“We gave our youngest product to Prjctr students.” How Spalah builds a culture of experimentation

Spalah business culture: experimentation as a systemic process

AppLab is an application factory within Spalah. It is where products are launched from scratch, business models are tested, product market fit is found, and solutions that show results are scaled.

Young products have a special advantage - flexibility. Positioning is already formed, but still flexible, the audience is studied and segmented, but is still being supplemented, engagement channels are in the stage of active testing. Therefore, the collaboration between Spalah and Prjctr was a win-win: students received useful feedback, and the company received a fresh perspective from specialists who are new to the profession, but already think in terms of strategies, segments, and unit economics.

Real Spalah product, real problems for students

In order for the groups to work not with an abstract case, but with a real mobile application, Spalah provided the students with:

• context of the Spalah AppLab product development stage;
• description of the current engagement logic;
• brief;
• test room for launching campaigns;
• Well, actually, the task: to develop a strategy and diversify the User Acquisition infrastructure for the next two months.
  
  

At the defense of their term papers, the teams presented full-fledged approaches to engagement: with audience segmentation, a competitor matrix, channel hypotheses, creative testing logic, and a vision for scaling.

"There was a lot of talk about UGC content in creatives, the use of AI avatars in UGC, and the advantages of both options: AI and real faces. Seeing the presentations and looking at product promotion from a different angle was just as interesting as giving our feedback — from the perspective of a team that works with growth processes every day," said Artem Dymchenko, User Acquisition Manager, Spalah.

"Creatives need to understand the user's pain points and what exactly they want to get. They don't buy features, they buy the state that these features can give," added Alena Slobodyanyuk, Head of Applab, Spalah.

What is the result?

Interesting hypotheses to test

Some of the proposed approaches involved alternative key messages and hooks. Some teams suggested changing the focus at the early stages of the funnel and structuring creative experiments differently.

Several Spalah Venture Builder ideas were moved to an internal backlog for further analysis and potential testing.

Strategic thinking at the start of a career

According to Spalach, they saw that the market was receiving specialists who were ready to think systematically from the start: through unit economics, test sprints, hypothesis prioritization, and long-term scalability.

"It is important for us to develop a strong professional community around us. What we saw at the defense can be confidently called mature strategic thinking. For us as a venture builder, this is a positive signal. Strong growth specialists form healthy competition and raise the overall level of the product environment," explained Alena Slobodyanyuk, Head of Applab, Spalah.

A mature market is always a synergy of business and education

The curator of the User Acquisition for Mobile Apps course, Viktoriya Martynenko, notes that working with real products significantly increases the level of learning:

“Working on practical challenges of real business turns training into a real test drive of the profession. This allows future User Acquisition managers to practice their skills on real numbers and problems, preparing for the complex challenges they will face on their first day at work. When students work with a live application, they face real constraints and make decisions in conditions that are as close to the market as possible. Collaboration with a business, such as Spalah Venture Builder, gives them the opportunity to think not theoretically, but practically.”

Such partnerships create a bridge between education and product teams. This is something that the Ukrainian market especially needs today.

You can find out more about the company and read Spalah reviews on DOU.

Will Spalah continue such initiatives?

"Definitely yes! The opportunity to participate in such educational projects is a win-win: for students, the opportunity to learn on real, not theoretically polished projects, for Spalah, the opportunity to notice interesting people and give them the opportunity to open up. I dream of introducing such cases as a permanent practice and coming up with my own internship formats and buildfast hackathons," said Alena Slobodyanyuk, Head of Applab, Spalah.

"For us, this was a useful format for interaction and a continuation of Spalah's business culture: openness to the market and willingness to invest time in the development of strong specialists," added Oleksandra Kukhno, Employer Brand Manager, Spalah.

As an employer, Spalah is interested in attracting more strong specialists to the market, so they are currently working on launching their own course in the AdTech direction. "This is a niche in which we are the largest in Ukraine, so we are ready to share our expertise and be ambassadors for its popularization," say Spalah representatives.

They promise to announce the start of the course in the spring on the social networks Spalah: Instagram and LinkedIn .

You can see Spalah reviews as an employer and learn more about what the Ukrainian venture builder Spalah Venture Builder offers to startups: on DOU and on the Spalah Venture Builder website .

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