History of AlterGeo

In 2008, in the nomination “Best IT Innovation”, the winner was the Wi2Geo project , today better known as AlterGeo .

The idea that you can "determine the location of objects via Wi-Fi " was born by  Denis Alaev in late 2007. After a couple of months, friends joined Denis - Alexander Dorzhiev and  Sergey Kurlovich , and it was decided to "create a user service - a geolocation social network that will allow you to see who is around, where are friends, etc." Although the decision was made, the guys did not immediately quit their jobs and plunged into the lives of entrepreneurs. This process was going on gradually.

“Without speeches, the project is in a vacuum,” says Alexander Dorzhiev. - We went to events such as RIF , pronounced pitches . It seemed more important to tell people about your project, to test an idea, than to find an investor. ” The responses were not always positive, people asked: why is this even necessary? But there were those who believed in the project, for example, the AddVenture business angel fund  , which invested about 50 thousand dollars in it. The help of the fund was not only in money. “They organized meetings for us with experts and investors. When you answer the question ten times: “Who is your audience?”, You yourself begin to think about it, ”says Denis Alaev, smiling.

In June 2008, the beta testing phase began. “We realized that we needed to immediately roll out prototypes to illustrate the idea,” Alexander shares his experience. “It was a surprise for me that even on a raw product, people are ready to participate and help, for example, to specifically collect Wi-Fi point bases.”

Alexander recalls that the team created the first versions of mobile applications on its own and could not do without problems: “We thought: what is there to do - the interface? We ourselves can. But the result was monsters that were impossible to
use. ” Now all the development of mobile applications is outsourced. The AlterGeo team retains the core of the project and the web service, which, incidentally, is based on  Amazon WS .

Today AlterGeo has more than 300,000 users, and the daily audience reaches 15 thousand people. Due to such indicators, the project is interesting not only for users, but also for partners, the first of which was the Rosinter restaurant chain  . Representatives of the network themselves got in touch, began to give mayors of restaurants free drinks, and also helped to improve the partner interface, which was "difficult to do blindly."

According to Denis’s calculations, the social network is about to reach the level of self-sufficiency, and technology partnership is already making a profit. This allowed AlterGeo to get through the second round of funding. The new investor is the Kite Ventures Fund .

The guys assure that for three years in the role of entrepreneurs they themselves have not changed much. But you can see that, by technical education, they now use expressions such as “solutions like rebranding” or “the idea prevails, and then only technology”.

AlterGeo has new heights ahead. The project team is not afraid of competing with giants such as Facebook, because "everyone can find their niche in the market." They are full of optimism: “In the next couple of years we will be leaders in our segment.”

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We thank the editorial office “ By the Rules ” for their help in preparing the article.