Laughing, crying, working, learning – this was the first year of CHERRISK!

CHERRISK users buy a policy in every 9 minutes. CherryGO is downloaded in every 2 minutes. We have more than 50 thousand users in our ecosystem. Exceptional results, knowing that a year ago we were only making the finishing touches to CHERRISK. On the dawn of 17 September 2018, we worried about our exact launch time: would it be 8 AM or just sometime afternoon? The last wrinkles were ironed out by 3 PM and the first Hungarian fully online insurance platform was launched half an hour later. Ever since then our success story goes on, and we’d like to share some bits of this year with you.

„Startup” is probably the most overused expression in the tech world. We ourselves would be tired of it, if we weren’t working in an insurtech startup with serious international ties. But since we live the „Silicon Valley” life here in Budapest, we’re not tired of the word, on the contrary. It would be hard to describe our first year in one sentence, so we don’t even try. Read on if you want to know how it really was through the experiences of CHERRISK team.

All laughs and giggles… and loads of work

In one word: good. In more words: good and exhausting. Really. As our head of legal, Petra put it: we cried and laughed all the time. In the good moments, we laughed so hard tears ran down our faces.

Because this is a great group. No wonder that while filming our birthday video, many of us underlined how strong the CHERRISK team is. Our diversity is just as important. There are so many different people at one place, we learn something new almost every day from each other.

But… There’s always a but, and we don’t want to lie: there has been some really hard moments too. Petra referred to these as the moments we cried. Luckily, we found something good in these as well. At least we were there for each other. Because it’s true that CHERRISK is something we all love, but just like real love, it only lasts if we all work on it. And we worked on it right. Because we believe in building the future of the insurance industry. We believe in doing something useful. During all this hard work, sometimes we even forget how „exhausting”, „hard”, „tiring”, „short” or „long” this year felt.

Tough moments, great decisions

This year wasn’t just about operating something that’s already made. We also had to invent many new things. Before launching CHERRISK we had ideas and preconceptions about what we should do and what could work. On 17 September 2018 all these ideas met consumers and reality.

Some things worked, others didn’t, but the internet has one great feature though. Everything, all the successes and failures can be measured. After having the data, all we had to decide is what to do with it. This was tough, because we also had to axe solutions we loved, but didn’t work well.

We had to change the calculation chat we all adored. It just didn’t resonate with visitors as well as we wanted it to. But every bad thing has something good in it: we created the “price tile”. This wasn’t an easy decision and there were some heated debates about it. But this is part of CHERRISK, too. Ever since the beginning we’re recruiting people who are able to reason, argue, and defend their opinions. We have conversations and we make decisions. When we have a decision we do what we must. And leaving the chat behind was something we’ve done. It was a good idea: calculating on the “price tile” is a lot quicker. At the end of the day that’s what matters: how our customers react to our solutions.

This is an example, how monitoring the system and listening to customer feedback have a huge impact on the future of the CHERRISK platform.

Community was spot on

One of many things that we didn’t change in the first year, was the emphasis on our community building solutions. Sure, we made some finetuning, but supporting charities will remain important to CHERRISK in the future, too. Customer feedback is amazing. The CHERRISK community already offered more than 3 million forints (€9000) to charitable causes. With our biggest charity campaign to date we also gathered more than 3,2 million forints (€9500) to Bátor Tábor with the help of ultramarathon runner, Szilvia Lubics.

Beside a fully functioning insurance platform, we launched a brand new lifestyle app in June 2019. Why? We believe that building an active community, which leads a safer life is important. Therefore we created CherryGO – the app that rewards time spent walking, biking and mobile-free driving. Members of CherryGO already moved for more than 5 million minutes together.

Some months ago we also launched our blog. The idea behind this platform is important: we want to give useful and valuable content in everyday life. Creating a dialogue with our audience is key in learning about issues that our customers might face and often the best solutions come from these interactions. We already have a small community that does this. CHERRISK’s “Hard core” is an invite-only group on Facebook that consists of our most loyal customers. They help our work tremendously with their feedback. Several new functions and changes are based on their ideas.

Thank you for being with us

All these fantastic results wouldn’t be possible without you, our customers. We can only write this very post because you are with us in this unique journey. Really: there are not that many companies, which try to create a platform like this, and in some ways you’re already a part of our story!

In only one year, CHERRISK acquired more than 20 thousand registered users. CherryGO was downloaded by even more people in just weeks. More than 24 thousand policies were purchased with the help of CHERRISK. All these numbers, all your feedback tells us that consumers really need a solution like ours in the insurance industry.

Maybe it’s hard to believe, but we have a better day every time we break a daily sales record or hear from our customers. Really. You are our biggest motivation.

We’re all going in the same direction

For a while now we have an all-staff meeting every month, where our CEO, Krisztián “slidifies” the results, the figures, the goals. Basically he tells the whole team what’s up with CHERRISK. He always ends up saying: “Guys, this really is working for some reason!” But deep down in our heart we know what are the reasons: all those long hours we put into our work and of course you, our customers.

After these meetings we also have a test. We have to answer some questions anonymously. There is a lot of different people on a meeting like this. Call center representatives, creatives, developers, insurance guys, lawyers, managers, mathematicians. It’s a rather colorful bunch. One thing we usually agree on, though. Whenever we answer the question about how clear CHERRISK’s future is to us, we usually give super high numbers.

Because no matter how diverse we are, we know one thing for sure: the second year of CHERRISK will be about international expansion.