From idea to implementation. Part One - Failure
Danilevsky Kirill
Today I want to talk about how easy it is to implement your idea into a real project. One example of failure is spinning. One of my friends, a distant one, had an idea to create a city portal. The portal was supposed to be a site with different sections: city news, a poster and events, a section on work in the city and all in the same spirit. Naturally, there are many similar projects on the market, in which a lot of money has been invested, and which many have already heard. But it was in his city, there was no such site. And in principle, he was right that such a project had long been requested.
And so, he decided to address this issue seriously. Wrote TK, created a business plan and financial project with a budget. The project involved half a year of work with four senior programmers on staff.
If my memory serves me, then it all started in 2010. Having rushed around on the Internet with my idea, I realized that it was not interesting to anyone, and thus I could not get money for the project. The next idea was this. Once the portal is citywide, then the project investor must also be from this city.
It took a couple of months of intensive running around the business centers and various enterprises to find an investor. The difficulty was also in the fact that he still could not reach the owner himself. The staff did not give the boss a telephone, and all sorts of assistants, secretaries and other deputies, all this was not at all interesting. In general, he was just stupidly sewn, and the owners, who might have been interested, remained in happy ignorance.
As a result, with a huge share of bitterness and disappointment, he somehow randomly wandered into a conference of entrepreneurs dedicated to industrial automation. And there he met with the owner of the enterprise for the production of metal plastic windows, armored doors and other similar products.
He was able to explain to the businessman the essence of the project, and convinced that he was in demand. In principle, the investor understood that the citywide portal was an interesting idea. After all, all the inhabitants of the city will be present there, which are, in fact, its potential customers.
And they agreed as follows.
The investor pays the work of developers and the salary of my friend who will lead this project. He pays for the design of the future portal and during the first year he will invest another 5 thousand dollars in the promotion of the portal and advertising. At the same time, an advertising flyer with information about a new project will be applied to any product that the investor produces and sells.
In return, he receives two major places on the site for banners for life, and the entire business section (with goods and a catalog of city companies) will also belong to him personally.
If my memory serves me right, then the budget, excluding advertising, was about 40 thousand dollars.
So, they concluded an agreement, and the investor had to allocate in cash each 7 thousand dollars. Fortunately, my friend simply knew no bounds. He immediately received real money in his hands and immediately got down to work.
At the same time, he considered that as an advertisement of a future project, a review should be done in the press and on major news portals. No sooner said than done. A large and detailed article about a new city project appeared in large media.
By the way, my friend was not an IT specialist. He knew something, but did not possess deep knowledge. He budgeted $ 1,200 for senior programmers' salaries. That is, 4800 dollars per month per team. The project was supposed to be created on the framework. And then the first blow awaited him. There were simply no specialists in his city who knew frameworks and knew how to work with them. Then it was decided to hire people for remote work. And then the next blow awaited him. Less than 2 thousand dollars, they did not want to communicate with him at all.
He did not want to go to the investor and explain the situation. Since the contract has already been signed and the money has been allocated, and part of the money has already been spent on advertising in the media. An investor could just get a little crazy and demand to return all the money to him and break the contract. Therefore, he went the other way. He began to monitor the market of IT programmers in order to understand who he can hire for his money.
After spending a small amount of time, he made a decision. Create a project on Drupal, as it will be the fastest and much cheaper than on the framework. He hired a team of two middle and two jones. They, exactly, fit well into his budget. At this time, Drupal 7 was just released, but since few people knew it yet, they decided to do it on Drupal 6.
And then the following happened. For half a year, specialists left the team and new ones came. The work was not like a structured process, but like some kind of rat race. Everyone who came over remade what the previous one did. The deadlines were disrupted. The investor was just beside himself with anger, tore and metal. But since he had already made decent investments, he added another 15 thousand dollars to the project.
After eight and a half months, a trial release was launched. It seems that Lori Ipsum somehow worked with test content, but when they began to clog all sections with real content, photos and videos, then problems started. Forever climbed out, some errors, something worked incorrectly, sometimes a database error crashed and the portal crashed. It was decided to hire a senior programmer for seven days so that he would make a full review of the project, find bottlenecks and write a list of problems for the middle to fix.
The specialist was hired and he made the following conclusion. That this whole project was worthless, that it was being developed by some rare idiot who had first seen Drupal, and in general, Drupal 6 was no good. Everything needs to be rewritten on Drupal 7.
While these clarifications of relations and the search for a way out of the situation lasted, a new project popped up on the market, a city portal with already full content. And one of the famous sites entered the market, which made just a small branch for this city.
It all ended up not very intelligent. My acquaintance, when describing his idea to an investor, did not even stutter that he might lose his money. That this is a very risky investment area. On the contrary, he assured him that everything would fire and there would be no problems. The businessman, of course, was not an idiot, and he controlled all the costs of the project. But he did not understand anything in the development teams, he did not understand the process of creating something virtual. He did real things in real production, and was very far from the IT sector. But when the project collapsed, a friend decided that the investor might not understand his explanations correctly, and simply left his city for the capital, where he later got lost.
I don’t know if the investor recovered from such a financial collapse, but for myself, I made the most serious conclusions. It is better not to start any project at all than to receive investments in this way. And about the organization of the process in general, I’d better not say anything at all.
