in SEO traffic as a result of good structure and focus on UGC, where we incentivized users to leave book reviews.

In 2012, I initiated a development of four key marketing services needed for fast growth:

• a personal recommendation engine that increased revenue coming from email marketing by up to 18% of the whole company's revenue
• an automated high-quality ads generator
• a smart responsive direct marketing platform that could send a smart email to web users, push notifications for mobile users and check each channel's health and user satisfaction
• cohort-based traffic attribution system that helped to track each customer acquisition channel separately and reach better LTV/CAC numbers.

Also, I saw great potential in the development of the app for audiobooks.

We started the development of the app called “Listen!” in March 2012, launched the first version on October 2012, and in January 2013 we hit the top 10 overall grossing in the App Store and Google Play, becoming the #1 app with audiobooks.

In 2015, the company generated $15M in revenue and became profitable and, soon after that, I decided to leave the company to become the CEO of MAPS.ME and expand my experience on a global scale.

In 2013-2015, LitRes was #1 by revenue and installs in the non-gaming category in mobile stores in Russia.

That’s great. Let’s now talk about Level Up Basketball, your newest project. Why basketball? What prompted the idea for this company?

Basketball has been a great love for me since I was a kid. I remember growing up in an area that didn't have much interest in or community around the sport.

I would have loved to have an online community of people who could help me get better and talk to me about basketball! 

I like being able to leverage all of my experience with community building, app development and analytics to come in and carve out spaces that serve a purpose (mapping, sharing reviews, learning basketball, etc.) but also have a social, gamified element.

In these communities, people can share whatever niche passion they have with others who will deeply understand them rather than feeling awkward talking about their interests to real-life friends and family who don't share their passion. 

So, Level Up Basketball is a true passion project for me. My co-founder is actually the guy I grew up playing basketball with. We would play until it was too dark to see the ball in front of our faces!

He has been creating basketball-focused businesses since 2000, so when he came to me for advice about building a project for digitizing the training process, I was immediately all-in. 

I was ready to immediately leverage all of my skills to build something huge that has never really been done before.

It’s hard for basketball coaches and amateur players to find a reliable way to source training drills and create community around their love for basketball, which is crazy to me because it’s the number two team sport in the world with huge 450M players!

Sure, there are lots of YouTube videos and blogs, but it’s really difficult for people to aggregate the quality videos and tutorials on their own.

With Level Up Basketball, we’ve created a single hub for players around the world to access a unique kind of training app that adds features like gamification and “social clout” to make the experience more fun. 

Players can earn digital coins that can be used to upgrade their avatars and change their appearance.

We’re also planning to connect to the metaverse in the future, allowing players’ avatars to participate in virtual games based on their real-world skills for an even more immersive experience.

We’re even working on adding blockchain rewards, which are really appealing to Gen Z.