When I launched a startup and you find out that this is not a startup at all

It happens like this, you put together a team of guys, invest money and / or attract a partner investor in your project, work day and night for almost a year to offer the world, in my case, of course, the city its unique invention and voila!

You come with your project in the form of a working prototype to defend yourself for a crash test organized by some kind of entrepreneurial get-together and they say to you - “Guys, what do you already have, this is the same meetap mobile application in Europe and everyone uses it, why you do something in your own way, just grab and copy!

Honestly, my eye almost fell out when I heard such words from the jury of the startup crash test invited in Novosibirsk, i.e. people a priori believe that it is impossible to do something better than foreign projects and you just need to copy everything!

The position is wonderful, but of course it’s not about her, it’s about the fact that the unborn startup has already had a certain Western competitor, which is already present in Russia.

Probably now you are thinking, but why didn’t you immediately google your competitors before starting work on a startup? What is there to be surprised if you yourself were looking badly, right? What are your thoughts?

Yes, in fact, the right thoughts, which is already there, but before the fact, there is a competitor, then it turns out that this is not my first competitor and not even the second one, and if I pick a little more into the past, it turns out that there are already such startups there is nowhere to dig.

Then it turns out that one of the competitors not only does not earn money, but also pays the organizers to record participants through their application! And you definitely don’t have a budget for this, you would have had enough money to finalize the idea and that’s good ...

And that's all, sailed, you think, how can you make money in such conditions?

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Okay, of course, I embellished a little the limit of my disappointment and the whole picture that I saw at the time of the prototype launch in January 2017, because at the time of launch I knew only one competitor, probably not unknown to you meetap, but it is compared to our prototype seemed simply divine! Everything seemed so convenient and beautiful ...

And here after 11 months, I am very glad that I did not go copy my competitors, because at the time of creating the prototype and preparing the structure of my startup I did not know about their existence!

Actually, as it turned out, the mitap in Russia is not particularly developed, most likely only for the organization of events of an educational and party nature in the IT sector for the most part, while our focus is on gathering people for a joint time in the field of entertainment and sports , go to paintball, play volleyball, etc.

We found closer competitors, but for the most part they all went only to sports areas, which again gives us more room for maneuver.

Since I already had an unsuccessful startup behind me and the understanding that simply swelling money into a startup can’t revive it, especially when a business project is oriented in several B2C and B2B planes.

For example, we cannot massively start attracting users with an empty application, where there is nowhere to go, and we cannot attract organizers to an application in which there are no users, because After some time, they will be disappointed and leave the application.

This is the trouble of all service projects serving the interests of several parties.

In my opinion, there is only one effective way out - you must make money on this application yourself, i.e. you must have a business whose interests you will pursue in your online service.

And yes, on the one hand, this is a certain hemorrhoids, because everyone should do their own thing, you say, we should only develop the service and be an unbiased platform with open competition for everyone!

But guys, the working conditions in Russia are such that if you yourself do not start earning on your service, then no one will come to you when you start promoting the service in the direction in which you are benefiting - other organizers in this area also begin to catch up and So!

And only then your startup starts to develop! When others see that you make money on it yourself.

And this is the key to the success of your startup!

If you yourself can earn money on your startup as a client, then your startup is viable!


So don’t be afraid of competitors, you just have to start earning money yourself! Thus, you better understand the needs of your users and implement the necessary updates faster, rather than trying to move at random by adding new chips and gadgets, hoping to attract paid customers.

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In January 2017, we rolled out a terrible beta version of our mobile application “Who's Where - Friends of Interest”, terrible in terms of design and amenities, now of course there is still no fountain, but it was much better than it was originally, the initial idea was to create a catalog of accessible entertainment in the city, so that users themselves choose what they want to do, book entertainment through the application and other users can join the event.

Everything is great, we made a catalog, filled it with a variety of entertainments and not quite entertainments (added baths, hookahs) and began to try to drive users out of Instagram ads.

Publishing mobile advertising on Instagram is still an adventure, as it turned out, I had to tinker with it and to be honest, I still have not really figured out the pricing of conversion costs, at first it seemed like it was cheap about 15 rubles per click and the settings went, then the cost reached 80-130 rubles ... in general, we no longer use this advertising tool, did not want to understand, and more like the VK target + segment target.

And the result of advertising on Instagram was about 150 installations and 0 activity.

