The story of an unflown startup

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post * about Altasfera. It was a very ambitious project, inspired by the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek about private money and an active discussion about the global economic crisis. Since then, the concept of the project has changed several times, the interface has been revised, the team left and came in, new functions were added, various ways of promotion were tried. Last summer, the money ran out completely, they did not search for investors, and the project was not frozen for an indefinite period. I still think that many of the basic ideas of Altasfera are correct. Most likely, they will be embodied one way or another. But in that particular implementation, we made a lot of mistakes. I had time to comprehend them and in this topic I would like to share my experience with you. Perhaps I will repeat the theses already known to the audience, but at the same time I hope


Focus on one thing


In Altasphere, three strongly interdependent subsystems were designed: a system of reputation of performers, a system for issuing obligations-assets by which contracts were concluded, and a system for issuing private currencies secured by obligations. The problem is that the reason for concluding contracts arose after reliable ratings were formed, and the ratings had nowhere to come from in the absence of real contracts. Money issue, however, required both full-fledged work and a rating system and a system of obligations.

Each subsystem solves a very specific problem and each individually can be an independent mechanism.

Startup freelancepro.me forms the ratings of freelancers. Instead of trying to accumulate the source data for these ratings internally, he aggregates existing information about the reputation of freelancers from third-party sources: odesk, linkedin, elance, github, etc. I think that over time, educational services and sites of industry conferences may also get on this list. The recently launched Mozilla Open Badges carry the same approach: instead of systems closed to themselves, open ones are built that collect information from the outside and give it to the outside.

Asset liabilities in Altasphere are inherently very close to coupons and gift certificates. Services that allow them to produce and sell for a long time and successfully work. The only difference is the use of this tool: we tried to make obligations a full-fledged means of concluding contracts, and not a way to attract customers or sell specific services. Nevertheless, nothing prevented from starting precisely with this.

Finally, private currency systems are also actively developing. The most notable example here is bitcoin. The success of this project, of course, is largely ensured by a very strong cryptographic technology, but also by a common approach: the user does not need anything except for the fact that he already has the computing power of his computer at hand.

Probably, you can make a complex multi-component system work right away. This requires large resources: people, money, experience, connections - which you most likely do not have. As well as we did not have them. And most importantly, you must have the ability to immediately design it correctly, which does seem fantastic at all. All innovative companies at the beginning of their journey started with one product: Google from search, Apple from personal computers, Facebook from personal pages.

Have a strategic vision


We had some idea of ​​the “A” point, the current structure of the economy and society, we had some vision of the “Z” point, how we would like to organize social and economic processes with the help of the Altasphere, vague guesses about how all this could develop further and no clue about intermediate letters. How do we get from point “A” to point “Z”? How many stages are there? What resources will be needed to move from the current stage to the next? We not only did not know the answers to these questions, we did not even look for them. It seemed that just one light flickering somewhere in the distance through the fog is enough, but somehow it somehow.

“Somehow” did not work. We hired people, but periodically not those. We could not hire all the necessary ones simply because of financial constraints, but we did not understand this and therefore wasted our available forces in vain. We used the tools available to us, but not the ones that were needed: we shot promotional videos, did emails on the purchased databases. Promotions did not bring any effect (simply because effective ones cost other money), and email newsletters did more harm than good. The site began to fill people who clearly do not share the philosophy of the project, at some point there was even a wave of spam from MMMschikov. Accordingly, the already small attractiveness of the project for a person from our target audience only decreased: you come to participate in the formation of a new economy, and you are greeted by announcements about MMM,

Having survived a series of unsuccessful attempts to gain momentum, we realized that we needed some kind of intermediate point. We decided that the idea of ​​private money was probably too complicated, we had to somehow simplify it. In general, they chose the method of simplification quite by accident: books about networking came to my attention and Altasfera began to be called a “network of useful links”. Networking itself is noteworthy practice, and there is, of course, a place for a service that helps you find useful connections. One of the recent StartFellows laureates is just such a service - takepin.com

However, the problem is that networking does not lie on the path leading to a system of private currencies. From the change of slogan, Altasfera has not become a convenient tool for finding useful links. All that we have achieved in this way is new obstacles for the target audience and new waste of resources for adding unnecessary functions, for negotiating with networking, traveling to their conferences, etc.

