Startup on their own. The history of the creation of the real estate portal

I welcome you, dear users of "Megamind"!

I want to share with you my experience in creating my startup - a real estate portal.

The article will turn out to be voluminous, but it will give an idea of ​​how long I have come to understand how it is necessary and how not to do projects.

My name is Danilevsky Cyril and I am now 36 years old. I graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic in the distant 2000, and studied at the Faculty of Informatics. After the release, my independent flight of the developer began.

As a web developer, I have been working for over 10 years. In my youth (20-25 years), I was full of optimism and all kinds of bright ideas. I undertook to do everything. I tried to implement all my ideas on my own.


One of my ideas that I implemented was my own PHP framework, in my opinion, I called it Site-Master. It was written procedurally and worked quite fast. I built a couple of my projects on it.

In 2004, I created my bulletin board called E-Sale and a project that was a bit of a freight portal. Where it was possible to hire a freight carrier or pick up goods for transportation. It was called Trans-avto.

These projects existed for about a year until 2010, after which I let them go and let them rest in peace.

Why did this happen? And the reasons, in fact, are many.

1) This is procedural programming. When the project grew, maintaining the existing code was a punishment. I had to constantly refactor the code, rewrite the old functions again. And it has turned into an ongoing routine.

2) Using your own framework. Then, in my youthful years, it seemed to me that running a project on our own framework was cool, it's proud, it speaks of my professionalism and experience. This was one of the fatal mistakes. The bulletin board was quite visited, up to several thousand visitors a day. Dozens of new ads were added daily. The speed was great, the interface itself was beautiful and convenient. I created a large number of buns that competitors did not have. And he was very proud of it. But the site was hacked once a week. Either through a vulnerability in Ckeditor, then they picked up mySQL injection, where I clicked on some function. And my work has become an eternal patch of holes. Plus, when I needed to add some interesting functionality, I had to write everything with my hands, implement it in code, test, refactor, maintain.

3) My faith in the user. I provided extensive functionality on the board, but there were rules that users had to follow. The rules are quite simple. Do not spam, do not write capslocs, do not duplicate ads, etc. I really did not have time for moderation, and I really counted on the understanding of my users and their integrity. But in vain! Most often, they did not read the rules at registration at all. No one complied with them. And very soon, the board began to turn into some kind of dirty trash. Once a week I began to atrocity and delete ads of outrageous people, and ban them myself. But that did not help. On one deleted ad, ten more new ones appeared, from another account, from a different IP address. All this turned into some kind of mouse fuss. I then put everywhere wherever possible captcha, but conscientious visitors who wrote me angry letters suffered. As a result, I again had to think about protection against spammers. But, if the site immediately behaved harshly in terms of moderation, then such a headache could simply not be.

4) Wrong advertising strategy. I strongly hoped that traffic would increase from white directories, various forums and other message boards. But if the traffic came, it was so meager that it was not worth the effort that I spent on it. Then I began to share my software solutions all over the Internet. Payment systems, counters with a reporting system for statistics, etc. People in large quantities downloaded these solutions, implemented them on their sites, but I did not get the desired effect. Traffic to the site did not increase, but the headache increased, when they began to bombard me with e-mail questions about how to install the script correctly, they say it doesn’t work for me - help and other similar cries for help. I just could not send everyone. And I got a new unpaid job.

5) Sincere belief in all kinds of articles on SEO on the Internet. To be honest, until I realized the fact that all these articles are written for only one purpose, namely to attract a trusting user to your site, and not to teach something, a lot of time has passed. With that, I read one article - I read everything! To find the real experience of people, even if unsuccessful, was an almost impossible task. And I kept banging my head against the wall in search of some way out.

6) The dominance of amateurs everywhere and in everything. Somehow, it began to come to my mind that I needed to hire one developer and one CEO who would partially remove part of the headache from me. It all ended with the fact that I had to fire everyone and again do everything myself. People turned out to have even less knowledge and experience than mine. There was no motivation at all. A lot of people after reading a couple of articles about CEO, with a dubious quality, have already called themselves professionals. About the same picture was with programmers. The time and money I paid was wasted again.

In addition to all this mouse fuss with their sites, I had to somehow earn a living. And I was simply torn to pieces between freelance with clients who bring me profit, as well as between my projects that eat my money and suck all my juices out of me.

My work day began from the moment I got out of bed and ended when I went to bed. Such a regimen greatly undermines physical health and mental balance too. I became nervous and irritable.

And at some point in my life, I decided that was enough. Since I was already starting to feel that they would soon carry me out of the apartment with my feet forward. For a whole year, I spat on programming and did not even open an IDE. Just switched to a house, a family, other worries. This allowed me to maintain my peace of mind. Move away from the blow of his huge fiasco.

Somewhere in 2010, I again took up the keyboard. See it in the blood and not run away from it. But I went the other way. I was a little tired of the freelance of previous years, of eternally clarifying relations with clients and decided to get a large office for a normal salary. Which I did.

After working for a couple of years at a foreign company, I realized that I also did not find peace of mind here. If I used to have a lot of customers riveted the brain, now there are only a couple of cool bosses, but no less than all freelance customers combined. The problem was that business owners did not understand at all how the IT field as a whole works. What to lower the team to do so and so in the morning, and in the evening everything should be ready, it is not possible in principle.

