Young Entrepreneur Competition

How to tell everyone about your product? Yes, an excellent plan is to publish a post on Habré! However, if the target audience is completely different, this is not appropriate. We decided to hold an open mass competition. The competition itself will be held in April, and I will summarize its results in terms of technical problems and achievement of goals in May.

Registration and description here: http://cup.play42.ru .

Under Habrakat, I will talk about what project, what competition, what goals we set for ourselves and how we prepared for the competition, what conclusions we made from this.
')

Prerequisites

Our company has created a product 42. A school for teaching economics and entrepreneurship in schools (it is possible, having worked out, to apply in universities, colleges, for business). The children like it very much, and both teachers and principals like it. But the trouble is buying for them is a complicated and long business, coupled with traditional delays. To improve the situation, there are two approaches:

• go from above to massively purchase at, say, all schools in Moscow;
• to make it so that everyone knows everything about the product, then it will be more willing to take it.

We are working with the first option, so we started the second one.
Objectives of the event:

1. 1 000 000 people should know about the Competition;
2. 10,000 people must take part in the Contest;
3. you need to find and establish contact with the maximum number of school leaders and teachers / teachers: they are our clients.

The goals are quite ambitious, but others are not needed. In principle, there are 1,500 schools in Moscow, about 12,000, 9-11 grades, or 240,000 students of the target group. It turns out that 4 percent is enough for us. But there are still universities, colleges, private schools.

Sponsors and partners

Firstly, an event about which a million people will find out (surely will find out!) Is a good opportunity for advertising. In particular, it is interesting to those whose target audience is schoolchildren and students or schools and universities. Moreover, the budget of the event, that is, the minimum amount that had to be received, was in the range of 100-200 thousand rubles. (although at first it was all 300 in the plan). Some, say, a fitness center receives so much from 4-8 clients, that is, if out of a million at least 8 people come to the sponsor, then it is already effective.

Two search options have been tried. One - a personal meeting in the appropriate circle. As usual, this is the most effective way, which brought the result .

The second option is an attempt to reach various companies through their contacts, most often via email. This did not give any results, mainly because the competition is not sufficiently thematic to reach someone’s target audience.

Some letters were sent by my colleague and I do not know the full statistics (MTS and Megafon, I know, answered), but from my letters it is.

They didn’t answer me: Beeline, Clodo, Selectel, Yandex, Comus, Ozone and another five stationery stores, Greenfield Project.

I was answered or managed to be contacted in another way: Microsoft, MIOO, Alex-fitness, studentoo.ru, HeadHunter, Forbes, Scalaxy.

UPD : Scalaxy answered and became a partner of the event, and the topic was transferred to "I am promoting".

Of these guys, only HeadHunter became our information partner through its youth portal, career.ru .

All other partners found through personal contacts. Thus, we managed to get the minimum necessary information support and financing.

There was an embarrassment with MIOO : we thought quickly to come to an agreement with them, but quickly did not come out, and the information appeared on the contest page on the company's website. This is the most important employee of the MIOO for us and asks, they say, with whom are you here, it turns out, you cooperate? Fortunately, it cost, but a very unpleasant incident.

It is strange that the abbr tag somehow does not work especially.

Findings:

• it is useless to send e-mail, first you need to call and search for the right person;
• personal relationships decide everything, no matter your friends or your friends, someone must be able to represent you with dignity;
• it’s better to start looking for sponsors and partners for half a year, it is important to take into account the seasonal load of people and other aspects, and in general most companies are brakes;
• the more accurately your target audience and the target audience of the company are determined, the easier it is to match them and the easier it is to find a sponsor / partner;
• Be careful when posting materials!

Attracting people

What could be more important?

Press release

The simplest thing you can do is send out a press release. For 5 minutes I found on the Internet a list of sites where you can do this. It is clear that a separate communication should be sent to the press service of leading media. As it turned out, this should be done on Friday morning and on Monday for the second time (thanks, Olga!).

In April-May 2011, a “Young Entrepreneur Competition” will be held - an online event where every student of a school, college, or university will be able to demonstrate their abilities and win numerous prizes.

Detailed information on the website cup.play42.ru , registration is also taking place there, which will last until April 7.

The project was approved by Russian President D. A. Medvedev at the Seliger 2010 forum.
The event was organized by Grupa 42 LLC, an innovative company established in 2009 in the business incubator of MGTU. N.E. Bauman. Gruppa 42 creates and promotes future education technologies, provides a wide range of information technology services.

Our partners: NUK IBM MSTU named after E.E. Bauman, Center for the Development of Innovative Infrastructure and Youth Entrepreneurship at Moscow State Technical University, Council of Rectors of Moscow and the Region, Moscow Club of Young Entrepreneurs, Career.ru (HeadHunter Holding), Group of International Programs.

The “Young Entrepreneur Competition” is a unique opportunity for young people to join the business world, develop the competencies of an innovative entrepreneur and have a good time.
Participants will have to fight each other in an exciting business game, they will manage virtual firms in various industries and compete with each other.

All games will be held on the Internet in the evenings and will not distract from the educational process, while participation for students in Russian educational institutions is completely free. In addition, invited experts are ready to consider your business ideas.

The best participants will be invited to the awards ceremony, which will be attended by prominent figures in the field of education, business, media. The first 40 participants will receive personal certificates and special prizes from the sponsor of the event.

The competition is based on a simulation game where the player becomes the head of the company. The simulation game is part of the 42.School educational complex, which is used in the leading schools in Moscow.

The press release is read by the editor, not by the potential bidder, so the idea here is this: the first paragraph should always communicate the essence of what is happening. The closest lines should attract attention. In our case, this is a mention of Medvedev, who really left a signature on our leaflet wishing good luck. Further to the heap and persuasiveness - partners. The Fyodorov surname is also sometimes a good idea to trump up. The description of the company itself could be the last, but since the partners are at the top, then the description. But in the end everything else is important, if someone is interested, he will read it.

Further, an important step is to contact the press services of all large structures related to the event so that they spread the information. In our case, this is, first of all, MSTU. Career.ru and so will make the newsletter.

Official channels

This method is the biggest calculation.

It was for this purpose that through the Faculty of Engineering Business and Management and its Dean (thank you!) We reached the Council of Rectors of Moscow and the region, so that the paper signed by Fedorov would go to universities. The chances that information will actually be conveyed are dramatically increasing. Similarly, we were supported by the association of koldzhey (secondary vocational schools) of Russia. If MIOO does support, then there will be paper for schools. Then the director will tell the teacher, and that one - to the children. Similarly, for any other events: it is better if the boss tells his staff about the conference than if they see it among dozens of others somewhere on the Internet.

What do we ship? A4 envelope, in it the corresponding letter, A4 poster for hanging, a booklet (folded in half A3) for the head of the institution. Two thousand envelopes, yes. There are services that will print everything themselves, put it in envelopes and send it, but we decided to do all this manually. The base of addresses from Excel is saved in csv and parsed by php into the necessary pictures, which are printed and cut, glued onto envelopes. One envelope - 1 minute, in total, the four of us work for 8 hours already, horror. Therefore, it is easier to buy a cake or other neighbors in an incubator and work in 30 pairs of hands!





During the creation of materials, the website career.ru was offline, so their old logo appeared there. The registration message is different, as the schoolchildren will see the poster, and the booklet will be seen by the director.

Social media

Here would stir up an awesome viral video ... But, unfortunately, this was not possible. Therefore, everything is simple: the like / tweet buttons on the site, the “meeting” of VKontakte - that's all. I am sure that you can come up with something more fun, but I do not know what it is.

In the registration form, we added the field “Where did you find out from us”, then we will evaluate the effectiveness.

Hosting

Now we use the services (mt) MediaTemple, and I want to note that I have not seen anything like them yet. Speech about the grid-service. The point is simple: the rate for $ 20 includes 1000 performance points. If there are no guests on the site, then less than 1 point per day is spent. However, if the effect of an influx suddenly happens, then do not worry: the site is instantly scaled. It is very difficult to fill it up.


