habrahabr.ru → habr.com

    Starting today, Habrahabr is available at habr.com . The old habr.ru and habrahabr.ru addresses are now used exclusively for redirects. Habr begins a new big and exciting story.



    What's happening?


    Habr was conceived as an industry project, interesting for those employed in the high-tech industry. When it started in 2006, few expected that over time a small industry site would turn into a market giant. In a fairly short period of time, Habr gained popularity, excelled and influenced other online projects using similar mechanisms for creating and filtering content, as well as rating users.

    Years passed, Habr passed through the stages of growing up, changed and every year became more and more extensive. Now the audience of Habr and projects that have stood out from him at different times is 12-14 million unique users per month. This is a large audience, according to our feelings, the maximum possible audience now is Russian-speaking users who are interested in information technology. Not only in Runet, but in all of Europe there is no such concentrated audience.

    A few years ago, we began to wonder more often, “what next?”. The unique audience of the project has reached its extreme point, our current monthly audience is, of course, a lot, but by nature we are not only idealists, but also maximalists, and this is not enough for us. Therefore, in order to find new growth points, shake ourselves and draw ourselves into a new big story, we decided to go to the global Internet.

    And we have everything for this. Firstly, our audience is fluent in English, because it is impossible to program without knowledge of English, unless you're a 1C developer. Secondly, our users actively read English-language sites, and thirdly, they still strive to share knowledge with other users. Well, fourthly, on the Toasterevery month they ask the same question that interests many: what analogues of Habr are abroad ?

    You will be surprised, but there are really no analogues, apart from clones. Moreover, there are examples demonstrating that a project created in the likeness of Habr, aimed at a global audience of developers in a certain aspect, can be successful. For example, the site kukuruku.co, named after the chocolate bars of the same name, where English translations of the most interesting publications from Habré are placed irregularly. On the example of this project, you can see that the idea of ​​translating cool Russian-language texts into English and sowing them in reddit and hackernews works. For example, the popular publication " USB killer ".Dark_Purple posted it on Habré in 2015, at the moment she has 366 thousand views. While the text translated into English now has 787 thousand views. Feel the difference? And also these statistics best illustrate our motivation to start big changes:


    Finding a way to enter the global market


    Initially, we considered launching a stand-alone project exclusively for an English-speaking audience. We did not want to start under the Habrahabr brand, suggesting that this name would be difficult to understand among native English-speaking users. In the courtyard, the year 2018, Tesla flies in space, Roskomnadzor deliberately breaks the Internet and creates difficulties for thousands of companies, but so far even Russian-speaking users do not always correctly spell / pronounce the name of our main project (HabrHabr, Habr). It is easy to imagine what will start when we start with this - by the way cool and cool, no matter what the name is - we will operate on the global Internet. Another reason is that we did not want to associate the project with the so-called “Russian hackers,” who in the West at that moment seemed to be literally everywhere. Therefore, they planned to start on a separate project, which would repeat the functionality and ideas of Habrahabr. We decided to test the hypothesis, will we manage to repeat the Habr, but among the English-speaking audience?

    We looked for different variants of the name, but all the good and most suitable ones turned out to be expensive for us. For example, we really liked the domain pushpull.com, but the owner requested an excessively high price. There were other options, but I couldn’t find a suitable one until one day I came across an ad for the sale of the habr.com domain name in the domain store on nic.ru.

    Seeing the ad, I thought. Why not drop all these prejudices about “Russian hackers” and enter the market with the Habr brand already established in the minds of developers? I immediately wrote umputun , one of the oldest Habr users living in the USA, and asked to find out from native Americans how they would read the name Habr. As I expected, it turned out "Hebr." Then I wrote to my mentor, the founderBadoo Andrey Andreev and asked to ask the British in the London office how they would read the name Habr. “Habr, habr, habr”, - voices were heard from the audio recording, which Andrei sent in a reply message.

    So that's for sure Habr. The name is already known to a large audience of developers, it can be recognized by ear and gaze almost without errors and any misunderstanding, therefore it is resolved. It remains only to redeem the domain name. After bargaining with the seller, we made a deal and a few weeks later became the owner of the habr.com domain. Now it remains to update the identity and you can start releasing the long-awaited releases.

    What's next?


    Internationalization


    Now we are engaged in the internationalization of Habr and plan to begin rolling out new opportunities in the coming months. This is a large stack of tasks, we are moving iteratively, and as soon as we are ready to introduce new functionality, we can begin to test it . The simplified internationalization scheme will look like this: users will be able to choose not only the interface language (rus, eng), but also the language of the content (rus, eng) that they want to see on the site. Publications in feeds, hubs and user profiles can be read in several languages, similar to company blogs. Habr will become a truly multilingual project with extensive capabilities *.

    geektimes.ru → geektimes.com


    Yes, Giktimes will receive similar capabilities and will also be localized. In addition, in the near future we will transfer part of the hubs from Giktayms to Habr. There will remain only scientific science, gadgets, astronautics, sciences and others that do not intersect with Habr.

    Command


    Over the past year, our team has almost doubled, now we are about 45 people, taking into account the remote employees. But we are growing and happy to see in our ranks new people with burning eyes. We need developers, translators, editors, managers and people of other professions necessary to create successful projects. If you want to join, just write to us at job@habr.com and tell us what you can do best and why we should invite you to the team.

    Attraction of investments


    Despite the fact that we are a long-term profitable company and we have the means to develop, now we are considering the issue of attracting investments for vigorous expansion into the global market. If you are interested in moving towards this goal with us, write to us at welcome@habr.com .

    Appeal to users


    Users - the most important thing that is on Habré. Together we have already built the largest technology product development community in Europe. It is time to make Habr known not only among Russian-speaking, but also among English-speaking developers. We have everything for this: a strong brand, product, users and unique content.

    You can recall not many companies that have successfully climbed into the big Internet, reaching the ceiling in the local market. But we decided to try; We are sure that we will succeed. We want to get a new and interesting experience, we will talk in our blog about how we are moving towards the intended goal. Therefore, support us. If you are the author of Habr - think about translations of your publications; very soon you will have a reason to post them on the site for a new audience. If you have not become an author, then soon there will be another reason for initiation into the favorites.

    * -After talking with colleagues, we decided not to talk about all the plans, so that there remains a slight touch of understatement. This text is an explanation of why and why we decided to become a global company. Stay tuned for updates, they will follow very soon and you will see what we have in mind.

    Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

    How much do you think habr.com is worth?

    • 50.6% Less than 1 million rubles 3,744
    • 30.6% From 1 million to 3 million rubles 2263
    • 18.9% More than 3 million rubles 1397

    Will you read publications in English when the opportunity arises?

    • 38.1% I will definitely be 2876
    • 44.3% Most likely 3347
    • 17.6% I will not 1334

    What do you think about the internationalization of Habr?

    • 27.6% You will succeed, because there is 2086 for this
    • 51.3% The idea is good, I will observe 3885
    • 10.6% has not yet decided on feelings 804
    • 4.9% You won’t succeed 369
    • 5.6% of UFOs flew in and left their option here 427

    Also popular now: