Evangelist is a pain in the IT company, and why do you need it
Last Tuesday, we decided to dilute our entrepreneurial gatherings behind the series “Silicon Valley” by communicating with real geeks - Grigory Bakunov and Mikhail Chernomordikov.
It's just that we have been believing for a year that our small company has evangelists. But when we talk to someone about this, no one understands: what, how, why, what are they talking about? At some point, we ourselves no longer understood. And they decided to sort out the domestic “primary sources”. And at the same time they found out whether this is a good career for the developer, and why they will kick you if you decide to find an evangelist in the company - or in yourself.
- We re-read Wikipedia three times, but did not understand, who is the evangelist?
Grigory Bakunov: Remember the meme "tyzhprogramist"?
So, it doesn’t go anywhere in this case either.
In fact, there is a large segment of specialties in IT - well, as it has historically developed - in which it is never clear what a person ultimately does.
No one, for example, knows what marketing experts are doing in the end: someone believes that these are “people about the product”, someone thinks that it’s “all about advertising”, others talk about “messages and communications” ... And only in the case of the director everyone knows what he is doing.
Mikhail Chernomordikov: I think that in a few decades all evangelicals will do the same thing - their task will be to develop ecosystems around platforms and technologies.
And today, yes, although the topic itself is already 20 - or how many, even more, they tell me years, you may meet an “evangelist” who walks and says: “We have the coolest product, look, it is the brightest, it is the most thin, the most beautiful, buy this product! ”
But, actually, it's just a very cool seller. And the goal of sales is to sell, fulfill the quota, and even better - get a bonus. That is, to sell more, to do some kind of upsale. And the goal of the evangelist is to make a joint long-term investment of time, effort, find a person and build something with him that will grow in a few years.
Well, someone under the “evangelist” generally means such b2b sales, a person who is looking for other companies with whom you may have joint business interests ...
- Here is the last one, this is probably the person who will drink everyone?
Chernomordikov: Yes, a person who has such important positive qualities to be successful in the labor market ...
(Bobuk laughs in a voice)
In general, there are probably 1000 people in Microsoft evangelists in the world, there are really a lot of us.
But when Windows was created, no evangelist of Windows existed. And all this appeared when it became clear that not only Microsoft itself should write programs for it.
After all, there is, by convention, a person who invents Windows himself, he has his own goal: he thinks how to make it good, beautiful, pleasant, everyone used it, everyone was happy ... But there are also other people who, for example, they want to launch something interesting for the Bali market, and themselves - from Irkutsk, for example.
- Well, they can come to the Novosibirsk office of Yandex and from there already ...
Chernomordikov: Well, maybe. But you can come to Microsoft, and Microsoft Russia and Microsoft in Bali will agree together to help the developer from Irkutsk, if he has a good product, and tell the user in Bali that, look, there is such an interesting application.
In general, I think that evangelism is not about the product itself. That is, the evangelist, I repeat, does not say "we have a cool product," and even more so, he will never say that "our product is cool, and everyone else is terrible." He says: “Together with our technology, product or platform, you can do something great.” This is more like how I understand evangelism.
Bakunov: I would also add that, pay attention, if you communicate with the evangelical guys in some kind of project, almost none of them are lying.
The evangelist’s job is not to sell technology as widely as possible. This is a man who is almost always ready to admit mistakes, who is ready to say: “Well, yes, we have a bad time here, but let me do my best to make it much better.”
That is, this, in fact, is such work that is very much tied to honesty. That's all. This is probably the main difference from the same sales or “brand advocates”. An evangelist is a person who, in the first place, is in the middle between what you would call a “brand” and an external audience. An evangelist is a guide in both directions.
- You both were developers ...
Bakunov: I still have ...
Chernomordikov: And I probably can’t do much, but yes, I wrote in C ++, C # ...
- Well, yes, and here for you evangelism is good career development?
Chernomordikov: It seems to me that career is a very individual thing, and it is very weakly dependent on the profession.
It happens that a person wrote a code, and then realized that he wants not only to write it, but also to tell others about it. But it happens that he loves only to write code and hates all people, does not want to communicate with anyone.
“I am writing a code and I want to make a company that will cost a billion dollars, I want to become an entrepreneur,” is also a good option.
That is, all people have their own interests, their abilities, and, it seems to me, the profession affects this very little.
Bakunov: You know, those who really achieve something and want something always have some kind of global plans: to change the world, make it better, achieve some brilliant successes, and all that.
And then everyone simply chooses the method that seems to him the most correct. This is just a story about careers, in fact. Well, both for me and for Misha, as far as I know, this happened approximately like this.
I know a person who has been programming for most of his life - about 20 years. Then at some point he realized: in order to more effectively develop what he had done, he needed to go to the people and begin to talk about it as widely as possible.
Because for him it was the only way to make what he did move on.
- Or maybe you need something else: not to be an introvert, for example?
Bakunov: I can tell from the experience of one of my companies, which I have outside of Yandex, that no communication skills, except the ability to convey my thoughts, are needed.
In my side company, the guy who communicates with the developers promotes the SDK, practically does not leave the house at all - he just has vision problems. But this does not prevent him from communicating well with people. And he does not have much communication skill.
In general, developers who communicate with other developers are always the same introverts as any average developer. Misha will not let you lie.
You know, my favorite joke is about how the developer-interovert differs from the developer-extrovert. The first, when you communicate, looks at your shoes, and the second - at the interlocutor’s shoes.
Chernomordikov: I’m your sneakers, Grish, by the way, when I met you.
Bakunov: Thank you, and I are your sneakers.
I mean, the main thing is to sincerely love that product, the platform that you are going to, excuse me, to promote. After all, the word "evangelist" is quite accurate: the main thing that is required of you is the belief that it is really a very cool thing that will change the world (because if it does not change the world, then why is it needed at all?) And knowledge, deep knowledge of what this thing does, how it works - and why it works.
And yes. If the evangelist will tell me only the good, then this is no good evangelist.
Bakunov: The fact is that the evangelist is not a position, it is a role. This is such a role in the team. This is a group of people or a person who has assumed part of the responsibility for the product, for technology, for the platform.
His task is not only to bring faith and knowledge about technologies outside, but also to bring the needs and requirements of developers or consumers into the company. His task is to help them all, understand?
And at the same time he is the man whom everyone hates: this is a very thankless job, very thankless.
He knows all the shortcomings of what is happening inside, and cannot take them out, he knows all the problems of people outside, and tries not to carry them inside, because his task is to carry positive in both directions.
This is hellish work, which, probably, will never be appreciated either by management or by people outside. That is, you can come and praise, but no one will ever appreciate the amount of work that you do. In this sense, I bow to Misha, because it’s much easier for me, really.
Chernomordikov: Everyone is simply afraid of you.
Bakunov: You know, no, we just still have a family-type company in which Arkady Yuryevich can come and say: “Well, what kind of garbage?” I’ll say: “Well, yes, well, such garbage,” and this will end the whole conversation.
You know, I’ve been working in Yandex for a little over 15 years. And every three years, I read articles from major experts, analysts, and journalists who say that the company is losing ground.
And every time we all sincerely worry, we think: "Well, yes, really." The problem is that we constantly think to ourselves that we work a little, that we have not done enough, that we need to be bigger, faster, move better and come up with some new things. Well, the evangelist is always the one who already knows the real state of things.
I know many evangelists who, a year or two after leaving their companies, began to super-actively hate them.
And this is very easy to explain: remember about “one step from love to hate”? This is it, in fact. When you scaredly love that company, scaredly love the product you are involved in, you know all the smallest bugs and defects, you accumulate discontent with all this wonderful substance. When you leave the company and stop pushing yourself to constantly think in a positive way, of course, all sorts of negative things come up. And it is obvious that they are accumulating, accumulating ... And sooner or later they break through.
Therefore, quite often the evangelist, a couple of years after leaving the company, begins to be such a generator of negativity, or something. But it seems to me that people have long been accustomed to this, and look at it, well, as if the guy scolds his ex, relatively speaking.
It saves me that the work is extremely diverse. If today I feel that I came in the morning in some kind of depresnyak, did not get enough sleep, something else - I always have something to do.
For example, inside the company there is a product that interests me, which I deal with a lot now - these are technologies related to voice. This is incredibly interesting and incredibly cool, I can talk about it for hours, so you don’t want to hear about it - some of the people inside the company are already trying to avoid me because I’m talking about it non-stop ...
Chernomordikov: It seems to me that you said the right thing that the evangelist is a person who knows all the problems inside very well, but at the same time believes in his company.
And by the way, if a person nevertheless decided to leave for another company, it is better to move to some other place, not an evangelist, and then this can be very good. It is very easy: from an evangelist to be a developer, from an evangelist to be a marketer, there are many such examples.
Although, I note that in recent years everything has become even more interesting. If 5 years ago it could be said that ecosystems are completely competing with each other, now this is not the case: for example, Office is on iOs and Android, and iTunes is on Windows. It seems to me impossible to change the “faith” (the evangelist about this) to the opposite. But we have come to the state of the market when changing one company to another does not mean changing faith.
Of course, there are times when you think that not everything is perfect with your platform, and moreover, as Grisha has already said, part of the job is to see and understand. And it happens that you do not really agree with the decisions that are made, it happens with all of us.
Here the most important thing, as you understand the general direction and the ultimate goal: if you agree with it, then you can forgive a lot of little things that seem wrong to you.
I’ve heard about “Windows - Kapets” for a very long time, much longer than Grisha - about Yandex problems. That month, when I joined Microsoft, we released Windows Vista ...
Well, it seems to me that before becoming an evangelist, a person needs to be in the place of the one with whom he will work later.
I mean, evangelism is not for everyone, not only will not everyone succeed, but not everyone will like it.
Yes, an evangelist - it may just be a post, but it is probably not very good. Well, as a programmer, it can also just be a position, but it is very bad. It's great when an evangelist is a vocation that a person feels and understands that this is what he wants to do.
Frankly, if a person is an evangelist, he already knows about it. He believes that he knows that he can help others to do joint projects. And he feels good from it. Because not all people feel good from this: there are many of them, and they are very successful in other directions.
Bakunov:Misha, let's be honest that if Mircosoft is in a concrete crisis and half of the company needs to be fired, then the evangelists will go under the knife.
Chernomordikov: Well, I don’t know ...
Bakunov: Ok. I just watched several crises in various other companies, how it looked. It was very clearly visible when I handed over Apple how all the people who propagated this out went out of there. What IBM’s first crash looked like, how IBM’s second crash looked when they already had evangelists.
- Since we are talking about dismissals: what kind of KPI evangelists do? That is, how are the results measured, in other words?
Chernomordikov:If we talk about the market of mobile applications around Windows, then this can be measured by the number of people who participate in it, the growth of revenue from our platform, the growth of user satisfaction with these products, and so on.
If we are talking about commercial solutions based on Office, then we are talking about business productivity solutions ...
- Michael, I'm sorry, but you seem to be mocking now. Can you just say how they decide to pay you a premium or not?
Chernomordikov: The size and quality of the ecosystem around the platform. We directly influence this.
Bakunov:And I still think that not every activity is measurable. There is, for example, Coca-Cola: it advertises regularly before the New Year on TV, because it knows that it is necessary. But not because it can be measured.
I assure you, if you suddenly turn off this ad, then they will not notice against the background of how recognizable their brand is at all. But it is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, they intuitively feel that it is necessary.
Here is the same story in most companies, which I know where there is any movement related to the promotion of a product, technology, platform. Quite often, trying to measure something is not possible, simply because of the structure of the world. But we are adult guys, we understand that sometimes quality is also important.
Chernomordikov:In fact, much can be measured. Yes, you do not always know why this is happening. But if there is a positive trend, you make certain conclusions that what you do is good.
Bakunov: Let me give you a simple example, a simple analogy. There is a child, you feed him peas and meat at the same time. Do you understand that you cannot determine what it grows from?
Chernomordikov: It grows from proteins, fats and carbohydrates, which are contained in different things that you feed your child ...
- But who of them is peas?
Bakunov: Of course, you are right. Many things on Earth can be measured. But, unfortunately, the reality of life is such that especially small companies are far from everyone can measure.
Just because for them the prospect of measuring something for two years seems rather mysterious, especially when you just finished 10th grade and you only have 3 months to create a company ...
Bakunov: If you want, I’ll just say one sentence. They don’t need an evangelist.
In general, I sincerely, of course, sympathize with the person who comes to a small company to work as an evangelist. Misha, do you even imagine this strange picture? There is a CEO of the company, there are CTOs of the company, and now they both get together and decide after lessons - we need an evangelist. Why? Because we came up with a new product, and someone must believe in it.
Chernomordikov: Such an outsourcing of faith ...
Bakunov: Guys, if you have a small startup, I have to tell you a very simple thing. If you yourself are not able to be an evangelist of your product, if you yourself are not ready to talk about it at every corner, then why are you even doing it?
It seems to me impossible to find a person who will burn them even for a salary, but, conditionally, from 10 to 18. Yes and no need.
If, of course, you have a product with which you could capture the world, a product of gigantic proportions that requires tremendous support, work with an audience of millions, then yes, then you probably need a special person.
And there is a very simple way how to find it: do not look for it, it will find you. This is the person who uses your product or platform. If you have your own product, most likely you know all your customers. And they most likely know you. At least, while you have a company of some distinct small size.
Chernomordikov:Yes, that is right. The Evangelist, indeed, is the very first of the early adopters. That is, this is the very first who tries everything new that you do.
Bakunov: Yes, this is an important point by the way. An evangelist is a person who comes to you and shakes: “And let me try your new product, let me test it.” The most annoying and annoying dude.
This means that he cares.
PS If you scrolled in the hope of a video - it is . The glitch of sound in the first minutes is an attempt to reanimate Wirecast, the change of picture and sound environment afterwards - this is after Wirecast's attempt to reanimate.
PPS We decided to devote the following such gatherings to entrepreneurship. But there will be a part interesting to microelectronics - About how Aliexpress will look for them factories in China.
It's just that we have been believing for a year that our small company has evangelists. But when we talk to someone about this, no one understands: what, how, why, what are they talking about? At some point, we ourselves no longer understood. And they decided to sort out the domestic “primary sources”. And at the same time they found out whether this is a good career for the developer, and why they will kick you if you decide to find an evangelist in the company - or in yourself.
- We re-read Wikipedia three times, but did not understand, who is the evangelist?
Grigory Bakunov: Remember the meme "tyzhprogramist"?
So, it doesn’t go anywhere in this case either.
In fact, there is a large segment of specialties in IT - well, as it has historically developed - in which it is never clear what a person ultimately does.
No one, for example, knows what marketing experts are doing in the end: someone believes that these are “people about the product”, someone thinks that it’s “all about advertising”, others talk about “messages and communications” ... And only in the case of the director everyone knows what he is doing.
Mikhail Chernomordikov: I think that in a few decades all evangelicals will do the same thing - their task will be to develop ecosystems around platforms and technologies.
And today, yes, although the topic itself is already 20 - or how many, even more, they tell me years, you may meet an “evangelist” who walks and says: “We have the coolest product, look, it is the brightest, it is the most thin, the most beautiful, buy this product! ”
But, actually, it's just a very cool seller. And the goal of sales is to sell, fulfill the quota, and even better - get a bonus. That is, to sell more, to do some kind of upsale. And the goal of the evangelist is to make a joint long-term investment of time, effort, find a person and build something with him that will grow in a few years.
Well, someone under the “evangelist” generally means such b2b sales, a person who is looking for other companies with whom you may have joint business interests ...
- Here is the last one, this is probably the person who will drink everyone?
Chernomordikov: Yes, a person who has such important positive qualities to be successful in the labor market ...
(Bobuk laughs in a voice)
In general, there are probably 1000 people in Microsoft evangelists in the world, there are really a lot of us.
But when Windows was created, no evangelist of Windows existed. And all this appeared when it became clear that not only Microsoft itself should write programs for it.