They tried to advertise for some time, they did not implement any statistics collection in the application, because our horse didn’t lie still in the basic functionality, which is necessary in our opinion.

But the fact is that having achieved the first 350 installations, we did not receive a single event that the users themselves would create and even a request to the social services. networks asking to help you figure out how to create an event.

Thus, we came to comprehend the fact that you should not count on user activity, the percentage of initiative people who are ready to organize something is quite small (at least in the audience that we attracted).

Conclusion number 1 :

We must decide for ourselves the issue with the fullness of the service, give what users will use your service for and keep the application on their phone.


And yet, since we advertised the application in general terms, such as “Download and lead an active lifestyle, have fun and enjoy life” (I outlined the text of course, so that the essence was clear), we were faced with mass removal of the application, t. to. people who installed out of curiosity did not find interesting events running in the application and simply uninstalled the application.

Conclusion number 2 :

If the service implies a lot of directions with different content and you can’t immediately provide your users with a complete or at least more or less decent choice, then it’s worth developing the project and attracting users only in running directions.

Our principle:

Each user involved in the application should have an anchor direction active in the application, for the sake of which he will keep our application on his phone and use it regularly.


As it turned out, this approach was not only effective, but also wildly economical in terms of advertising costs!

We use the VK target for users who are in groups of different companies of competitors and for all newly logged in there (i.e., users who have not yet decided), Segmento target helps us by downloading lists of all newcomers to the advertising room and our advertising posts with links to the application.

We began to attract users in this way in May, and at the time of writing this article, a total of 15,677 rubles CTR from 1 to 5.5 was spent ! Number of transitions 1323.

I recommend splitting your service in directions and promoting and filling it in parts so as not to choke!


Of course, if there are a lot of directions, otherwise you just run the risk of tearing to pieces and not being in time anywhere!

This is of course a rather slow development option, but in conditions of limited resources and great probability of inexperience to let all the money out of the toilet - for us, such a development is the best option.

At the same time, competition does not stand still while we are busy in Novosibirsk, competitors are on the alert and appear in other cities, although they have not yet been experienced and they have yet to step on many rakes.

Conclusion number 3:

It is better to immediately consider the possibility of scaling your service! And given the specifics of our business, it is better that each city has a separate team.


And this means that you can kill two birds with one stone!

1. You will kill competitors who have not yet been born, unless of course everyone knows your name, it’s more likely that the team will not even get involved in the race, because you are already working and ahead of them for a year both in experience and in necessary functionality, which still to be done.
2. You can still attract additional funds if you sell your startup, this is not a franchise, but if you can immediately earn money at this startup, then there is a high probability of finding interested partners in the cities by offering them a price that is not comparable to the independent development of this project.

Look for directions that would bring you income in your application / service and try to quickly go to other cities so that work starts there and then you don’t have to butt for a market in the city!


In our case, these are sporting events: volleyball, football and basketball, they are already steadily generating about 60 thousand rubles to us. have arrived, though with monthly development costs we are still in the red, but your partners will not participate in the development, which means they will immediately earn and popularize your service in their city!

You know how it inspires when in the dressing room on volleyball you hear the players say “Damn, well done, those who came up with the application!”, “Cool attachment”, etc., not knowing that the founder of this idea applications :))

Actually, we have most of the users (about 60%) generally came on word of mouth and this is cool!

But of course there are a number of problems over which we puzzle ...

For example, there are events that take place every hour, for example, CrossFit, trampolining, and we cannot add all the events of one company, because there will be a huge canvas of events for every hour, and adding them 1 event per day and requiring recording only through the application from their customers - in this case, it is absolutely pointless for them.

By the way, in our case, we have one more very important rule:

Events that are placed in the application can be accessed only by signing up in the application and nothing else, only in this case, users begin to take the application seriously.

After all, if you imagine the choice for a person: To sign up for an event as before, by phone call, SMS, VTSAP or Vkontakte, or record something else, to set something up for this, to figure it out - it is natural that they would prefer the old familiar way, without even trying.

Although in fact, recording through the application for regular events is more convenient, as practice and small polls of sports enthusiasts have shown. directions that were previously recorded through the VC marked pluses, then someone wrote a minus sign and everyone was steaming, how many empty seats were there as a result, and who goes and doesn't go and sit there and count the pluses.

In general, some kind of monster has already grown from the article.

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