And the motivation was not at all the one I was counting on. For example, if you can’t do this in a day, then it’s not such a good developer. But before you worked as a programmer, whom we fired, and he could do it in a day. And all in a similar vein. I must say that the salary was very decent, but the stress was even greater. Or, as an example, such a situation. You are being pressed from above, what you need for yesterday, you are forced to create new functionality overtime. You rush like a squirrel in a wheel, but you do everything. And then the leadership has no more time for two weeks to see this functionality.

But I have to say that working in this company gave me a huge experience. I was able to see all the shortcomings of the workflow from the outside. I could understand how important the planning and delegation of authority stage is. How important it is to keep technical documentation, without which in a month you won’t even remember what was discussed at all and what we developed there. And the most important thing that I understood is that a large and rich company does not mean that it is successful.

I also got another interesting and very important experience that can only be obtained in a company with a large financial turnover. It is clear that no one listened to me as the main developer. And if they tried, they did not understand what I was trying to tell them. Namely, I often found bottlenecks, illogicalities, and dead-end implementations in their TK. Trying to explain this, they did not understand me, and if they did, they did not listen and insisted on their own. And at some point, I saw right on a live project how my assumptions came true. After which the team descended from above, to redo everything, but it was already right.

As a result, I learned with high accuracy to find bottlenecks in architecture. And he could observe in practice how these processes took place. Since the company had almost a billionth turnover, they simply did not take into account such things. For them, this was an average error. But for me it was an experience that it is not possible to buy for any money. And it was this experience that became the key in my life. Since saving finances at the design stage of your project is actually the key to the success of the project itself.

Since I still remained a free artist at heart, work in the office could not keep me forever. Even a large salary did not motivate me, although it allowed me to put together the initial capital. And I quit. Also, due to the fact that even with a high rate, I still did not find peace of mind.

Back in the office, I was thinking about my future project. I approached this issue carefully, taking my time with a good share of sober skepticism. I already had a tremendous experience with the bulletin board. I knew what users needed firsthand. I was able to take a detached view of all my negative experience, and independently criticize myself objectively.

Plus, real estate has always attracted me. Why real estate. Well, there are a number of objective reasons. Firstly, it is a very complex, but at the same time very interesting area of ​​business. Then - this is an eternal topic, a strategic type of business. Well, in addition - this is a huge financial turnaround.

Naturally, I was aware of how highly competitive this field is. But it didn’t scare me. I was already savvy with both knowledge and experience. And I started developing the project with the creation of an idea.

The idea was simple, like the corner of a house:

1) The project should not be another clone of a successful real estate portal.

2) It should be as simple as possible. To enable those who post their offers to manage their ads as conveniently and quickly as possible. And for those who are looking for real estate, give them the opportunity to search it all over the world with the maximum accuracy of their criteria.

3) I boldly decided that those popular resources that are - this is not the best of those invented, this is the lack of an alternative.

Then I got into the shoes of a simple consumer and wool the Internet in search of different apartments, offices and houses. I wanted to find something simple, flexible and powerful.

I guess I found tens of thousands of websites, portals and something remotely similar to a site that worked in real estate.

What conclusions have I drawn from what I saw:

1) Probably, 80 percent of the sites I saw are similar to each other. Clones with the same flaws.

2) Many sites were made and designed so that right from the first page they shouted: “User! I hate you." If they could, then they would spit in the face right through the screen.
I immediately dismissed clones and similar sites from paragraph 2), since they did not constitute competition for me.

3) Serious real estate portals had some strange properties. For example:

1. Almost everyone has a narrowly regional focus. Globalization is on our heels, many gadgets are equipped with all the languages ​​of the world. So why lock in only one country?

2. Almost all, only one interface language is Russian. But what about foreign citizens who somehow somehow end up in the CIS countries, and without knowledge of the Russian language.

3. Many resources really like interactive property search maps. For example, on a Moscow map there are hundreds of tags with rented apartments. But such a solution seems to me absolutely not convenient. First, you need to know the areas in order to understand where you are looking. Then, when the card is removed, all the tags merge into one. You need to do the scaling, move the map in all directions and click on all the labels to get at least some information. I agree that it looks cool and beautiful, but I personally could not use it. Many users do not want to spend their time on unnecessary beauty and toughness.

4. The vast majority of resources, such sections as daily rentals, residential and commercial real estate, this is just a selection field in the ad. But I thought that these are completely different objects with their independent sets of fields. And there is no point in making porridge out of this when filtering. Therefore, I divided all these properties into their independent and non-overlapping sections with their unique sets of fields.

5. Again, for most portals, filtering occurs by clicking on an infinite number of drop-down lists. For example, a user is looking for an apartment for himself. It takes and selects eight parameters from a dozen filters. He presses the search button, and he is given: “No results were found for your search.” And often it gives out generally what was not required. This is not just annoying - it takes out the brain in full. Therefore, I made facet filters. You will get only what you are looking for, as in normal online stores. For many, this has become unaccustomed. But as soon as users tried a little, they realized what a convenient search was without headaches.