After all, there is, by convention, a person who invents Windows himself, he has his own goal: he thinks how to make it good, beautiful, pleasant, everyone used it, everyone was happy ... But there are also other people who, for example, they want to launch something interesting for the Bali market, and themselves - from Irkutsk, for example.
- Well, they can come to the Novosibirsk office of Yandex and from there already ...
Chernomordikov: Well, maybe. But you can come to Microsoft, and Microsoft Russia and Microsoft in Bali will agree together to help the developer from Irkutsk, if he has a good product, and tell the user in Bali that, look, there is such an interesting application.
In general, I think that evangelism is not about the product itself. That is, the evangelist, I repeat, does not say "we have a cool product," and even more so, he will never say that "our product is cool, and everyone else is terrible." He says: “Together with our technology, product or platform, you can do something great.” This is more like how I understand evangelism.
Bakunov: I would also add that, pay attention, if you communicate with the evangelical guys in some kind of project, almost none of them are lying.
The evangelist’s job is not to sell technology as widely as possible. This is a man who is almost always ready to admit mistakes, who is ready to say: “Well, yes, we have a bad time here, but let me do my best to make it much better.”
That is, this, in fact, is such work that is very much tied to honesty. That's all. This is probably the main difference from the same sales or “brand advocates”. An evangelist is a person who, in the first place, is in the middle between what you would call a “brand” and an external audience. An evangelist is a guide in both directions.
Evangelism for developers
- You both were developers ...
Bakunov: I still have ...
Chernomordikov: And I probably can’t do much, but yes, I wrote in C ++, C # ...
- Well, yes, and here for you evangelism is good career development?
Chernomordikov: It seems to me that career is a very individual thing, and it is very weakly dependent on the profession.
It happens that a person wrote a code, and then realized that he wants not only to write it, but also to tell others about it. But it happens that he loves only to write code and hates all people, does not want to communicate with anyone.
“I am writing a code and I want to make a company that will cost a billion dollars, I want to become an entrepreneur,” is also a good option.
That is, all people have their own interests, their abilities, and, it seems to me, the profession affects this very little.
Bakunov: You know, those who really achieve something and want something always have some kind of global plans: to change the world, make it better, achieve some brilliant successes, and all that.
And then everyone simply chooses the method that seems to him the most correct. This is just a story about careers, in fact. Well, both for me and for Misha, as far as I know, this happened approximately like this.
I know a person who has been programming for most of his life - about 20 years. Then at some point he realized: in order to more effectively develop what he had done, he needed to go to the people and begin to talk about it as widely as possible.
Because for him it was the only way to make what he did move on.
- Or maybe you need something else: not to be an introvert, for example?
Bakunov: I can tell from the experience of one of my companies, which I have outside of Yandex, that no communication skills, except the ability to convey my thoughts, are needed.
In my side company, the guy who communicates with the developers promotes the SDK, practically does not leave the house at all - he just has vision problems. But this does not prevent him from communicating well with people. And he does not have much communication skill.
In general, developers who communicate with other developers are always the same introverts as any average developer. Misha will not let you lie.
You know, my favorite joke is about how the developer-interovert differs from the developer-extrovert. The first, when you communicate, looks at your shoes, and the second - at the interlocutor’s shoes.
Chernomordikov: I’m your sneakers, Grish, by the way, when I met you.
Bakunov: Thank you, and I are your sneakers.
I mean, the main thing is to sincerely love that product, the platform that you are going to, excuse me, to promote. After all, the word "evangelist" is quite accurate: the main thing that is required of you is the belief that it is really a very cool thing that will change the world (because if it does not change the world, then why is it needed at all?) And knowledge, deep knowledge of what this thing does, how it works - and why it works.
And yes. If the evangelist will tell me only the good, then this is no good evangelist.
What can I expect if I decide to get a job as an evangelist?
Bakunov: The fact is that the evangelist is not a position, it is a role. This is such a role in the team. This is a group of people or a person who has assumed part of the responsibility for the product, for technology, for the platform.
