A place in the sun for a new startup

    Recently, we published the story of the birth of LinguaLeo.ru . The service launched in beta on March 1. In less than a month, the development team returns to Moscow. But we are sorry to just leave the island of Koh Chang - so much has been invested in creating comfortable working conditions. Therefore, we want to share our impressions of what it is like to develop on an island in Thailand, and to tell in detail what those who dare to venture and go to the tropics will have to face in order to devote themselves entirely to the realization of the idea. And we declare the action: we will transfer our sunny place to the good guys with a new interesting startup!

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    In early May, we return to the capital and are ready to transfer our place in the sun and all the acquired property in good hands. Namely: a profitable contract for the rental of a large home-office, furniture and "iron" to work on the project and valuable information for life here. Furniture and iron - for a nominal fee.

    About how we live here


    Our corner is located on the west side of Koh Chang island in the Chai-chet area. Three live in an office-house with three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a vast court territory right at the foot of the jungle. Renting this house along with paying for water and electricity costs 15,000 baht per month (about 13,000 rubles). For comparison: renting an office with the same area in Moscow would cost 10 times more (130-150 thousand rubles). Together with the house, we got round-the-clock access to the pool of the hotel owning the house, as well as a cute Thai black and white cat, who lived here long before us. The other two guys from the team live in a cozy Ban Chaba hotel in two-bedroom Thai apartments, which the owners call the "wooden VIP house."

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    It costs 9,000 baht per month (~ 7500 rubles). Their rooms are regularly cleaned, bed linen is changed, there are showers, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a fan, an additional lounge room with a breakfast bar, sunbed, wardrobes and a sink. Plus no need to pay for electricity.

    We tried various working time schedules and worked out the optimal one for ourselves. The working day begins at 11 am local time (8.00 Moscow time). We usually start with a small stand-up rally. After three and a half hours of hard work, it is time for lunch, which was prepared by the kitchen duty. We are on duty in two, preparing lunch and dinner for the whole team.

    In the middle of the day we take a break, everyone is engaged in personal affairs. Who is not tired of the sea or the pool - goes swimming. Someone, taking this opportunity, is not averse to taking a nap in the hottest time of the day in one of the air-conditioned rooms.

    At around 6 pm, we resume the development of the project for another 3.5-4 hours, reaching the next checkpoint - dinner, which is prepared, again, by our attendants. After dinner, you can catch a Thai massage in your favorite salon or do a night vigil (it costs ~ 200 baht).

    On Saturdays and Sundays, we play volleyball, travel to neighboring islands. Sometimes you want to feel civilization, then we travel to Bangkok. One-way trip to the capital takes about five hours (on a motorbike to the ferry, ferry crossings, then by minibus to the city). Soon, by the way, there will be a Thai New Year (April 13th), which coincided with the birthday of one of our team members. Some plan a trip to Bangkok during the holiday, someone flies to the islands, someone will relax here. Two hundred meters from us there is a webcam , you can watch the weather on Koh Chang in real time, located on Coconut beach.

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    During our stay here we created a convenient "infrastructure"


    In October 2009, in the first two weeks of our stay, we traveled around the surrounding cities with a local friend Jack and acquired everything we needed:
    • A complete set of office supplies: marker and cork boards, Whatman paper, a laser printer, five comfortable tables and chairs, a coffee maker, a lot of coffee, paper holders and other little things.
    • Technique for creativity: a server machine, two widescreen displays, a UPS nickname, extension cords, adapters for monitors, a WiFi router, a LAN cable, cooling pads for laptops, which were already every member of the team.
    • Dishes for food and cooking, cooler for coasters and cooling water, six 20-liter bottles.
    In addition, we established contacts and as a result received:
    • A contract with a company delivering water to the house by phone (price - 15 baht per bottle, 5 pieces are enough for a week, i.e. 75 baht).
    • The contract with the only operating ToT Internet provider on the island. The actual speed is about 1 Mbps, sometimes a little lower, although we were assured that the speed would be 4 Mbps. Cost - 900 baht per month, we have enough with our heads, oddly enough.
    • An agreement with the landlord that we can use the pool at the hotel without restrictions (see photo).
    • Motobike rental contract. The price for a six-month lease is 12,500 baht (~ 11,000 rubles) for one motorbike.
    • Valuable information about where it is better to buy products, where to repair bikes if they break, where to order a gas bottle replacement (delivered once a month and a half, 300 baht ~ 250 rubles), how to get a student visa if you want to study Thai or English ( it’s not necessary to live in Bangkok, you can live anywhere in Thailand).
    All this took us about three weeks of active searches and trips. The remaining five months we fully devote to the project.