Ultimately, we did not even have an answer to the question of why we are doing Altasfera. This story began, it seems, as an altruistic project to change the world for the better. There was no talk of making money. There was an idea and some budget from the accumulations of the founder of the project. When these accumulations began to dry up, we made an attempt to introduce a commercial component into Altasfera - we made it possible to buy badges that increased the user's rating. And even before Altasfera gained at least some popularity. As a result, the last money was spent on commercial services, which only exacerbated the situation: moreover, the change in the world for the better became completely incomprehensible.

Big things are done step by step: at the very beginning you have neither knowledge, nor experience, nor resources.

Worry about your team’s well-being


We live in an amazing time and work in an amazing industry: here and now, the Marxist criticism of capitalism turns against itself. Marx wrote about inhumanity. For the capitalist, the worker is a function, an easily renewable fuel for a huge factory machine. A capitalist who owns machine tools, workshops, and mines is more needed by an employee than a capitalist with an unskilled worker, one of many of the same. Therefore, the employee’s inner world, in general, is of no interest to anyone except his family and friends. The incentive to show humanity arises among the capitalist only at the line behind which riots and pogroms begin.

The production tool for the web developer is a $ 500 laptop. The necessary infrastructure — servers, software, domains, access to the network — is either cheap or completely free. The main value is now in people, in their skills, abilities, aspirations. If you want to become a capitalist, i.e. to profit from the addition and resale of the labor of the people you hired, then your inner world should be your main concern. Because you can’t give them anything else. They already have laptops. You can give what they don’t have: interesting tasks, material and moral satisfaction, a balanced work environment. The same people work very differently depending on the conditions.

In Altasphere, we hardly thought about the general mood in which we work. We had remote developers, sometimes relations with them were built quite tough, and there was almost always a sense of feverish negativity: deadlines were broken, something had to be fixed and finished constantly. It is rare when the opinion of the developers themselves about the need for a particular functionality was taken into account. In addition, the situation was complicated by the fact that initially the service was developed outsourcing and we inherited a code of very dubious quality. It’s hard to work on what you don’t really believe in, supporting a bad code, in an atmosphere of haste and guessing that the fruits of your thread will remain unclaimed.

In fact, we took the worst of both approaches. From the old approach - hierarchy, inattention to the inner world; from the new - the opportunity to isolate oneself from the neighbor with a Skype conference.

One hundred years ago, in order to be a successful capitalist, it was necessary to own factories, mines. Today we must be able to build a beneficial atmosphere around us.

Check yourself


In the physiological and epistemological sense, we live in a world of illusions: our brain is constantly building models of reality, signals from the sensory organs only correct the current model and the cycle repeats. “Our perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality,” writes English neuroscientist Chris Frith in his book.

There is always a gap between what the world really is and how you perceive it. This gap is the greater, the less often you subject your models to verification and the more confident in your a priori judgments. The brain is easily deceived when the gap between reality and our imagination about it is relatively small - when we just look around. When you fantasize about the services people need, about how they could solve everyday tasks, about how you could change the world with the help of technology, your brain almost certainly deceives you.

Altasfera began with the writing of a treatise in which a rather inept attempt was made to describe the economic and socio-cultural crisis of Western civilization. No more and no less. Six months this text was written. We fantasized something about the world and cut off all sorts of signals that would allow us to bring our model into line with reality. First, out of fears that the Altasphere idea would be stolen, then simply out of self-confident confidence in their own righteousness, worthy of the main character of Nosov’s books.

The main problem of all builders of utopias is that the scheme so beautiful and elegant on paper does not stand up to reality: people do not fit in the roles prepared for them, side effects arise, competing trends appear from nowhere, etc. At a subconscious level, a desire is formed to protect his invention from the outside world: before Altasfer was presented to the public, it was completely rewritten, the design was redone twice. When a clash with the outside world still occurs, psychologically I really do not want to notice the consequences. This is the psychology of a gambler: the more you invest / lose, the more difficult it is for you to stop, the higher the cost of defeat for you. It seems that here is another step and there will be success.

Perseverance, own vision - these are excellent qualities. But at the same time, the Socratic “I know that I know nothing” is also necessary. Everything that you think about your project is nothing more than hypotheses, and all of them need the most stringent test. And the more important this or that hypothesis is for the existence of your project, the earlier it needs to be checked.

PS
* when the concept changed, I hid that first post about Altasphere. Now I no longer have the opportunity to get it back, so it is only available as a pdf file .


Also popular now: