Reloading LitTime or a short history of 2 years of startup slipping

2.5 years ago we started the start-up with Habr. Now - 1.5 months have passed since the restart, for a long time I did not know in what format to write the post. Well, let's tell an instructive story of failure, which I hope will be useful.

Idea, partner search, first launch trial

I always lacked a service in which I would find out about the release of books of different genres. Part of the idea for this product came from Mastersland.com . There were and / or there were specific services that span one or more related genres. But interests can extend beyond the boundaries of “genre ghettos”. From this came the idea of ​​creating a news feed about books of all genres of fiction and a bit of non-fiction literature coming out in different publishing houses.

By education and knowledge - I'm more a marketer than a programmer. Therefore, I decided to focus on content and promotion. I needed a technical "director" in the project ... I described my experience in detail - here. There were 3 partners (2 per share, another - combined with the main work for piecework). Nothing came of the first two options, the last - the first version of LitTime appeared, with which we went to Habr and the first round of PR. In short, finding a good startup partner is as difficult as finding your soul mate in love . A little later, I found a different way out for the business, but first things first. With a prototype from a 3rd partner, we started. I think we took Bill Gates' words too seriously that we need to go out with a raw product. The site at that time, of course, performed the basic functions (feed, filter by genre, the list “I will read”). But the rest was done raw. Of course, there was a post on Habr



. And PR in VK groups. By the way, then he rolled himself for free, today - he turned from PR into advertising, and of dubious quality. Details compared with small statistics compared here . But pretty quickly it became clear that the conversion of visitors to regular ones was very small. After a week of "silence", about 30 unique people entered a day. Although with such volumes, the site has shown that it can be monetized! It gave hope.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the user k12th for their help and advice, as well as to all the other hubs who wrote comments and also showed us the holes in the site in practice.

Fail and exit search

Development did not stop. I was just expecting a block of bibliographies. But then a force majeure happened to the programmer - he was offered a wonderful job. Which, alas, turned out to be incompatible with the continued development of the site. I’ll note here that no one thinks bad that I understand the partner’s decision, we are in contact with him, and I am sincerely glad that everything went well with him.
Although my LitTime was on the verge of failure - there was a crude site left at the crossing (with the expansion of functionality).

I think you can imagine the moral state. At first, out of habit, he began to look for another freelance programmer, but pretty soon abandoned this idea.
Here I want to make a small remark - the option to “hire a programmer” was impossible, because There is no kinship with the Rockefellers, and all capital is money deferred from a relatively small provincial s / n.
Not wanting to get burned out again with a partner, I decided to check out the studio offers. I was probably lucky, but on the advice of a colleague I met with one company. And for relatively little money, we made our site what it is now.
This is another tip for startups: a very good alternative to partnership is a trip to a web studio. Check, maybe a prototype of your project can be done without losing a share in the partner. Yes, there are a number of minuses - you need to find one that you can do qualitatively, showing a good approach to development, the issue of price, etc. ... But I personally got the project as soon as possible (the studio does faster than the partner programmer), a guarantee that the work will be completed and confidence that, if necessary, the development of the site can continue with another studio or our hired programmers.

With them, LitTime was finally launched - not so raw, with great functionality. And since we did not stop the old site engine, we also accumulated a good amount of content.
I hope the story helps someone. So that you do not think that 2 years were wasted, I’ll say that in addition to the content, we: nevertheless got the first users, worked out the concept of the site, gained experience in this field of activity.

LitTime today

I hope the story was boring and useful. So how can we be useful at the moment: The

tape of books published in leading publishers

Here we talk about all the news of the largest Russian publishers. The tape contains all genres of fiction, as well as non-fiction: philosophy, journalism, biography, non-fiction and non-fiction. One of our main ideas is that the reading person is not obliged to confine himself to any genre, but can enjoy books from almost the entire spectrum of books.

There is also a button for buying these books in partner stores (both paper and electronic; in the case of classics free of copyright, digital versions of books are free).

Functionality "I will read"

Allows registered users to save interested books to a special list.

Bibliographies

A relatively young section on our site, but already having a good content base. Bibliographies will help you better navigate while searching for a book: what is better to read from the author, in what order.

Reviews and ratings

You can give ratings and write reviews on works that are stored in your personal account and will be visible to friends.

Communication
Users can subscribe to each other to see the actions of friends: books added to reading, grades, reviews. We also start testing messaging.

Literary News
Here we tell visitors about the most interesting and relevant literary events. With one of the news we got to the first place in search results in Yandex !

The future of the site

To guess, announce future functionality and the timing of its introduction is a thankless task. I can only say that the development is ongoing.
Website traffic is gradually growing, monetization is still discouraging hosting, but we expect more.
We will be glad if LitTime is useful and interesting to you.
Thank you for your attention. I will be glad to hear your opinion about the site and its technical implementation.