Features of working with networkers
On a technical resource, I hasten to clarify: networkers are customers from all sorts of multi-level business. This includes both solid large companies with years of experience (Amway, Oriflame, Herbalife) and one-day pyramids (their name is legion). We will not evaluate such a way to promote products like MLM , but consider the specific relationship between the contractor and the customer.
Before presenting our experience as developers, we should understand the essence and requirements of such a business. Let's talk in one language.
The meaning of this organization of trade (provision of services) is reduced to shifting on the shoulders of the final sales agent several intermediate elements from ordinary linear business. Advertising, logistics, office management, even the warehouse becomes the concern of the seller. Accordingly, the agents themselves and the whole chain of people who contributed to its appearance and success are rewarded for all such straining good commissions. In such societies, a high degree of self-organization. Local leaders of the top management level (directors of the regions), first-line managers (active sellers and organizers), the profit engine (the most productive sellers without subordinates) and shrimps, which are all included but amorphous users, appear autonomously.
In such conditions, an important step is the gradual filling of the agent with information and the smooth passage of all stages of the career ladder according to his success and psyche.
The meaning of the whole self-organization is reduced to the expansion of the client base and closure of financial flows within its society. That is, denyuzhka, got inside the company, should remain as long as possible in the calculations of their products. From this it follows not only the often wide range of products, but also the rapid expansion of the range of raw items, the purchase of absolutely unnecessary things and active incentives for such purchases.
The cornerstone of any such business is a marketing plan . This is a document according to which some profit is distributed after a single or cumulative sale. Since there are considerably more than two reward levels, the document is not always understood from the first time by the unprepared mind.
Structure is a word that will most often be mentioned in a conversation and which should be understood as a simple graph of user relationships. At the head of all clients is the firm (or a specific representative), and then there is a sequence of people, each senior in which is a sponsor for the subsequent sagitized. The first line is the people whom I personally invited to the business sponsor. What is characteristic, in our relationship graph, they are not necessarily attached directly to the host cell.
Points , bonuses and other terms with which some hide an inflatable chip, while others smooth out calculations in multicurrency systems. Usually there is a conversion rate of the abstract score to specific pieces of paper of the central banks of the states. This is an important point, since this abstraction often serves as a substitute for real money even terminologically, but behind it is a specific discount on the product, and not the total cost. Getting confused is easy.
And now we can talk about the most important thing. After all, a programmer or project manager may not have experience working with such companies. And even more rare experience of communication at the psychological level.
Having experience in using and using several different network structures, I decided to highlight a few tips and accents.
')
Often, the customer will sit in front of you in the form of a financial director, financial expert, salesman in one person. People at the top of the pyramid have many communication skills, a lot of life experience and are very colorful compared to dull corporate rats. Versatility leads to superficiality, which is not so bad for a manager. But this is a positive case.
In the negative, we have an ordinary hard worker, whose worldview has changed dramatically, and he quickly got a huge amount at his disposal. I understand the reader's sarcasm and accept the flow of rotten tomatoes, but if you are already talking about creating a website or CRM for such a company, then you have a person with personal money. Instead of $ 300 in salary, he can grow up to 10 kilobaksov in a year and become an influential person in his environment. He turned out to be the only one, and the failures of the others in this particular situation should not relax you.
What conclusion follows from this point. Be prepared for the lack of "fatty layer", and simply put the stabilization fund. When there is suddenly a lot of money on hand and the head has not yet been scaled, that is, a deceptive sense of cash flow. And he, it happens, suddenly goes out. And, as practice shows, the customer is not ready for such a turn of events. As a bonus, moderate payment generosity is manifested.
Be prepared for unclear relations. In network marketing, all partners, if not friends, are very close comrades. Cases are conducted as in the time of the king of peas and the merchant's word. The hierarchy is often blurred, it is not clear who is responsible for what. But this does not mean that things are not going. Sound any problem from the manual, and it will be solved internally by available means. Papers and regulations exist, but they are hery with triple force, compared with the usual customer.
I do not advise you to delve into how payments were previously made for huge structures in companies like those under consideration. I still can not believe how slowly the settlements went in manual mode before mass use of PCs. However, the idea that working properly once will work and now is completely viable for these clients.
And what we can’t calmly treat (the withdrawal of funds for plastic already on the next business day) may well rest against the condition “the user will suffer a month, he is used to.”
Most often it is necessary to implement a site with a protected area and certain calculations in response to events. There will be a user profile, its financial indicators, statuses in the structure and ratings. View your structure and order management with the entire hierarchy.
