Cheerick The story of a startup. Honestly

Hi, Habr!

We are Cheerick.ru , the first Russian service of micro-services. We want to tell about the way our team has traveled, the mistakes made and the results obtained, as well as to hear the startup's opinion about the startup and get fair criticism.

Idea come up with an idea

Probably it all began with us as usual. Just like others. At the beginning - the idea to create your own business - not to work for your uncle. The advantages of this approach are obvious, but the responsibility is also greater.
For a programmer, there are two ways in the IT industry as a businessman:

1. Work to order. Those. to open a software development company yourself, to search for customers, a team, etc.
2. Make some kind of your own startup project (framework, library, website, etc.), which you then sell or earn on it.

Differences in risk and the amount of possible profit. The first way is more staid and consistent: less risk, faster return of money, but less amount of possible profit.
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The second way is a more risky way. The probability that the idea will take root and will bring profit is low, the funds invested in the project will not return at all soon, but the amount of possible profit is more.

Our choice is the second way.

After dozens of meetings of our team, at which all kinds of ideas and proposals were discussed, we went through a lot of options. Some were taken to implement, but in time they found already existing and well-known solutions.

Conclusion 1. The market must be studied before proceeding with the implementation.

One wonderful day we stumbled upon one American startup - fiverr.com . The essence of the project is that any user can post an offer of services that he is ready to provide for $ 5. It did not take long to think: firstly, we really liked the idea, secondly - in Russia, moreover, in the CIS, there was no such project yet - we set to work. The project solves several questions: the main one is a legal and honest opportunity to earn money on the Internet to a person who does not possess any special skills.

The goal became obvious for us - to be the first to enter the CIS market (and earn a million in 20 years). Everyone in the team knew Java more or less, so they started writing on it ...
Made a mistake. On the Internet, there were already ready implementations of a similar PHP script. We lost about two weeks.

Conclusion 2. No need to reinvent the wheel. A ready solution may already exist.

The purchased script has undergone processing. Defects were fixed, integration with Vkontakte was added, integration with WebMoney, etc. They came up with the name of the site - eerick - uniquely associated with money and birds. Purchased hosting and domain, the site is running. Well, everything seems to be okay. Things are easy - formalize everything and start advertising.

But it was not there. The glorious Belarusian legislation (we are from Belarus) does not allow formalizing such a scheme of work. It took about a month to clarify legal issues.

Conclusion 3. First you need to thoroughly examine the legal side of the business. There may be problems with legislation.

Since the start of the project from the idea stage, it took about two and a half months. The team got tired, some began to lose enthusiasm. About two weeks Chirik inactive - no one was engaged.

Familiar investor interested in the project. This gave us a new push. We took up the presentation of the project, its business plan, etc. Very advanced, running live users on Chirp. But, here we were overtaken by another fair punishment. Explore the Internet in search of competitors, we found a few (!!!). One of them was pretty well-spun.

Conclusion 4. Do not delay time. Make and promote your project, otherwise you may not have time.

We decided not to give up and continue to practice Chirik despite the competitors that appeared, stuffing cones and making the necessary conclusions. A few days ago, we performed the first real operation with users unfamiliar to us. On Chirique, bugs are fixed, promotions are held, a new functionality is added a little bit. In general, we found the application of unspent talent.
Always believe in your project!

Interesting Facts

Our team consists of students BSUIR. Already at the beginning of the semester it was clear that it was impossible to be in time for everything - a startup, work and study. Therefore, we approached each teacher and told us that we were doing a startup. At the session, we received excellent marks on most subjects, without passing any labs.

PS What is the best price for a single service that should be at Cheerick in your opinion? We are very interested.