Interview with the creator of habrahabr - Denis Kryuchkov

We could not talk with Denis for about two months, each week making an appointment several times. There were no circumstances: either one, then the other could not drive up. In the end, we still met in the Boozz bar, which is located near the offices of Thematic Media and Futurico.

Dania: What karmic reasons prevented us from meeting for two months, probably?
Denis: I think employment.

Dania: Did you have sex with children and built your own casino with blackjack and whores?
Denis: No, that was before, now I have tied it up.

Dania: Tied up?
Denis: Yeah! [Denis actively nods his head and smiles, as if he remembered something very good] Well, you know, employment. Our office, well, you saw our office. But before you came to the room where Jovan and I sat together, and now coders and designers are sitting there. And I'm sitting in the center of the room, I have no office. And any person of the company at any moment of time can come up and occupy me with something, distract me with something. And that is why it could be difficult to dock. Have you seen the film “The Science of Sleep”? Probably, everyone had such a moment as you walk along the street with a dude, he takes a step to the right and you take a step to the right, you are left and he is left, and so on. And we also had it, just the opposite.

Dania: Out of sync?
Denis: Yes, yes. And when such a moment happened, it is called parallel synchronization, then finally we were able to meet.

Dania: Look, now you are talking about the office, on the phone before that I heard about some important meeting. Judging by your projects, you should remember everything as in the scene from the Simpsons, when Bart comes to the editorial office of MAD magazine and is completely delighted with how the clowns do it. And you’re talking to me about some important meetings, tranches, go-ahead ...
Denis: Well, this is all the background, the main movement is in the office. But in order for this movement to be provided, it is necessary to have some kind of safety margin in the form of a cache. And since we are not yet a self-sustaining company ... But we are close to the breakeven point. What we are doing now, nobody has done before.

Dania: What are you doing?
Denis: We come up with thematic communities for people who want to spend a lot of time in these communities. We have to be discoverers, that is, to pave the way that everyone will follow later.

Dania: Why didn’t anyone do it? Someone created communities in LJ.
Denis: Well, communities in LJ are communities within one big service. And we are creating completely autonomous projects in which people organize themselves, express themselves.

Dania: You are all just cynical businessmen who want to make money on poor circles of friends, as Jovan used to say, harness them all in one harness.
Denis: No, no. It just seemed to no one before it occurred to anyone to do what we are doing. That is, to find some interesting sphere, study it, study the people who hang out in this field, study their needs, behavioral characteristics. And then, based on this, build a service in which they will be comfortable. The prototype of this story was habrahabr. Tell the story of its creation?

Dania: Have you often told her?
Denis: Recently, yes.

Dania: Then do not.
Denis: The main thing is that the habrahabr led us to the idea that if you approach each project the way we approached the habr, that is, do it with heart and soul, then you can achieve success in other niches. We launched AutoCADA, but so far it has not been possible to completely puzzle the site. It is very difficult to perceive. That is, an ordinary ordinary person, registering on auto-cadre does not cut where he got. Well, imagine that you’ll suddenly find yourself on the street of some Tokyo there with hieroglyphs and a crowd of freaks, and you don’t know what to do. Here is the same with auto-cadre, and now we are trying to simplify this site. Now there are mostly geeky motorists hanging out there. And there are not so many of them. And in order to make the project successful, we need to make sure that its simple audience also perceives well.

Dania: And look, your audience intersects very much: on the hub, on lepra.ru, on dirty.ru, on auto-cadre ...
Denis: Well, yes. Yes. I would not say that it intersects strongly, but rather strongly. Are you an active user of all our projects? I think you're sitting in leprosy.

Danya: No, I like the habr. I go to leprosy every two days. Just look, Yegor Lavrov compared himself, Rykov, and people like you with dudes who hang duct tapes on the Internet. And flies all stick and stick ... As I understand it, people came to the hub with dirty and leprosy.
Denis: Well, yes, it is. But Habr was an independent project, it was my attempt to assert itself after I was fired from Webplanet.

Dania: Oh, let's talk about this. Lekha Andreev, the best journalist and a great science fiction writer, what happened to him for him?
Denis: I think that Lech at some point flew off the coils, has lost reality and is now carrying him in the wrong direction. I believe that Lech is a talented person, but he is a rather rude guy. Lech can easily send the audience for whom the audience is actually working and creative, if the audience says that Lech is wrong in something. About Lech once very correctly said Nosik: that Lech is a poet, and any poet is a boor.

Dania: So what was the conflict?
Denis: Lech came to a project that I had been doing for five years, and changed everything very much, redid it and the audience took it with hostility. Lech hung some shitty design from some StroySnabTorg-2, changed the concept, invited other authors, and the audience did not appreciate the merits of all this and began to rigidly joke on it. I told Lech that the design was shit, but he replied that he was the chief editor and generally leave me alone.

Dania: And who owns the Web planet?
Denis: Alexander Burmistrov. This is the person who owns the Mass Communications Agency. Which is engaged in public relations in structures such as Gazprom. Here. And then a habr appeared and it seems to me that Lech had banal jealousy. Because the habr began to attract attention, there appeared its own audience, good content. And Lech began to write frank crap about habr and about me personally.