Registration of new people is not required through the site. Yes, in the 21st century it can be. From this, a rather ornate admin panel with a bunch of distinctions and rights can emerge.
The most cruel moment is the implementation of the very marketing plan, about which separately.
Given the growth of the user, an element of distance education will be an important point. Someone is just access to the documents. Someone wants a complete system with external seminars. Be prepared for the fact that the materials themselves are a hodgepodge of famous films with the author's materials of local luminaries. Get ready for the vigorous eyes of the 90th, when all such materials poured from the west and adapted to the first "stumps" by the craftsmen. The principle of "it works" here is manifested in all its glory, and only in your power to improve it. By the way, working with interfaces will also be difficult. Pity for inexperienced users and show more perseverance in the implementation of advanced design ideas in the field of usability. There, no one will take it seriously.
If this is not the very beginning and not a total divorce of the population, then there will be an advance. And you can even curb all financial relationships with a competent agreement. Here, like everyone else. What distinguishes this sort of businessmen is the irrepressible belief in oneself, in the idea, in the structure and in the rapid growth of rabid attendants. This passion of enthusiasm will definitely be passed on to you. And you will urgently rivet a high-load fault-tolerant system on a million greedy merchants. Try to immediately build a cloud monster or a mini data center. Do not hurry! Of course, such a development can be, but to cool the heat of extrapolation of the load immediately costs at least three times. You will save development money by insisting on the gradual development of infrastructure, on the normal introduction of modules with normal testing. You will be rushed and pressured on the fact that “schaz popret”. Hold for such a period calabash with mate and calm down. If it explodes, everyone will be happy without your code. If not, there will be a chance to beg thanks for the saved servers and nerves.
What you need to do before you work is an accurate description of all the details of marketing, the logic of forming structures, the functionality of the modules launched in the first line. Normal literate TK and the document no one will provide. There may be video presentations of business, personal meetings, assurances. But you have to write TK and Matmodel yourself, double-check with various people in the company several times. It is better to be yourself at the introductory seminars and listen to answers to questions on technical things from beginners. Stop! What seminars? Yes, believe me, these peppers will start gathering people and telling raw ideas without even having a website and a personal user account. Everything will be on pieces of paper. But there will be. And you can hear at the presentation the launch date of the product, although they have not yet spoken time. This is a feature of rapid development: it is better to postpone the launch of the module than to stop the set of adepts.
The business you have learned, the processes, what you see and hear, must be presented in the form of any meticulousness of the TK and sign it. There are customers who successfully work without a specified technical specifications. Rarely but it happens. Network companies, due to the blurring of responsibility, leadership and the multifacetedness of the living nature of management, clearly do not fall into such exemplary clients. And even if you do not pay for the creation of such a document it will be cheaper to invest your time in its creation. Even if it is especially disgusting to you personally. otherwise you should not work under any circumstances. Throw, substitute and leave extreme. And not because they are so bad. There is nothing personal: when it does not go, it is necessary to show the guilty to the structure, and an outside developer is ideal for such a role.
Network companies do not arise from nothing. Someone always finds a product at a discount and lures the leaders-generals from a rotting similar company. I personally witnessed a triple similar transition. Since you can’t call MLM an unemotional business, revenge comes in the form of ddos, hacking, dill, trolling and internal espionage. You must be a good security officer and have a competent administrator in the team. For success, this is enough, even with the mediocre skill of programming. At the stage of formation, the chances of getting into such a meat grinder are great.
Get used to immersing yourself in a sea of ​​ideas. If you do not have a signed TK or a regulatory document, the chances of writing ten times and not appending are completely non-illusory. The customer quickly lights up new ideas and cool to the previous ones. Find an ally in your client team who does not burn with ideas, but is smoldering consistently and extinguish fires with his hands.
As I wrote above, a lot of hope rests on a sharp start. Even in the existing running pyramid, new functions can cause a stir. Or maybe otherwise. From my point of view, the approach of premature optimization justifies itself. Find a balance between the timing of the launch of new features and the depth of optimization. Networkers, even the simplest chip on the site, like sorting a comment or the ability to add a few photos to the product, can suck and inflate a couple of months. But the recumbent site due to an unreported JOIN without a key can push a very specific future millionaire.
Agile-approach and active editing on working servers are quite acceptable. Yes. So far it does not concern finances. Then stand up to the last and test the entire full system, based on the most harmful and stupid user with the support of a sophisticated and savvy competitor. If there is an error in the accrual of money points on a live server, then even a fresh backup will not help. The situation with the manual discharge of who, to whom, when, on what item listed and who has already deduced one and a half bucks, and who transferred to storage with a percentage will you dream of years in nightmares.
