About startups, to be honest

With enthusiasm, you can achieve everything. Enthusiasm is the brilliance of your eyes, the swiftness of your walk, the strength of your handshake, the irresistible burst of energy and will to put your ideas into practice. Enthusiasts are wrestlers. Enthusiasm is the cornerstone of all progress! Only with him is success possible. Without it, you have only opportunities.
Henry Ford

For a long time I wanted to share with the audience of the habr my thoughts and the accumulated experience that I received through tears, sleepless nights and gray hair.

I did not insert a picture here to attract attention, this would spoil the text, like a story. So, let's begin:

Instead of joining

I decided to connect my life with programming back in the 10th grade, and we will not dissemble or deceive ourselves, yes, just for the money. Just then, Vkontakte, Facebook, Google began to take off. And then the thought arose - I do not want to become a cook, not an architect, not a musician, but a businessman, the founder of a super company.

Oh, how fool I was then. I still did not fully understand with my school brains that there are 8 billion people on earth, and Pashka Durov and Mark Zuckenberg and Seryozha Brin are alone. 3 people for 8 billion ... for people familiar with probability theory and statistics, it will not be a problem to calculate that the chance that you will become the 4th of this gang is much lower than the chance that one of your flights on the Moscow-St. Petersburg hydraulics will refuse the plane (this is a 100% drop, so far no one managed to land without hydraulics).

35 exams at the university and 42 tests gave me the necessary base and skills, in between studies I programmed, hard and scary, did not sleep at night and did not eat well. I was so fascinated by this activity that I began to lose touch with reality. But let's not go into the details of my treatment in a neuropsychiatric dispensary ... this is a story for a separate publication.

And now, having graduated from the university, I, as an ordinary and standard person, went to get a job.

Once, when I was sitting in a business center and waiting for me to be called for an interview, to once again force me to sell a tree in C on leaf 2-3, this thought came back to me - I need to create my own company, so I asked to implement I have a 2-3 tree on the ASM, but did not sit here and did not humble myself in front of some strangers.

After 5-6 interviews, I was offered a vacancy for 60 thousand rubles in one of the city’s companies. Well, I was delighted. And started to work. I got up at 6-40 in the morning, took the train, crowded in the bus and walked for 10 minutes, came to work and wrote the code. At about 4:00 p.m. I no longer understood who I was, where I was, why I was here and what I was doing here. After 2 days, I came and wrote a letter of resignation. The director invited me to his place and offered to increase my salary to 75 thousand, but after 15 minutes I left the doors of the company forever with a work book in my hands.

Since then I realized work is not mine. So my sunset began as a startup (who read Nietzsche will understand).

Hackathons

Several times I participated in hackathons. I think this is a great experience for any startup, you come up with an idea, implement it, manage the development process. Learn to share responsibilities, delegate authority and make important decisions on the fly.

It was at the hackathons that I understood the main problem that plagues anyone who decided to start their own business - the team. The success of any undertaking depends on people. We will not take as examples of unique in nature enthusiasts, all day and night writing code completely alone. Ultimately, the results of their work are needed only by them and they do not go beyond their computer. This is a very good myth that you can do one thing. No, you can’t.

The main thing is the team. You need not just people, you need people who will do it, who will write the code on holidays, during the session, at night, at temperature, with chills and coughs.

The most valuable and most expensive resource is people. If you have people, you have 80% a company.

At one of the hackathons, I met one team, they were real professionals, but I remember one - the captain. This was a man who inspired confidence after talking with him for 15 minutes - I already realized these guys would take the main prize. A clear understanding of what they are doing, why, and for what. Competent and skillful separation of duties and quick decision making. Unfortunately, I lost contact with them, but I think that these guys are no longer in Russia and are doing something in the California garage that is likely to make a splash in the IT field in the next 2-3 years.

First project

I will not talk in detail about the first project, and I probably will not go about the next either. This is a general article and not an advertisement of applications and platforms and is beyond the scope of my story.