    Some results of our six-month stay on the island


    What did you like:
    • Sea, sun, beach, clean air and pleasant scenery.
    • Many local dishes, seafood: tasty and cheap.
    • Swimming, island tours, snorkeling, waterfalls, elephants, monkeys, waterfalls and mountains.
    • Prices for food, housing, service and clothing.
    • There are no traffic jams on the island, no traffic jams at all. Absolutely.
    • Medicine is at its best, both traditional (especially if there is insurance) and alternative (especially massage).
    • Bangkok nightlife :)
    • There is always someone to chat with: interesting people coming from all over the world, from Australia to Canada; expats, Russians and foreigners living on Kochang ...
    • Infrastructure for entertainment and leisure: golf courses, beach volleyball courts, tennis courts, ping-pong tables and billiards. Only 80 km to Cambodia: Sihanoukville, Ankor Wat, casino, even cheaper shopping, if necessary, visa run.
    • Stable weather: you can dress equally easily every day.
    • During work, the gaze does not rest on the murals or on the wall of the neighboring building, but flies over the horizon, glides along the water surface, rocky islands in the distance, silhouettes of fishing boats, tops of coconut palms and banana trees amuse it.
    • During work, you can move around with your laptop: work at the table, as usual, work on the porch, in a hammock, on the couch, in a lounge chair.
    • Fresh fruits. Many. Different.
    • Friendly Thais, country of smiles! :)
    What did not like:
    • Sometimes the weather is too hot, unusual for us. Although, when compared with the newly arrived "snowballs", we tolerate the heat very well :)
    • Groundhog Day at Sabay Bar, the most popular night club on Koh Chang. The composition of the compositions and speakers almost did not change. Apparently, it is designed for the cycle of tourists. But this minus is easily replaced by other no less fun places.
    • Longing for civilization some days. Although this is subjective, the main thing is to be able to relax, and Bangkok is not far away.
    • Several times in all the time on the island, electricity was cut off for half a day.
    • You can communicate with relatives only on Skype, sometimes the time difference (3-4 hours) makes you aware of yourself.

    Conclusions that we can draw from our experience

    • To do a startup in such conditions is real! If there is an undertaking, thinking heads and a few laptops. Here you can create all the conditions for the development of the project. Everything can be organized, all agreed. The main thing is to know where to go.
    • A six-month trip to a tropical country really helps to focus on a startup, without being distracted by the usual worries of life. The effect of “burning bridges” also works, increasing motivation for action.
    • The decision to implement a startup in Tai really helps to save money.
    • You should not be attached to the letter of the development methodology (XP, in our case) or to a tool for organizing work. If one-day iterations are now suitable - we use them, have ceased to approach - we pass to weekly iterations. If you are now happy with writing tasks on the board without any bugtragging - excellent. If it’s convenient and quick to keep bugs in Google Docs - no problem. As soon as this begins to be missed, we change it, but not earlier than it is really necessary (if there is no toolkit ready and familiar to the whole team).
    • In fact, the ocean is five minutes away, the beach and the sun are not so distracting after a month of living on the island. You can and should combine business with pleasure.

    What we advise to those who want to repeat our venture

    • If you want to live anywhere for six months or more, first take a tour for a couple of weeks to find a place that suits you. If we had not gone here a month and a half before we finally got over, we would not have this house and all the necessary information.
    • Be sure to take medical insurance for the entire six months. She helped us out a lot of times :)
    • Be prepared to change your lifestyle and familiar urban conditions to something wild and tropical. Refusing some stereotypes helps a lot.
    • Do not take a lot of clothes. Most will not come in handy due to mismatching climates. Here the most popular are shorts and a very, very light T-shirt or shirt, 99% of the time they spent in flip flops or sandals. All the necessary clothes can be bought here, they are of good quality and cheap. And Bangkok is a paradise for shoppers.
    • Be prepared that the jungle or the tropics can leave their mark on your startup, as they did with our service for learning English LinguaLeo.ru
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    Our mini contest!


    What startup will get our equipped corner? We are very sorry to just leave it all this way, so we offer start-up teams that are ready for adventure to move to a tropical island in our place. We will transfer the accumulated resources and experience so that you can fully concentrate on a new successful project. Only a month was left for the interested people to think - in early May we leave the island to return to Moscow and continue to develop the project already there.

    If you are seriously interested in our offer - write to LinguaLeo or via feedback . In the letter, do not forget to tell about your team and project.

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