Assume initially the flexibility of even the most stable things. You can be assured that this pricing model is already in granite, that the structure is unshakable and the form will not be supplemented. Have some more mate. After all, we know that this is garbage. Marketing can change or dramatically acquire a ton of additional conditions. The most reliable person will be a traitor and a scoundrel according to the new version of the balance of power, and he will have to be picked out of the rigid hierarchy. An agent tied to a passport, phone, and DNA code can sell his business, bringing ten tons a week, to another person under the guise of an investment. Examples of mass. Network companies do not suffer from bureaucracy and many concrete corporations can envy the flexibility of approaches.
The distribution of profits in the company chain of sponsors with additional bonuses is the most difficult part of this business. In most cases, the newcomer already understands that there will be money, but he will understand the full power (or wretchedness) of the mathematical model of millions in a couple of months. Do not be surprised that successful agents with structures with a hundred people will come across, while the subtleties of all bonuses may not be understood.
You need to understand in detail and build the whole chain of points transformations. It is firmly tied to the structure as such and statistics on the turnover of goods at various levels. Be prepared that the accrual of a pair of kopecks will be the requirement of miscalculation of an incredible amount of data and accounting for a dozen parameters. In the forehead, such things are wrong to solve. Therefore, use excessive statistics and additional fields in the database. Cache intermediate requests in structures, remember as much as possible intermediate calculations. Operation "in the forehead" can always be decomposed into a more resource-intensive for the base, but simple to calculate the sequence of actions. Do not flatter when the weekly statistics on the test for 5000 users you consider in milliseconds. The time will come, and 30,000 agents will generate such a flow of transactions and signals that a straightforward approach will require a day of miscalculation.
It is in this case that premature optimization, readiness of the architecture for fast vertical scaling, and an excellent platform for code profiling will be useful.
Customers are different. In the practice of our team there were such special orders with such specific customers. Much of what has been written is typical of other types of customers, but it is this list of features that catches the eye after the end of development.
Prepare documents on time. Delve into the subtleties of business without laziness, as this is the most important and specific part of the activity. Check incoming data with different people. Feel free to require problem solving at any level of structure. Write optimally, but without euphoria. The prototype will be sold as a final version without you.
There are still many little things and importance. Answers to specific questions will be in the comments.
Before presenting our experience as developers, we should understand the essence and requirements of such a business. Let's talk in one language.
The essence
The meaning of this organization of trade (provision of services) is reduced to shifting on the shoulders of the final sales agent several intermediate elements from ordinary linear business. Advertising, logistics, office management, even the warehouse becomes the concern of the seller. Accordingly, the agents themselves and the whole chain of people who contributed to its appearance and success are rewarded for all such straining good commissions. In such societies, a high degree of self-organization. Local leaders of the top management level (directors of the regions), first-line managers (active sellers and organizers), the profit engine (the most productive sellers without subordinates) and shrimps, which are all included but amorphous users, appear autonomously.
In such conditions, an important step is the gradual filling of the agent with information and the smooth passage of all stages of the career ladder according to his success and psyche.
The meaning of the whole self-organization is reduced to the expansion of the client base and closure of financial flows within its society. That is, denyuzhka, got inside the company, should remain as long as possible in the calculations of their products. From this it follows not only the often wide range of products, but also the rapid expansion of the range of raw items, the purchase of absolutely unnecessary things and active incentives for such purchases.
Terms
The cornerstone of any such business is a marketing plan . This is a document according to which some profit is distributed after a single or cumulative sale. Since there are considerably more than two reward levels, the document is not always understood from the first time by the unprepared mind.
Structure is a word that will most often be mentioned in a conversation and which should be understood as a simple graph of user relationships. At the head of all clients is the firm (or a specific representative), and then there is a sequence of people, each senior in which is a sponsor for the subsequent sagitized. The first line is the people whom I personally invited to the business sponsor. What is characteristic, in our relationship graph, they are not necessarily attached directly to the host cell.
Points , bonuses and other terms with which some hide an inflatable chip, while others smooth out calculations in multicurrency systems. Usually there is a conversion rate of the abstract score to specific pieces of paper of the central banks of the states. This is an important point, since this abstraction often serves as a substitute for real money even terminologically, but behind it is a specific discount on the product, and not the total cost. Getting confused is easy.
What you need to know with the cooperation?
And now we can talk about the most important thing. After all, a programmer or project manager may not have experience working with such companies. And even more rare experience of communication at the psychological level.
