How to invest a million and burn out

My name is Semyon. For the last 5 years I have been engaged in web development, gradually began to move into the status of a project manager and now I program only for my own pleasure.

This story began in mid-2014. My friends and I drank cocktails in a bar and discussed life. We were visited by the idea that it was time to change something. Gotta lose weight! Just losing weight is not interesting, but counting calories is very difficult. And we decided to make a project that will blow up the Internet, a project that will help us keep ourselves in shape, build beautiful graphics and consider everything for us.

A search on the Internet did not yield positive results. We could not find a complete system that can:
1) Count calories of dishes, cocktails, products
2) Count the number of vitamins consumed
3) Calculate the weight loss system depending on the lifestyle.
You say that there are a lot of such sites and applications and you will partially be right.
There are many systems that partially solve these issues, but there is no single system.

We started planning!


This planning took us about two months: we made a lot of tables, presentations, analyzed the market, thought what our product was better than others, told friends and acquaintances about the project.
As it turned out, our friends don’t use “calorizers” on the Internet at all, it’s much more convenient for them to write everything in a notebook. They tried for a long time to find out what the notebook was more convenient for than popular sites and received a lot of reviews, which were then taken into account during implementation.

Implementation!


First version: analysis assistant

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The first version was a page with a table of the main products that we use at home.

Second version: analyze products

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The second version allowed you to enter the name of the product and receive data on proteins, fats, calories, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals in the same table as in the first version

Version three: analyze recipes

The third version already provides an opportunity for a full analysis, we enter the name of the dish, we get a table that lists how much and what is in this dish.

Version Four: Final

This version allowed, depending on the lifestyle and nutrition diary, to offer the optimal diet for a particular person.

This is where the work on the project ended. We thought for a long time about the monetization of this project, there were many options. Here are the main areas we focused on:
• Links
• Subscription
• Advertising

Links. Many projects lived with this method of monetization, and about the same died ... With the advent of the minus index from Yandex, this method disappeared by itself.
Advertising. Displaying ads is a good way to monetize, the main thing is that advertising is unobtrusive and does not interfere.
Subscription. As we have seen for ourselves: some functions are available free of charge, for some you have to pay.
As a result, we settled on advertising or subscription. All users see ads, if you do not want to see ads, then for the money you can turn off all ads on the site.

And now the most interesting: How we burned out and lost millions! A lot of effort was put into the site, and most importantly time. Over the site (over 2 years) 2 development teams worked, 4 CMS, 2 php-framework, 3 JS-framework, several dozens of third-party libraries were used, but in the end it all ended in failure.
What millions were spent on: paying programmers, ordering content on the site, buying ads on the Internet, but we underestimated the competitors.
On the Internet there are several giants in this direction and it was not so easy, or rather unrealistic, to lure people from sites that they visited for years
But this is not the end. We have several successful cases of attracting users from competitors.
In the following articles I will share the technical implementation of the site code, a description of the most interesting moments in the behavior of hungry or malnourished users, and a few cases of attracting customers from competitor sites (more relevant for the media).

PS. millions were in Belarusian rubles 

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