Dmitriy Peregudov

Dmitriy Peregudov has a high energy life, and a list of goals that are worth waking up to every morning .

Having started his career in Engineering, Dmitriy founded several eCommerce startups prior to graduating from Babson College with a MBA in 2007.

Shortly after he launched his venture: GiftBasketsOverseas.com (GBO); an international gift delivery service.

GiftBasketsOverseas.com today is not just a gifting company, but the service that helps people to build business and personal relationships no matter how far they are.

While the business was initially focusing on personal gifts, Corporate customers were ordering a lot as well and the company’s focus soon shifted to the corporate segment and expanded to Customer Loyalty use case for many businesses looking to connect with their customers globally.

With this Giftsenda Platform was born as a fully independent subsidiary of GBO.

Giftsenda.com focuses on enabling Sales & Marketing teams to build relationships with their customers and convert their leads in the US and Internationally in over 200+ countries Worldwide.

The company built an innovative SaaS-based global gifting platform combining its gift delivery capabilities with ABM tools and Tech integrations with popular CRM systems such as Salesforce and Hubspot.

Today sending a gift with Giftsenda anywhere in the World is as easy as sending an email or clicking a button in your CRM.

Mr. Peregudov has been on the ground floor for all aspects of Giftsenda, using his high energy and creative mind to find innovative solutions to running a global company. Managing a creative team of online marketers, SEO experts, and business developers, Dmitriy was able to grow his company rapidly bringing the company to #1 in International gifting for the service area, which now includes 200+ countries & destinations Worldwide.

His success has continued, and the company has been in the Inc5000 list of fastest growing private companies for last 7 years.

Dmitriy’s efforts for continuous growth have been recently recognized by the Massachusetts State Senate and House of Representatives.

During his startup career Dmitriy has co-founded several other companies, including:

GoodChoiceFlowers.com – International Flower & Romantic Gift Delivery Network (has been later merged into GiftBasketsOverseas.com)
Onsite Videos – Marketing video technology to Humanize the Web and connect with website visitors in a personal way.
Click To Harvest – Farm to Table Food Delivery Service in the Greater Boston area.

Where did the idea for Giftsenda come from?

Since 2007 my team and I were working on making cross-border gift delivery easy for our customers.

At first most of our senders were individuals with friends and family overseas.

As we developed the business we’ve encountered the business need to send gifts: at some point business gifting became our focus.
We’ve talked to our customers and realized that they need more than just a way to send gifts.

Majority of the use cases we’ve seen at the time were around appreciation and customer loyalty.

However some customers also were sending gifts as direct mail, swag or gift cards and that was not easy especially when they needed to do this Internationally.

This is where GIftsenda came in: we developed a set of tools to make overseas gifting convenient and associated ROI – measurable.

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

From my early days as a software guy, I realized that I am the most productive on some logic-heavy tasks when the day is almost over. So I tend to work late and wake up 8-30 am to start my work day by 9-30 am.
Since on most of days I work from home, the commute from the second floor to the first is easy. 🙂

My mornings are usually full of meeting: I like connecting with people and especially love people who work here: this recharges me for the long hours ahead.

How do you bring ideas to life?

The essential thing for me is believing into the idea, and this involves not only me, but my immediate surrounding: my management team and my family.

Once I have the emotional support I need, the next step is to fing the earliest route to the “green light effect”. This is what I call the feeling of being reassured you are doing a right thing.

Once we get a green light, we can repeat it, polish to and keep turning the wheel until we feel happy about it, and that doesn’t really have to stop: our team is amazing in improving things that work.

The “Improvement” is one of our core values, so we are living it every idea at the time.

What’s one trend that excites you?

In our world we have often seen Marketing terminology around persona and bucketing customers into b2b vs b2c and so on.

As many savvy marketers and sales people have realized lately, they don’t talk to a “persona”, they need to connect with a “person”. They don’t send a gift as b2b, they send a gift from human to human, this is a trend that is now called h2h.

As our business grows, we continue focusing on gift recipients just as much as on our own customers (gift sender’s). After all, the impact of the gift we deliver on behalf of our customer matters most. So opportunity to impress is short important in our business, this is what drives ROI to our customers and makes them stand out from competition.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

I’d like to think – intuition to choose the best people is a very important skill I possess.

If you have a right team by your side: the work is more fun and exciting and things get done more smoothly.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Take more risks, focus on one thing at the time.
These are very connected.

Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

The world is more flat that we think of it. 🙂

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

Testing methodology: Try small, try bigger, go full scale .

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

In the early days of GiftBasketsOverseas.com we were focusing on building regional gift delivery websites and polished our logistics and internal processes regionally.

We have since developed a global system , but not having the earlier experience would not have allowed us to deliver the quality service we have today. You need several failures and if so, ideally on a micro scale.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

Failure to recognize the size of opportunity early on.

Later worked on building things faster, invest earlier into both people and the process .

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Green idea:
Xmas is celebrated on Dec 25th in some countires , while it’s celebrated on Jan 7th in most of the Orthodox Christian countries.
Collect Xmas trees from areas where they no longer needed on Dec 26-27 and repurpose them in the areas where demand is just coming up, around Dec 28-29
Save trees.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

The game “cashflow”
It served as a manual for my kids to learn about passive investments vs active business management and risk taking.

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

Asana project management.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

Giftology by John Ruhlin
It clearly defines a need behind Gifting as an important instrument in the Sales process.

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
It’s a great book about building a culture in your organization, and my journey building International team has been similar.

What is your favorite quote?

“Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution” – either an old Russian proverb or a quote by Milton Friedman.

Key Learnings:

• Take risks early
• Fail quickly, but small (take measurable risks you will be able to get up from)
• Listen to your customers
• Listen to your team , trust your team, build a strong culture
• Snowball your success, repeat wherever possible to scale early.