Having experience in using and using several different network structures, I decided to highlight a few tips and accents.
')
Manual
Often, the customer will sit in front of you in the form of a financial director, financial expert, salesman in one person. People at the top of the pyramid have many communication skills, a lot of life experience and are very colorful compared to dull corporate rats. Versatility leads to superficiality, which is not so bad for a manager. But this is a positive case.
In the negative, we have an ordinary hard worker, whose worldview has changed dramatically, and he quickly got a huge amount at his disposal. I understand the reader's sarcasm and accept the flow of rotten tomatoes, but if you are already talking about creating a website or CRM for such a company, then you have a person with personal money. Instead of $ 300 in salary, he can grow up to 10 kilobaksov in a year and become an influential person in his environment. He turned out to be the only one, and the failures of the others in this particular situation should not relax you.
What conclusion follows from this point. Be prepared for the lack of "fatty layer", and simply put the stabilization fund. When there is suddenly a lot of money on hand and the head has not yet been scaled, that is, a deceptive sense of cash flow. And he, it happens, suddenly goes out. And, as practice shows, the customer is not ready for such a turn of events. As a bonus, moderate payment generosity is manifested.
Be prepared for unclear relations. In network marketing, all partners, if not friends, are very close comrades. Cases are conducted as in the time of the king of peas and the merchant's word. The hierarchy is often blurred, it is not clear who is responsible for what. But this does not mean that things are not going. Sound any problem from the manual, and it will be solved internally by available means. Papers and regulations exist, but they are hery with triple force, compared with the usual customer.
Theme
I do not advise you to delve into how payments were previously made for huge structures in companies like those under consideration. I still can not believe how slowly the settlements went in manual mode before mass use of PCs. However, the idea that working properly once will work and now is completely viable for these clients.
And what we can’t calmly treat (the withdrawal of funds for plastic already on the next business day) may well rest against the condition “the user will suffer a month, he is used to.”
Most often it is necessary to implement a site with a protected area and certain calculations in response to events. There will be a user profile, its financial indicators, statuses in the structure and ratings. View your structure and order management with the entire hierarchy.
Registration of new people is not required through the site. Yes, in the 21st century it can be. From this, a rather ornate admin panel with a bunch of distinctions and rights can emerge.
The most cruel moment is the implementation of the very marketing plan, about which separately.
Given the growth of the user, an element of distance education will be an important point. Someone is just access to the documents. Someone wants a complete system with external seminars. Be prepared for the fact that the materials themselves are a hodgepodge of famous films with the author's materials of local luminaries. Get ready for the vigorous eyes of the 90th, when all such materials poured from the west and adapted to the first "stumps" by the craftsmen. The principle of "it works" here is manifested in all its glory, and only in your power to improve it. By the way, working with interfaces will also be difficult. Pity for inexperienced users and show more perseverance in the implementation of advanced design ideas in the field of usability. There, no one will take it seriously.
Security
If this is not the very beginning and not a total divorce of the population, then there will be an advance. And you can even curb all financial relationships with a competent agreement. Here, like everyone else. What distinguishes this sort of businessmen is the irrepressible belief in oneself, in the idea, in the structure and in the rapid growth of rabid attendants. This passion of enthusiasm will definitely be passed on to you. And you will urgently rivet a high-load fault-tolerant system on a million greedy merchants. Try to immediately build a cloud monster or a mini data center. Do not hurry! Of course, such a development can be, but to cool the heat of extrapolation of the load immediately costs at least three times. You will save development money by insisting on the gradual development of infrastructure, on the normal introduction of modules with normal testing. You will be rushed and pressured on the fact that “schaz popret”. Hold for such a period calabash with mate and calm down. If it explodes, everyone will be happy without your code. If not, there will be a chance to beg thanks for the saved servers and nerves.
What you need to do before you work is an accurate description of all the details of marketing, the logic of forming structures, the functionality of the modules launched in the first line. Normal literate TK and the document no one will provide. There may be video presentations of business, personal meetings, assurances. But you have to write TK and Matmodel yourself, double-check with various people in the company several times. It is better to be yourself at the introductory seminars and listen to answers to questions on technical things from beginners. Stop! What seminars? Yes, believe me, these peppers will start gathering people and telling raw ideas without even having a website and a personal user account. Everything will be on pieces of paper. But there will be. And you can hear at the presentation the launch date of the product, although they have not yet spoken time. This is a feature of rapid development: it is better to postpone the launch of the module than to stop the set of adepts.
