Interview with Eugene Vedenin, co-founder of Yellow Chat, Hookah Spoilers, Where2Smoke and author of Bartender Blend Tobacco.

  The interview was taken and translated from the link

— Hi. Please introduce yourself and tell us about yourself.

— Hi, my name is Eugene Vedenin. I’m the founder of Yellow hookah chat, Where2smoke project and a number of other pubs in Telegram.

— How long have you been in the hookah industry and where did you start?

— You know, here I don’t think anyone is interested in this. But to understand or not to understand, the first hookahs I smoked were on carbopol.

— Do you do anything else besides hookahs?

— I have a little project that helps people text on watsapp if the user is not in the phonebook. You can easily find it by typing something like that in a search. More than 20,000 people use it every day. In general, I do all sorts of IT projects, often for people from the hookah industry, but not limited to that. And on weekends I write music.

— Let’s start asking you about Yellow Chat. How did it all get started?

— It was a commercial for where2smoke. I created a hookah chat to let everyone know that there was a site like this. And then it just went from there.

— At what point did Yellow Chat become a center for communication of representatives of hookah sphere?

— I think it’s all thanks to David. He added a lot of people to the chat without asking me. And it’s one thing when I added strangers, but here it’s quite different. Many people knew David and when he added people, there was more trust. It turned out that we had all the bloggers, all the influential people, at some point all of them. And everybody was socializing.

— Did you do anything to popularize it, or did it happen by itself?

— Well, just actively adding to it at first. I just took all the users of the club24 in VK and wrote out the phone numbers of those who were open and added them to the chat in the cart. And it was necessary to put them in the notebook. I just put the numbers 1,2,3 and wrote them down. Then I looked, if there was a person in the cart, I added him. And then it turned out that, for example, number 13 is Ike, 24 is Sarkozy, Romanov, Dava or Chigridov. Some people would unsubscribe, but most of them stayed and communicated.

— Were you offered to sell the Yellow Chat? How much were they offering?

— There were talks, but we did not agree. The last offer was 200k.

— Any further plans for the chat room? Or let it live on as it is?

— No plans, lately they write more and more on business. Someone is looking for contacts, someone asks for an opinion. If possible, we help, we answer.

— Let’s talk about Where2Smoke. How did you come up with the idea?

— Honestly I forgot what year it was, but I think the site is already more than 9 years old. I was working in a bar at the time and often went to hookah lounges. And here you sit in some place, have a drink and want to go smoke hookah. I searched Google and Yandex, but there were no hookah lounges there. There were some stores or rare establishments, but there were hookah lounges at every step. And I decided to collect them all in one place. I made a page and started adding establishments in my city. When the hookahs were over, I decided to add another city, then another and another. Then I merged with Hookah Battle. Stas Medkov contacted me and suggested that we develop together. So other countries were added.

— How long have you been in operation? How many hookah lounges are in your app?

— To answer the first question, it’s been over 9 years. And how many hookah shops – about 5,000. Surprised that number is almost constant now. Some close, others open. Stability 🙂

— I honestly haven’t seen an advertisement for your app in years. Has there been one? If not, why not?

— In fact, Anton Gaivoronsky even made an insert about us in the video. Did you notice? The others didn’t either. In our business, only guerrilla marketing is possible. I ran targeted advertising, it was banned, then allowed again. In any case, the yield was small. The best thing that works in my case is seo. In many cities, we are in the top of the requests. In addition, at Hookah Battle events they run advertisements for our service, although this is of course a partnership story.

— How do you earn from the app?

The main earnings are from the owners of establishments. We have paid places in the top. You can buy them directly on the site for your establishment.

— What are your future plans for Where2Smoke?

The competition has become very high, now you can find hookahs in Google, and in Yandex and in 2gis too) And the data there is often more relevant. Things are somewhat better around the world. There the search is lame, and we have very high quality establishments, because they add people from the industry.

Rostov-on-Don also stands out. I personally went round all the establishments and wrote a detailed review of each one. It was such an experiment, which we wanted to scale up. But it turned out to be very difficult to find an idea person in each city who would write reviews on a regular basis. So it was not possible to expand this topic, unfortunately. And it didn’t affect the site’s revenue locally in any way.

— You also have the Bartender Blend Tobacco channel. What’s the gist of it?