However, CDN costs another $ 20, and anyway, the ping is large, it opens slowly. Therefore, it was decided to test scalaxy, selectel and clodo. First, I wanted to find out what to test for. Baseline information only calculation per 10,000 participants. All sorts of methods of calculation exist, but in general, they are all unreliable. Approximately it was decided that 1000 simultaneous requests should suffice.

Clodo and I could not get to scale. Selectel scaled, but not fast enough. Scalaxy ... I generally only three days ago, finally understood how their “rules” of scaling work. Yes, well done. Probably, this is my glitch. Scalaxy showed poor results in the test itself, but at the same time it was very quickly opened in my browser. It happened the other way around: he answered the testing service, but not to me.

With a question about this, I contacted loadimpact support, and this is what I was told:

It is a big time. This will raise the average.

There could be a lot of reasons why you were able to browse the site quickly. For example, if you’re trying to keep track of your balance If you’re where the problem lies. If you have some kind of DOS protection, it might throttle the traffic as well. Other reasons include bottlenecks

It could be quite a bit more investigation. Perhaps I couldn’t help you in this matter?

Or in short translation:

We glanced at your test and saw that the difference between the minimum and maximum response time is large, and therefore the average is large.

On the other hand, many reasons may explain why the site continued to open quickly for you. For example, a load balancer could send traffic to different servers. Also could work protection against DOS-attacks. Could just be plugs in the channels between our servers and your DC, etc.

Thus, in order to test something normally, you need to do it with several servers, know how the scaling system is arranged, etc. By itself, the test does not give anything, especially since in life the load will not grow so abruptly.

Therefore, the best test - use, let's see. While satisfied with the choice (Scalaxy), it is a pity that they did not want to become partners of the event. I almost wrote a smiley here.

Software

Before the contest, we had a system for training, even without registration. Made a number of changes:

• support for themes, made a more beautiful theme for users and special for the competition;
• Support for “profiles” of the system and config: now all views (mvc -> view) can be taken from the profile folder, if they are there, so the main page can be changed easily, and the menu, in addition, the registration and every other is enabled and configured through the config ;
• respectively, registration of participants;
• automatic creation of games, including among random users of sites, as in real multiplayer games;
• significantly, by a factor of three, they improved the speed of the system, mainly due to the removal of unnecessary requests and more thorough adjustment of CodeIgniter.

Event plan and prizes

Until April 7, there is a registration, perhaps a little longer. After it will be the first stage of selection, about a week. At this time, the game will be enough to go to the site and click "Play", from 10 participants the game will be formed. In this case, the first five games each go to his credit, the rest - training. Of course, someone will be able to figure out more than others, but there will be more visitors and less chance of finding partners.

Then there will be 4x640 participants, and with each round there will be 4 times less of them, in the final - 10 people. Everything, except the first stage, will be appointed by us in time. If someone can not, we will arrange extra time.

Each game - 6 periods of 5 minutes, who did not have time to go - the bot will follow it. The points system was taken from Formula 1. Well, the same rankings by the number of seats, as well as disqualifications, which do not give any place at all. This can be not only for cheating, but also for bankruptcy. All the details in the regulations .

In addition to the game, there will be another interesting one. Participants will have the opportunity to send their business idea to experts for consideration directly on the competition website, and they will receive a response. Good ideas do not influence the result of the competition. In general, the list of winners is an employer's find, but it is not yet clear how to use it, especially without violating anyone's confidentiality.

Our prizes are:

Laptop, tablet and smartphone - a prize three. From 4 to 10 place - hard drives. Buy in the same place at once 7 identical failed, so they are all different, and none of them is the same as stated in the poster. And from 11 to 40 seats will receive a discount of $ 100 on the program sponsor.

In addition, after the competition will be the award ceremony. There will be representatives of partners, as well as other invited interesting people. I hope that the event will take place in the house of the entrepreneur.

I invite everyone to participate!