How we lost 150,000 and closed the project

    Hey. My name is Vlasenko Andrey and I want to talk about our stupidity, because of which we lost several months of time and about 150,000 rubles.

    And it was like that


    A little over a year ago, my friend Vasily Mezko and I decided to make a product unique and necessary for everyone. At least we thought so. Everything went according to the standard scenario: Idea -> thoughts about millions -> project implementation -> drain of time and money.

    They usually say: "But they got a good experience." Yeah. Only if you think carefully, you could not receive it.

    The essence of the service was that VKontakte is very popular with physical prizes, where the winners are, as a rule, one or more people. But, in the last couple of years, mechanics are gaining popularity when the author encourages subscribers to repost for any endless product: pdf-instruction, e-book, webinar recording, etc. Moreover, in 99% of cases, the author of such a draw calls for reposts, subscribe to his public account and write to him in private messages to collect his prize. I saw similar posts where there were more than 1000 reposts ...

    The idea is fire!


    We thought. And they decided to automate this mess. After all, we can track those who join the community or repost their posts, so we can only give access to certain content to those who have fulfilled the necessary conditions: repost, subscription or repost + subscription

    As a result, the public admin is freed from the tedious sending of monotonous messages to who fulfilled the conditions of the draw, and the subscriber receives what he needs so, right after the conditions are met. Cool? In theory, yes.

    Thought out the interface. Wrote a code. Everything works. Now we need to somehow sell it and then it started.

    You violate the rules of VKontakte


    So we were answered by several people in the very first SMM public where we posted a post about our invention, and someone even refused to advertise for money, calling our brainchild “gray mechanics”.

    And here. Drumroll. We decided to read the rules of VKontakte.

    Why not? The service is ready. Time and money invested, now is the time to think about, but in general, does our product violate the rules of the site on which we are going to earn millions?

    Revered. Were upset. VK rules are written in such a way that the same action can be interpreted in different ways. It seems to be possible, but it seems to be impossible. We decided to ask support and received an answer in the style of the above rules.

    Do it. And we will see and it may be blocked, or it may not block

    Oh well him


    We thought and scored on the project for a long time. Fortunately, this was not the main brainchild and we had something to do. But time passed. A frozen project made you sad every time the thought of it appeared in our bright minds. And also there was news that Twitter launched a similar mechanic and we again thought that we should resume the project, because the direction is promising.

    We started to think about where to get traffic and I wrote to a fairly well-known person with a proposal to test our product. Surprisingly, they received a positive response and consent to testing the service. Naturally, when a person who is authority for you in many things speaks approvingly of your product, motivation comes by itself.

    Ayaz approves, but there is no VKontakte


    Further, everything again went according to a different scenario, which at least somehow intersects with millions in our pockets. Ayaz wrote that VC support does not approve of our idea. I decided to finally understand the question and asked the support of the most understandable and capacious questions that cannot be answered evasively and received an answer that cannot be interpreted ambiguously.

    Hello Andrey! You can. While we do not see anything forbidden in this.

    We do not violate the rules, cool peppers are ready to test the service on a blog with an auditor of 200k +, Twitter is introducing similar mechanics - that means we are on the right track.

    We hire an administrator and run traffic


    During the New Year holidays, we found a very good administrator for our public, ordered a design, set up advertising, and it seemed that everything was about to go uphill, but no. Messages on Vkontakte’s administration arrive on a cold winter evening:

    The SmmReact application (vk.com/app5478456) was blocked.

    And then comes the realization that somewhere we made a fatal mistake. Somewhere at the very beginning of the journey, when we tried to make service on the site, the rules of which we did not even read.

    Summary


    As a result, a project worth about 150,000 rubles was left without the possibility of monetization. You can, of course, swim against the tide and fight with the support service and try to get around the restrictions (especially since we had a decision on this subject), but there is a big risk that VK will start blocking the customer service communities, many of which are invested in our projects are much larger than us.

    Therefore, with a clear conscience and a fresh mind, we decided to forget about this project and concentrate on our main service Sales Script Constructor - Scriptogenerator , which does not violate any rules and is of much greater benefit to our customers. But, I will talk about this a little later.

    PSThe SmmReact service that was discussed now fully functions as a separate site, but we no longer plan to deal with it, therefore, if you have a desire to become a Jedi and go against the rules, write , we can transfer the product for a small fee with full transfer of copyright .

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