6. The limitation of the number of characters, the ban on the use of html tags, the ban on inserting links to your sites, the limitation on the number of photos, etc. Everything is simple. I did not limit anyone and forbid everything. On the contrary, I even encourage users to upload large and high-quality photos of their property. Write a good and detailed description of your objects. I allow the use of tags to highlight important points in the text.

7. Very often repetitions of identical sentences. Now I follow the portal, and punish those who do not follow the rules from the first day. But in order to avoid the need to post the same offers, I made it possible in the user profile to update the date of my offer once a day. Then such a proposal appears at the top of the list. Property sorting is by default by publication date.

8. Insanely annoying “Raise to Top” ad. Many sin this. For example, a user enters a section to find an apartment, and he gets five pages of yellow ads that he doesn’t need and are not interested in. But you need to scroll and browse them all. I consider this rudeness and disrespect to my users. Therefore, I basically abandoned this path. Those who want to somehow highlight their proposals, I decided to put them in separate VIP blocks, which will not block the viewing of simple ads.

9. Services such as online booking for daily rentals, import / export of xml feeds are paid features. I made them free on my portal.

10. And there is another important point that gives me confidence that I can compete with serious players. Many portals cannot afford to keep a highly professional senior developer. Salary alone will hit hard on the budget. As a rule, finances are invested in a project at the development stage, and then what is already there, that is. Few modify the functionality, improve their project and give new opportunities to users. And every couple of weeks or a month I release a new release. I consult with users what functionality they need and implement it on the portal.

I have mentioned ten points that I consider key in the question of why I am sure that the project has a future.

The project itself took me two years of work. Approximately 3800 hours. Every hour I roughly value $ 30. I implemented the project on the Drupal 7 platform. For the reason that I professionally develop it. It was most of the project’s time spent on creating their own modules and functionality.

The project itself, even before the launch of the first release, I redrawn again at least three times. Since already at the implementation stage it became clear that what I wrote in the statement of work is not optimal or even fundamentally wrong.

On May 1, 2015, I launched the first release. It was significantly different from what you can see now on the portal. Some functionality was not finalized, the design was a complete crap.

Attracting new users who would agree to publish their property with us was very difficult. No one wanted to publish on an empty site, many looking at the project did not understand why it looked somehow different than what they were used to seeing on the Internet. I found all over the internet contacts from various real estate agencies throughout Europe. He wrote to someone, called someone.

This part of the work was very difficult. Since those who are looking for real estate will not come to the site, unless there are those who will publish it. It was a vicious circle. But now there are more than 1300 sellers on the site, and new ones are registering much more willingly.

I also realized that at some point I began to walk in a circle. This involved improving usability and the overall look of the portal. And then I turned to the Drupal community for help on the Drupal.ru website, especially since I had been a member of it for many years. I asked to constructively criticize the portal. Many users responded and together we were able to bring Best-House to a more or less normal form.

Now on the portal is the fifteenth release. Without criticism and outside views, it would be difficult to develop the project. Since everything was already becoming familiar and different jambs were no longer visible.

At the moment, the portal is not monetized. All functionality is free. I plan to earn on the creation of various paid services. For example, in the near future we plan to create our own unique CRM system, sharpened for real estate. While I am at the stage of deliberation.

Yes, I forgot about another point. About the domain. I thought for a long time which domain to buy. All beautiful domains were naturally taken apart. I wanted the domain to be international, without regional binding. It was easy to remember and unambiguously written. The first domain was completely different. I finally made it a test. And so, I accidentally came across the domain best-house.org, which previously belonged to a Japanese real estate agency, and which was sold for sane money at auction. Moreover, he already had PR 5. I bought it right away. I don’t remember why, but not very expensive.

Here, in a nutshell, is my life experience in terms of creating my own project, almost 15 years long.

In the afterword, I want to give some advice to those who want to start their project:

1) If you do not understand anything at all in IT, but want to invest money in a project (yours or someone else's), then it’s better to give this money to an orphanage. It will be much cheaper, less burnt nerves, and most importantly, do a really good deed.

2) If you calculated the budget for the project, while calculating it very professionally and clearly, then you can safely multiply it by five, if not more.

3) If you have your own idea and want to implement it into a project, together with your friends, then immediately figure out whether you can finish this project alone if your friends leave you.

4) If you find an investor who is ready to invest finances in your ideas for a share in your project, then be prepared for the fact that you are more likely to become a project lead, not a leader. And in the end, little can be left of your ideas at the end of the project. However, like your enthusiasm.

5) Most startups die at the implementation stage, without having seen their first release. And all because comprehension of the need for your project, its obvious advantages, and its architecture, occurs already at the development stage, and not at the stage after the idea is born.

And in conclusion, I want to say that after the project’s miscalculation, first of all, it is necessary to consider the losses that you can incur, and not the virtual profit, which can be if a hundred “if” work.

You can view my project here.

And you can criticize it directly in the comments. I will be happy to answer everyone who is interested in both the technical part, both financial and design.

Special thanks to those who mastered this opus to the end. He who seeks surely finds.

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