From Pet Project for Personal Use to a Global Provider of Monitoring of Changes on the Web

We talked to Marek Dorusinec of Wachete about monitoring website or entire portal for changes and he had the following to say about it.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Marek Dorusinec: Besides the limitations regarding lockdown, there has not been any health issues, so I can say it’s fine for now.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Wachete.

Marek Dorusinec: We founded Wachete in response to our daily struggle of monitoring the prices of buying apartments. The prices changed often, and it was very beneficial to notice when it happens and take advantage of it and buy.

Therefore we decided to build our own product to monitor changes on the web that we did offer to the public after 1 year. Later on, we decided to offer extra features and monetized them. That was almost 5 years ago.

How does Wachete innovate? 

Marek Dorusinec: We try to react in flexible ways to requests from customers and integrate them into our product to make it more useful. Either new flows, features, or optimizations.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Marek Dorusinec: I think that for our kind of business the number of customers actually slightly increased. We see more people monitoring pages related to COVID restriction updates and government pages.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Marek Dorusinec: This is a difficult question. I think those choices are made daily. And from each of them, we learn a bit. The biggest choice for our business was where to establish the company. We went for a safe choice for the Czech republic as we were both based there, but later, it was not optimal for accounting and tax purposes. If we were to make a choice today, we would go to a country like Estonia, which is more friendly towards online businesses and startups.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety?

Marek Dorusinec: Try not to take the company too seriously. We both do it more like a hobby, not as a job.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Marek Dorusinec: Our biggest competitors are companies like Visual Ping and Distill. We try to cover more features than our competition and keep the quality and user-friendliness of the product. Last but not least we constantly monitor our competitions’ prices, so that we can better offer deals to our customers.

Your website?

https://www.wachete.com