Today I want to talk about how easy it is to implement your idea into a real project. One example of failure is spinning. One of my friends, a distant one, had an idea to create a city portal. The portal was supposed to be a site with different sections: city news, a poster and events, a section on work in the city and all in the same spirit. Naturally, there are many similar projects on the market, in which a lot of money has been invested, and which many have already heard. But it was in his city, there was no such site. And in principle, he was right that such a project had long been requested.
And so, he decided to address this issue seriously. Wrote TK, created a business plan and financial project with a budget. The project involved half a year of work with four senior programmers on staff.
If my memory serves me, then it all started in 2010. Having rushed around on the Internet with my idea, I realized that it was not interesting to anyone, and thus I could not get money for the project. The next idea was this. Once the portal is citywide, then the project investor must also be from this city.
It took a couple of months of intensive running around the business centers and various enterprises to find an investor. The difficulty was also in the fact that he still could not reach the owner himself. The staff did not give the boss a telephone, and all sorts of assistants, secretaries and other deputies, all this was not at all interesting. In general, he was just stupidly sewn, and the owners, who might have been interested, remained in happy ignorance.
As a result, with a huge share of bitterness and disappointment, he somehow randomly wandered into a conference of entrepreneurs dedicated to industrial automation. And there he met with the owner of the enterprise for the production of metal plastic windows, armored doors and other similar products.
He was able to explain to the businessman the essence of the project, and convinced that he was in demand. In principle, the investor understood that the citywide portal was an interesting idea. After all, all the inhabitants of the city will be present there, which are, in fact, its potential customers.
And they agreed as follows.
The investor pays the work of developers and the salary of my friend who will lead this project. He pays for the design of the future portal and during the first year he will invest another 5 thousand dollars in the promotion of the portal and advertising. At the same time, an advertising flyer with information about a new project will be applied to any product that the investor produces and sells.
In return, he receives two major places on the site for banners for life, and the entire business section (with goods and a catalog of city companies) will also belong to him personally.
If my memory serves me right, then the budget, excluding advertising, was about 40 thousand dollars.
So, they concluded an agreement, and the investor had to allocate in cash each 7 thousand dollars. Fortunately, my friend simply knew no bounds. He immediately received real money in his hands and immediately got down to work.
At the same time, he considered that as an advertisement of a future project, a review should be done in the press and on major news portals. No sooner said than done. A large and detailed article about a new city project appeared in large media.
By the way, my friend was not an IT specialist. He knew something, but did not possess deep knowledge. He budgeted $ 1,200 for senior programmers' salaries. That is, 4800 dollars per month per team. The project was supposed to be created on the framework. And then the first blow awaited him. There were simply no specialists in his city who knew frameworks and knew how to work with them. Then it was decided to hire people for remote work. And then the next blow awaited him. Less than 2 thousand dollars, they did not want to communicate with him at all.
He did not want to go to the investor and explain the situation. Since the contract has already been signed and the money has been allocated, and part of the money has already been spent on advertising in the media. An investor could just get a little crazy and demand to return all the money to him and break the contract. Therefore, he went the other way. He began to monitor the market of IT programmers in order to understand who he can hire for his money.
After spending a small amount of time, he made a decision. Create a project on Drupal, as it will be the fastest and much cheaper than on the framework. He hired a team of two middle and two jones. They, exactly, fit well into his budget. At this time, Drupal 7 was just released, but since few people knew it yet, they decided to do it on Drupal 6.
And then the following happened. For half a year, specialists left the team and new ones came. The work was not like a structured process, but like some kind of rat race. Everyone who came over remade what the previous one did. The deadlines were disrupted. The investor was just beside himself with anger, tore and metal. But since he had already made decent investments, he added another 15 thousand dollars to the project.
After eight and a half months, a trial release was launched. It seems that Lori Ipsum somehow worked with test content, but when they began to clog all sections with real content, photos and videos, then problems started. Forever climbed out, some errors, something worked incorrectly, sometimes a database error crashed and the portal crashed. It was decided to hire a senior programmer for seven days so that he would make a full review of the project, find bottlenecks and write a list of problems for the middle to fix.
The specialist was hired and he made the following conclusion. That this whole project was worthless, that it was being developed by some rare idiot who had first seen Drupal, and in general, Drupal 6 was no good. Everything needs to be rewritten on Drupal 7.
While these clarifications of relations and the search for a way out of the situation lasted, a new project popped up on the market, a city portal with already full content. And one of the famous sites entered the market, which made just a small branch for this city.
It all ended up not very intelligent. My acquaintance, when describing his idea to an investor, did not even stutter that he might lose his money. That this is a very risky investment area. On the contrary, he assured him that everything would fire and there would be no problems. The businessman, of course, was not an idiot, and he controlled all the costs of the project. But he did not understand anything in the development teams, he did not understand the process of creating something virtual. He did real things in real production, and was very far from the IT sector. But when the project collapsed, a friend decided that the investor might not understand his explanations correctly, and simply left his city for the capital, where he later got lost.
I don’t know if the investor recovered from such a financial collapse, but for myself, I made the most serious conclusions. It is better not to start any project at all than to receive investments in this way. And about the organization of the process in general, I’d better not say anything at all.