His task is not only to bring faith and knowledge about technologies outside, but also to bring the needs and requirements of developers or consumers into the company. His task is to help them all, understand?
And at the same time he is the man whom everyone hates: this is a very thankless job, very thankless.
He knows all the shortcomings of what is happening inside, and cannot take them out, he knows all the problems of people outside, and tries not to carry them inside, because his task is to carry positive in both directions.
This is hellish work, which, probably, will never be appreciated either by management or by people outside. That is, you can come and praise, but no one will ever appreciate the amount of work that you do. In this sense, I bow to Misha, because it’s much easier for me, really.
Chernomordikov: Everyone is simply afraid of you.
Bakunov: You know, no, we just still have a family-type company in which Arkady Yuryevich can come and say: “Well, what kind of garbage?” I’ll say: “Well, yes, well, such garbage,” and this will end the whole conversation.
You know, I’ve been working in Yandex for a little over 15 years. And every three years, I read articles from major experts, analysts, and journalists who say that the company is losing ground.
And every time we all sincerely worry, we think: "Well, yes, really." The problem is that we constantly think to ourselves that we work a little, that we have not done enough, that we need to be bigger, faster, move better and come up with some new things. Well, the evangelist is always the one who already knows the real state of things.
I know many evangelists who, a year or two after leaving their companies, began to super-actively hate them.
And this is very easy to explain: remember about “one step from love to hate”? This is it, in fact. When you scaredly love that company, scaredly love the product you are involved in, you know all the smallest bugs and defects, you accumulate discontent with all this wonderful substance. When you leave the company and stop pushing yourself to constantly think in a positive way, of course, all sorts of negative things come up. And it is obvious that they are accumulating, accumulating ... And sooner or later they break through.
Therefore, quite often the evangelist, a couple of years after leaving the company, begins to be such a generator of negativity, or something. But it seems to me that people have long been accustomed to this, and look at it, well, as if the guy scolds his ex, relatively speaking.
It saves me that the work is extremely diverse. If today I feel that I came in the morning in some kind of depresnyak, did not get enough sleep, something else - I always have something to do.
For example, inside the company there is a product that interests me, which I deal with a lot now - these are technologies related to voice. This is incredibly interesting and incredibly cool, I can talk about it for hours, so you don’t want to hear about it - some of the people inside the company are already trying to avoid me because I’m talking about it non-stop ...
Chernomordikov: It seems to me that you said the right thing that the evangelist is a person who knows all the problems inside very well, but at the same time believes in his company.
And by the way, if a person nevertheless decided to leave for another company, it is better to move to some other place, not an evangelist, and then this can be very good. It is very easy: from an evangelist to be a developer, from an evangelist to be a marketer, there are many such examples.
Although, I note that in recent years everything has become even more interesting. If 5 years ago it could be said that ecosystems are completely competing with each other, now this is not the case: for example, Office is on iOs and Android, and iTunes is on Windows. It seems to me impossible to change the “faith” (the evangelist about this) to the opposite. But we have come to the state of the market when changing one company to another does not mean changing faith.
Of course, there are times when you think that not everything is perfect with your platform, and moreover, as Grisha has already said, part of the job is to see and understand. And it happens that you do not really agree with the decisions that are made, it happens with all of us.
Here the most important thing, as you understand the general direction and the ultimate goal: if you agree with it, then you can forgive a lot of little things that seem wrong to you.
I’ve heard about “Windows - Kapets” for a very long time, much longer than Grisha - about Yandex problems. That month, when I joined Microsoft, we released Windows Vista ...
Well, it seems to me that before becoming an evangelist, a person needs to be in the place of the one with whom he will work later.
I mean, evangelism is not for everyone, not only will not everyone succeed, but not everyone will like it.
Yes, an evangelist - it may just be a post, but it is probably not very good. Well, as a programmer, it can also just be a position, but it is very bad. It's great when an evangelist is a vocation that a person feels and understands that this is what he wants to do.
Frankly, if a person is an evangelist, he already knows about it. He believes that he knows that he can help others to do joint projects. And he feels good from it. Because not all people feel good from this: there are many of them, and they are very successful in other directions.
