QRoom - Social Q&A in Russian

Hello. Today I would like to show you our small experiment, which is gradually turning into a successful and visited project. QRoom.ru was originally conceived as a Russian-language clone of formspring.me, but at the moment we can confidently say that we have long surpassed the original in terms of capabilities. But first things first.

It all started very simply, modestly and as agile as possible - one person worked on the technical part of the project, and the first version was launched in two weeks. Everything was done on RubyOnRails and uploaded to Linode VPS. It was interesting for us to check whether the Russian-speaking audience was ready for the so-called Social Q&A services. After the launch, the refinement and screwing of new features continued. At the same time, the number of users began to constantly grow, and a month after the launch, we reached an indicator of 3 thousand unique per day - all this practically without investing any money in advertising. Competitors began to appear in the Russian-language segment. It became obvious that the finest hour of services like formspring.me had arrived.

In the meantime, the work was in full swing: we expanded the team a bit, added a lot of new small features (for example, we were almost the first in RuNet to connect a new vkontakte API, which allows us to enter the site through this social network), made a redesign, moved to the domestic Skalaxi platform .

Now QRoom.ru usually has 10 thousand unique visitors per day. On average, people spend 10 minutes on a site. The maximum indicator for the number of page views per day is 142,180 (an average of 125 thousand).

In the near future we are planning a lot of interesting innovations. In particular, we understand that so far QRoom is not interesting for all social groups and we would like to become a platform for a wide range of discussions: between the client and the companies, between members of professional communities, between students and teachers. Of course, it would be interesting for us to listen to your thoughts on how to make such discussions convenient.

In the meantime, we will continue to work. I wish our competitors success - our will to win partially depends on how quickly and successfully they work. And if you are not with us yet - join QRoom and offer your ideas. We are always happy to receive feedback, and relatively small in scope of work useful innovations that users offer, we usually release very quickly.

So, as you see, it’s quite realistic to invest a minimum of money and time to start a small project and check the concept’s performance. And then to develop it. For us, the bootstrapping strategy turned out to be successful in every sense. I hope this short review will inspire others to launch their startups.