Openmonte websites & communities

2014, 2019–2025

Overview

After moving to Montenegro at the end of 2012, I spent about a year thinking about what useful things I could do in this country. My experience at the time included working on a dozen city portals in-house and with custom development, and a few tour marketplaces.

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Initial Idea & Prototypes

Montenegro's tourism infrastructure was developing slowly and in those years there was no resource that would provide information about the region, local tourist spots, restaurants and entertainment.

The space was vacant. in 2013 I made some prototypes of the new portal. Some of them resembled gis-based applications, others were more like a regular news site with a business directory. I call the project Mapa Grada — City Map in serbian.

Ipads had already become quite popular at that point, so the design takes into account usability on a tablet. The first prototype:

The last one:

But I realized that I would need a team to develop and promote the product. After spending about 1000 euros on the prototype, I postponed the realization.

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False start

At the beginning of 2014, I met a very active marketer and spent 15000 euros on developing and promoting Openmonte.com — his small website with information about Montenegro and services for the Russian-speaking audience.

I created the project's corporate identity, business cards & presentations, layouts for the website and advertising banners, and organized a conference for IT specialists — one of the first for russian-speaking people in Montenegro.

Presentation for sales:

Conference «Business in Montenegro Through the Internet»:

We also started to provide residence permit services, help with finding accommodation, and develop communities in social networks.

I never sought to be visible and few people knew about my real involvement and investment, allowing my business partner to be the face of the company. This became my mistake: just six months later my partner, violating all the terms of our agreement, closed my access to the website and our shared resources, and took the project for himself. Then, after 5 years, he suddenly «realised» that he had not achieved his goals and returned the site and a couple of Facebook groups to me as a compensation.

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Reboot 2019

I started revitalizing the project. The website almost didn't work: it had to be recreated completely, old content had to be transferred to wordpress and new articles had to be written. By 2020 Facebook was no longer the main platform for our audience, so in a couple of years I developed a network of channels and chats in Telegram for job searches, housing and event announcements: they became one of the largest Russian-language resources.

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Main Telegram Channels

Montenegro Online — News

The Openmonte news channel and general chat were the first new resources in Telegram. In addition to the Telegram channel, we have a Facebook group and an Instagram profile. The logo for it, based on my description, was drawn by Alexander Savenkov — a Montenegrin in a traditional headdress with a lush mustache.

Montenegro Jobs

Then it was the turn of the jobs channel. To stand out from the competition, I used a picture of a cat jumping at the viewer — it was as if it saw the job and ran towards it.

Together with the channel, I created the monte.work website and Facebook page, and set up automatic publication of vacancies from my and other channels there. On the website, in addition to jobs and resumes, I write articles about employment and life in Montenegro, using my experience: I explain what difficulties emigrants will face, how to write a resume correctly and how to write jobs without violating the law and the labor code.

There is a large chat attached to the channel, where employers post new vacancies for free (I check them before publishing them on the channel), and job seekers discuss questions about work and business. Three years later, more than 10,000 subscribers search jobs there.

Montenegro Events

Finally, together with Katerina Bordiug we created Montenegro Events — a channel with announcements of events in Serbian, Russian and Ukrainian languages.

The logo with the channel's character — a surrealistic dog with glasses — appeared almost by accident, when I was trying the first available version of InvokeAI (without a graphical interface) with Stable Diffuson 1.4. The image of the dog was one of the first generated, but then underwent many changes and refinements.

We don't charge money for publishing charity events and help raise money for refugees from Ukraine, as well as tell about concerts, performances, fairs and holidays organized by Ukrainians in Montenegro.

Announcements from the channel are also sent to our website, facebook page and instagram. Three years later, more than 8,000 subscribers read us in 2025.

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Mobile App

In 2020, together with programmer Anton Eregin, we launched apps about Montenegro for smartphones on iOS and Android.

It was a free app: a guide with interesting tourist places and author's information about them. We also prepared an English version, but the coronavirus and then Russia's war with Ukraine changed our plans.

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Online Delivery

In 2021, with the help of my friends, I launched a courier service for the things and documents delivery, and then food together with MixMarkt, German chain of supermarkets. Aleksandr Savenkov was again responsible for the logo — a turtle on a skateboard.

For MixMarkt's delivery service, we had to make an online store. Montenegro has complicated logistics and often houses do not have addresses, so we had to write a special plugin that allows the user to select a point on the map as an address, and then transmits the exact coordinates to the driver.

To increase sales, I also added a bot in telegram with the online store's selection, and added an integration with a facebook store. I create some ads for promotion:

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Polls & Surveys

In 2022, I started conducting annual audience surveys about living and working in Montenegro. Unfortunately, no one else collects statistics among the Russian-speaking people, so these surveys remain the only source of data on who is moving and why.

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Authors & Roles

Product Manager
Artur Netsvetaev