Bakunov:Misha, let's be honest that if Mircosoft is in a concrete crisis and half of the company needs to be fired, then the evangelists will go under the knife.
Chernomordikov: Well, I don’t know ...
Bakunov: Ok. I just watched several crises in various other companies, how it looked. It was very clearly visible when I handed over Apple how all the people who propagated this out went out of there. What IBM’s first crash looked like, how IBM’s second crash looked when they already had evangelists.
- Since we are talking about dismissals: what kind of KPI evangelists do? That is, how are the results measured, in other words?
Chernomordikov:If we talk about the market of mobile applications around Windows, then this can be measured by the number of people who participate in it, the growth of revenue from our platform, the growth of user satisfaction with these products, and so on.
If we are talking about commercial solutions based on Office, then we are talking about business productivity solutions ...
- Michael, I'm sorry, but you seem to be mocking now. Can you just say how they decide to pay you a premium or not?
Chernomordikov: The size and quality of the ecosystem around the platform. We directly influence this.
Bakunov:And I still think that not every activity is measurable. There is, for example, Coca-Cola: it advertises regularly before the New Year on TV, because it knows that it is necessary. But not because it can be measured.
I assure you, if you suddenly turn off this ad, then they will not notice against the background of how recognizable their brand is at all. But it is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, they intuitively feel that it is necessary.
Here is the same story in most companies, which I know where there is any movement related to the promotion of a product, technology, platform. Quite often, trying to measure something is not possible, simply because of the structure of the world. But we are adult guys, we understand that sometimes quality is also important.
Chernomordikov:In fact, much can be measured. Yes, you do not always know why this is happening. But if there is a positive trend, you make certain conclusions that what you do is good.
Bakunov: Let me give you a simple example, a simple analogy. There is a child, you feed him peas and meat at the same time. Do you understand that you cannot determine what it grows from?
Chernomordikov: It grows from proteins, fats and carbohydrates, which are contained in different things that you feed your child ...
- But who of them is peas?
Bakunov: Of course, you are right. Many things on Earth can be measured. But, unfortunately, the reality of life is such that especially small companies are far from everyone can measure.
Just because for them the prospect of measuring something for two years seems rather mysterious, especially when you just finished 10th grade and you only have 3 months to create a company ...
[Beyond the brackets] Especially for those who make their small companies
Bakunov: If you want, I’ll just say one sentence. They don’t need an evangelist.
In general, I sincerely, of course, sympathize with the person who comes to a small company to work as an evangelist. Misha, do you even imagine this strange picture? There is a CEO of the company, there are CTOs of the company, and now they both get together and decide after lessons - we need an evangelist. Why? Because we came up with a new product, and someone must believe in it.
Chernomordikov: Such an outsourcing of faith ...
Bakunov: Guys, if you have a small startup, I have to tell you a very simple thing. If you yourself are not able to be an evangelist of your product, if you yourself are not ready to talk about it at every corner, then why are you even doing it?
It seems to me impossible to find a person who will burn them even for a salary, but, conditionally, from 10 to 18. Yes and no need.
If, of course, you have a product with which you could capture the world, a product of gigantic proportions that requires tremendous support, work with an audience of millions, then yes, then you probably need a special person.
And there is a very simple way how to find it: do not look for it, it will find you. This is the person who uses your product or platform. If you have your own product, most likely you know all your customers. And they most likely know you. At least, while you have a company of some distinct small size.
Chernomordikov:Yes, that is right. The Evangelist, indeed, is the very first of the early adopters. That is, this is the very first who tries everything new that you do.
Bakunov: Yes, this is an important point by the way. An evangelist is a person who comes to you and shakes: “And let me try your new product, let me test it.” The most annoying and annoying dude.
This means that he cares.
PS If you scrolled in the hope of a video - it is . The glitch of sound in the first minutes is an attempt to reanimate Wirecast, the change of picture and sound environment afterwards - this is after Wirecast's attempt to reanimate.
PPS We decided to devote the following such gatherings to entrepreneurship. But there will be a part interesting to microelectronics - About how Aliexpress will look for them factories in China.