They will not give statistics so that you read to the end and do not close this article, but for now let’s say so, success and money are as far from me as Earth is to the nearest star to the Sun - Proxima Centauri.

For 2 years of my searches and research in the field of business, promotion and start-ups and communication with those who have already achieved any significant results, I give the following:

Money problem

Often I hear such a good myth that you need money. We need investors, we need angels, we need infusions of huge sums.

It works and you really need money if you are going to open a giraffe breeding farm. Yes, you need pens, you need food, you need vitamins for giraffes, you need at least a male giraffe and at least a female giraffe. One giraffe costs 300 thousand euros. Agree, it’s very difficult to buy a pair of giraffes for your own savings.

But, we are creating an it company. We don’t need a giraffe, we need a computer, a bunch of chips and a garage on the outskirts of Moscow with good internet. Everything.

Agree that you can write your own Google sitting in the garage and renting an Amazon server for 5 thousand with 12 cores on board and it will work. The need for money at first is the biggest myth and global deception that holds us back and makes us doubt our capabilities.

But there is one point where money is needed - this is ADVERTISING.

Promotion

Oh, this is the most interesting and most exciting section. If you already have a prototype - a working, chic product that should “break the world”. It is necessary that people would know about him.

What needs to be done to find out about him?
That's right - to advertise. How to advertise? Of course, pour hundreds of thousands of dollars on promotion in top sites, in top groups of social networks and in videos on youtube. No, this is the main mistake.

Take yourself as an example. The network has such unique and interesting products, such as the Vkontakte network, the Facebook network, the BlaBlaCar application. Yes, even such a resource as habrahabr ... Have you ever seen an advertisement about them on TV? And advertising in groups on a social network? Have you seen booklets or announcements in the subway, where the inscription “Vkontakte - come in and find your friends” flaunted. No, because, you learned about it from your friends, acquaintances, stumbled by accident.

It is important to understand that you can push the promotion of your platform, application or website with a couple of unobtrusive articles or posts in 2-3 public places. But your idea should produce the notorious "Wow effect."

Recently there was such an application as “Periscope”, I heard about it from a friend. And for 4 hours I followed the life of an “African American” in the criminal district of Compton (this is the gangster district of Los Angeles). And what do you think? I immediately wrote 10 to my best friends to download this application and also laughed at how this fat guy wanders around the neighborhood and sells hash, filming all this on camera and broadcasting it to the application.

This is called a cool idea, it catches, makes you spin it, it acts like a sect, spinning itself. You just push her, then she lives her life.

And when they tell me that one person poured a decent amount into the promotion of his application and received 10 thousand downloads and now tears his hair out. I answer him that the idea is complete nonsense. She did not produce a “Wow effect” and drowned among millions of equally useless and meaningless creations.

Idea

As I mentioned above, an idea is the cornerstone of success. That is your everything. If you have no idea, you have nothing. Often I meet on forums and in all kinds of resources such a text "The idea is nothing, this is nonsense, share with us." This is written specifically. Do not believe such advisers.

The idea costs a lot of money. In the world of thousands and millions of people who can write you a second Vkontakte, a second Facebook and a second Yandex, in the notorious India there are thousands who want to write you anything for a ridiculous thousand dollars.

Therefore, take care of your idea as the apple of your eye, do not share it even with your friends, relatives or girlfriends.

There are many people in the world, perhaps even in your environment, who, without a shadow of doubt about the secret from you, will realize the idea and launch it before you and it is far from the fact that you can turn around, even if your implementation is better. The winner is the one who used to finish the Persians, and not the one who showed the best running skills and showed a large step width or ran in a warm coat and felt boots. Whoever succeeded first won.

Summarizing

What is needed to create a super company?
  • People (team)
  • Great idea
  • Knowledge
  • Nerves of steel
  • Incredible luck
  • Luck
  • You must be a great psychologist.


Team, idea. Here is the main thing. Forward. It's time to act. Aging Durov and Bryn should retire, the time of their glory has already passed, it's time to update the history books and Forbs lists. And who knows, maybe this article is read by someone who will envy half the globe in a couple of years. Good luck.

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