Tweeter, Bobuk, Bitcoin

It so happened that thanks to Yandex and the TolstoyStartup Camp organized by him, we have become a full-fledged company, with its product, development strategy, market positioning, in a word - serious entrepreneurs. Therefore, we will quite often return to our experience at the camp and tell how it affected us.

This time we would like to share a funny story that happened to us at the camp. As you can see from the title, Twitter, bobuk (Grigory Bakunov) and bitcoin are involved in it .

During the first meeting with Grisha at the camp, without exception, everyone had to pass the first serious test of their idea. It went like this: you go out in front of an audience, tell the essence of your idea in a minute, and then listen to a flurry of criticism from Bobuk (at that moment the language did not turn to call him Grisha). You need to understand that a person has just a talent for it. He, like no one else, knows how to find weaknesses in any idea and criticize as harshly as you can imagine. After everyone went under the “press”, there was something like questions and answers. They asked about a lot and different things: how did Yandex begin, education, radio broadcasting, etc. But one question was directly related to our story: “How much does one advertising tweet on your behalf cost?” To which Grisha replied that he usually doesn’t practice this, but would do it in one bitcoin. At that time, the rate was around $ 800 for bitcoin.

Each subsequent meeting with Grisha turned into a decline of enthusiasm for us and the realization that it would be better if we were sitting at home and not wasting Yandex resources and Grisha’s personal time here. In his usual manner, he poked us every time that we do not have a market, technology, and in general we are not presenting the project correctly. In short, every meeting with him was a cold shower for our team.
Despite all Grishin’s criticism, other mentors reacted normally to our project and each time we successfully passed through control points.

To validate the idea, we launched the first landing, on which we checked whether our application would be interesting to users. 3 or 4 days after launch, traffic fell onto the page. It was completely incomprehensible what kind of traffic it was, where it came from and what to do with all this. I even had a small panic attack: I began to worry about the fact that users were running, and we have not yet released the product. In general, I was afraid that disappointed users would never return to us.

When they started to figure out where the traffic came from, they came across this. The



panic intensified, when it became clear from the discussion of the tweet that Twitter was blocking the link to our site, as it considered it to be malicious. In short, I almost became a smoker that day.

When the traffic subsided and we came to, we thought that it would be nice to somehow thank Grisha for this tweet. Here we remembered the question about the advertising tweet asked during the first lecture. Obviously, we did not have that kind of money back then. After a small brainstorming, it was decided to give him an “option” on the very bitcoin, in the form of a souvenir coin : The



moral of this story is simple: it often happens that those who scold you the most, actually believe in you, and scold you in order to show where you could become better .

www.avoapp.com