— It was originally a blog channel about how I create my tobacco. I am quite deeply immersed in the bar industry and wanted to transfer all this to the hookah theme. I brewed tobacco with flavors of world famous (not us) cocktails. Yes, now there are examples, what they did in Nua is very cool. But I still feel like it’s all a bit superficial. For the guys from Elcapitos it’s just a one-off, they don’t live hookahs. At least that’s how it seems to me.

Over time, I’ve become more and more immersed in bezaromka and cigar history, so I’ve started experimenting with alcohol more often. I like to infuse, brew and use natural ingredients.

It’s very much a craft channel right now, by what you can make in your kitchen for personal consumption. Some crazy idea comes to me, I try it out – I write about it. I had an experience, I grew basil and made tobacco with it. It’s not a mass product at all, a lot of things come out badly in the end. But that’s where the interest lies.

— How much money do you need to buy equipment and brew tobacco at home?

— I’ve finally come to a method where you don’t need to buy anything at all, just the raw materials. A scale, a pot and a glass jar with a lid is all you need. By the way, I still have not described this technology, but I will definitely make a post on this topic.

— How much cheaper is it to brew at home than to buy?

— Significantly cheaper, but I didn’t really count it because it’s not that important to me. Let’s do the math with you right now. Let’s take a kilogram of tobacco for 2500r, five kilograms of glycerin for 1500r and 2kg of syrup for 100r, we get 4100r for 8 kilograms of tobacco. About 50 rubles per hundred grams. The hardest thing is to find tobacco. I named the price for which I last took it. It’s more expensive now. But I still have supplies.

It’s also interesting to brew from cigars, cigarillos. The price goes up, but it’s a completely different segment. It’s not an everyday product.

— How safe is it? Brewing tobacco with alcohol seems like a bad idea in general to me.

— I have more questions about a lot of the aromatics. It’s not the same as smoking with wine or absinthe) I think you have some bad memories. The alcohol evaporates quite a bit while still brewing, then warming the bowl, and the amount of it is usually negligible. It gives only certain notes, and not alcoholic ones at that.

— Can you tell the audience how best to start brewing and how to get involved in it in general? Well, except for subscribing to your channel.

— I don’t remember which writer said – if you can’t write, don’t write. There is another good but less prosaic – if you do not want to shit, do not torture your ass. I think the meaning is clear 😀

Where to start – with the search for information. And further as it goes. Most people don’t need it at all. There’s plenty of great tobaccos on the shelf for every taste.

— What’s the most interesting combination you’ve found when brewing?

— My favorites are two. This first one was with cahors. Cahor is a boiled wine by its technology. That is, in terms of aromatics, it lays down very well on tobacco, because the volatile flavors are already out. You can even boil it moderately, it will still have a strong enough recognizable smell. I used to pour it over Burley and dry it a few times. Then I boiled tobacco on it again with a little wine added, it’s just about 2 percent of the weight of the tobacco. Now you see why I’m surprised at your concern about alcohol? It’s very rich in the end. And soft. I sent it to a friend of mine, and he liked it too. He says make a kilo, I’ll buy it. I say, “Yeah, I’ll do it,” but it’s been three years since I got my hands on it .

And the second one is one of the last brews. With wheat ale unfiltered. It’s quite amazing. I was just wetting the tobacco with it to add working moisture. As a result, after brewing I got such a vanilla-bread smell, and so strong that my wife thought it was an aroma. When smoking it is really quite mild, but the result was surprising.

— Do you even buy tobacco in the store now, or have you completely switched to self-sufficiency?

— Rather the opposite, I’ve only just started buying now. For many years I smoked only my own tobacco and what they sent me. But now I’ve started buying, trying to compare. For example, what Dogma or Satyr make. But in general, I smoke my own, even when traveling, if I have a chance.

— Is there any future for your channel? Plans?

— Lately I’ve been thinking about production, contract or collab to make. But so far I manage to keep them away 🙂 I want to write more often, share more, tell at least about all the experiments. There are ideas in video format to try. If anyone has any suggestions, I will be glad to cooperate.

Blitz:

Favorite movie?

There are a lot of them. The first thing that came to mind right now New Cinema Paradiso. Not many people have seen it, but I love it.

Where2Smoke or Yandex Maps?

I would have chosen 2gis, but you left it out. In any case, we’re not competitors with them, we just occupy different niches.

What is your strength?

Probably faith, you have to believe in what you are doing. Without that, nothing good can come out of it.

If you like what Evgeniy do – visit his HookahBattle profile and “+” his karma points.