Dania: Before that, did you work at dni.ru?
Denis: Yes, I worked as the creative director of dni.ru. It was a very long time ago, then dni.ru was a normal project, not a tabloid. Boris was the editor in chief ... he forgot his name, but he was a very good journalist. The Days had the concept of a socio-political project, and not as it is now.

Dania: Well then, tell me everything from the very beginning.
Denis: I started with an ordinary person who drew banners. In any media there is a person who does this. Because every day the events change and you need to palm off on users new banners. In Days, then we drew normal banners, and not like now: “Why Bodrov disappeared” or “What happened to Yarmolnik’s stomach”.

Dania: How did you get into dni.ru?
Denis: I came to Days at the invitation of Kostya Rykov, who is now a deputy of the State Duma. I met him on the Internet, then I lived in Penza, studied garbage there - I spent whole days on the Web and studied what was happening in this big, big world. Kostya saw in me a man who could be useful in some projects. And once, when we chatted on the phone once again, he said: “Listen, let's come live in Moscow and we will communicate normally.” I thought one day, and the next I bought a ticket.

Dania: Actually, it's scary. Well, the fact that everything around is connected with the name of Kostya Rykov, even Denis Kryuchkov.
Denis: It’s just that Kostya is a person with great energy and ideas constantly flow from him. And apparently they gush so much that now he is a deputy of the State Duma. And perhaps after some time he will be some minister. Minister of the Press ... Or the Minister of the Internet ... In general, when I realized that I was tired of drawing banners and responsible for the creative of the Days, I quit and began to think about how to make my own media project. I came up with the name Webplanet, made a design for it, took the old days.ru engine from Kostya, and so I began to learn journalism. Before that, I had never encountered her at all; moreover, I had a trio of Russian language and literature at school. Over the past five years, I have been very cool at pumping myself up in journalism, I think the recognition was the fact that students of the journalism department of Moscow State University began to ask me for practice. But like any normal person, I think that for such a long period as five years, it is necessary to change the field of activity so as not to boil in the same boiler. I tried to shareholders of Webplanet to make a new project out of it, but did not find understanding. He argued, argued, and in the end I got fired. I actually wanted to quit myself, but they did it for me, and quite toughly - they left me without any bonuses. My plan to go to Europe for three months and live there was broken off, I got angry and did a habrahabr. and quite tough - left without any bonus vacation pay. My plan to go to Europe for three months and live there was broken off, I got angry and did a habrahabr. and quite tough - left without any bonus vacation pay. My plan to go to Europe for three months and live there was broken off, I got angry and did a habrahabr.

Dania: Such as a habr before did not exist at all or is it partly tracing paper from something?
Denis: Well, the news rating mechanism is tracing paper from digg.com. But on digg, users rate not news, but links to news. This, as it were, was a fundamental difference. Plus, we made various additional services on the hub: companies, work ...

Dania: And people continue to sit on it on an industrial scale, as Jovan said before, or did everything calm down? Are people tired of the habr or not?
Denis: Yes, they get tired. There are several periods in a person’s attitude to any community: at first he is very interested, then he is very involved, then the person got hooked on the community, and then the cooling period begins. All these phases take about a year. After a year, users consider themselves omniscient and say that “the hubr is no longer the same.” And then new people appear who go the same way that that dude walked a year ago. This is a normal process of user cycling in communities.

Dania: Who is the main investor in Topical Media?
Denis: Well, this is classified information. Let's just say this is a venture fund that invests only in web-projects and nothing else.

Dania: They found you?
Denis: Yes. A familiar girl called me and said that a very famous person wants to meet with me. I gave the phone and in the end I got a call from another person whom I did not know, but about whom I heard that he was investing in various Internet companies. He called, offered to come to visit the office. We talked, they offered to invest, I refused. Then they called almost every day, every other day and were very persistent.

Dania: First they sent girls, then riot police?
Denis: No, they didn’t even send whores. Everything was normal, civilized. At the same time and besides them there were people who wanted to invest in the company. It all began six months after the opening of the Habr. The attitude of these people appealed to us and we agreed to sell a blocking package.

Dania: What is your official title? And how free are you in your actions?
Denis: Officially, I'm a creative director. My responsibilities include organizing the work process of the entire company. If it comes to launching a new project, then everything is discussed with me. If we want to hire someone, I will interview this person. That is, dofiga everything except issues related to financial statements. I don’t understand this, so other people are doing it.

Dania: Well, look, if tomorrow it comes to your head to turn all the texts on your projects upside down, paint everything red, etc. Will you be allowed to do this?
Denis: Firstly, I will not ask anyone. We will just discuss everything with the employees and if we agree, we will do so. But at the same time, sometimes I play a dictator and make decisions myself, because just like that, and a three-week discussion will not lead to anything good. Sometimes you just have to take and make tough decisions. To say: that’s how it will be, nibet ...