The business you have learned, the processes, what you see and hear, must be presented in the form of any meticulousness of the TK and sign it. There are customers who successfully work without a specified technical specifications. Rarely but it happens. Network companies, due to the blurring of responsibility, leadership and the multifacetedness of the living nature of management, clearly do not fall into such exemplary clients. And even if you do not pay for the creation of such a document it will be cheaper to invest your time in its creation. Even if it is especially disgusting to you personally. otherwise you should not work under any circumstances. Throw, substitute and leave extreme. And not because they are so bad. There is nothing personal: when it does not go, it is necessary to show the guilty to the structure, and an outside developer is ideal for such a role.
Runtime environment
Network companies do not arise from nothing. Someone always finds a product at a discount and lures the leaders-generals from a rotting similar company. I personally witnessed a triple similar transition. Since you can’t call MLM an unemotional business, revenge comes in the form of ddos, hacking, dill, trolling and internal espionage. You must be a good security officer and have a competent administrator in the team. For success, this is enough, even with the mediocre skill of programming. At the stage of formation, the chances of getting into such a meat grinder are great.
Get used to immersing yourself in a sea of ​​ideas. If you do not have a signed TK or a regulatory document, the chances of writing ten times and not appending are completely non-illusory. The customer quickly lights up new ideas and cool to the previous ones. Find an ally in your client team who does not burn with ideas, but is smoldering consistently and extinguish fires with his hands.
Technical Tips
As I wrote above, a lot of hope rests on a sharp start. Even in the existing running pyramid, new functions can cause a stir. Or maybe otherwise. From my point of view, the approach of premature optimization justifies itself. Find a balance between the timing of the launch of new features and the depth of optimization. Networkers, even the simplest chip on the site, like sorting a comment or the ability to add a few photos to the product, can suck and inflate a couple of months. But the recumbent site due to an unreported JOIN without a key can push a very specific future millionaire.
Agile-approach and active editing on working servers are quite acceptable. Yes. So far it does not concern finances. Then stand up to the last and test the entire full system, based on the most harmful and stupid user with the support of a sophisticated and savvy competitor. If there is an error in the accrual of money points on a live server, then even a fresh backup will not help. The situation with the manual discharge of who, to whom, when, on what item listed and who has already deduced one and a half bucks, and who transferred to storage with a percentage will you dream of years in nightmares.
Assume initially the flexibility of even the most stable things. You can be assured that this pricing model is already in granite, that the structure is unshakable and the form will not be supplemented. Have some more mate. After all, we know that this is garbage. Marketing can change or dramatically acquire a ton of additional conditions. The most reliable person will be a traitor and a scoundrel according to the new version of the balance of power, and he will have to be picked out of the rigid hierarchy. An agent tied to a passport, phone, and DNA code can sell his business, bringing ten tons a week, to another person under the guise of an investment. Examples of mass. Network companies do not suffer from bureaucracy and many concrete corporations can envy the flexibility of approaches.
Separately about marketing
The distribution of profits in the company chain of sponsors with additional bonuses is the most difficult part of this business. In most cases, the newcomer already understands that there will be money, but he will understand the full power (or wretchedness) of the mathematical model of millions in a couple of months. Do not be surprised that successful agents with structures with a hundred people will come across, while the subtleties of all bonuses may not be understood.
You need to understand in detail and build the whole chain of points transformations. It is firmly tied to the structure as such and statistics on the turnover of goods at various levels. Be prepared that the accrual of a pair of kopecks will be the requirement of miscalculation of an incredible amount of data and accounting for a dozen parameters. In the forehead, such things are wrong to solve. Therefore, use excessive statistics and additional fields in the database. Cache intermediate requests in structures, remember as much as possible intermediate calculations. Operation "in the forehead" can always be decomposed into a more resource-intensive for the base, but simple to calculate the sequence of actions. Do not flatter when the weekly statistics on the test for 5000 users you consider in milliseconds. The time will come, and 30,000 agents will generate such a flow of transactions and signals that a straightforward approach will require a day of miscalculation.
It is in this case that premature optimization, readiness of the architecture for fast vertical scaling, and an excellent platform for code profiling will be useful.
findings
Customers are different. In the practice of our team there were such special orders with such specific customers. Much of what has been written is typical of other types of customers, but it is this list of features that catches the eye after the end of development.
Prepare documents on time. Delve into the subtleties of business without laziness, as this is the most important and specific part of the activity. Check incoming data with different people. Feel free to require problem solving at any level of structure. Write optimally, but without euphoria. The prototype will be sold as a final version without you.
There are still many little things and importance. Answers to specific questions will be in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/130699/
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