Inviter - Two years of work

Once on Habré, the month of reports of bearded startups and startups, I will share my balalaika.



It will be about my project Inviter (Invites Exchange) , which was launched two years ago (plus or minus a couple of weeks). Birthday, however, can officially be considered November 13, 2009, when I shared a link to the project with a respected audience Habr.



Inside, I would like to tell you about the way Inviter walked during these two years, ask for advice, and give birthday cookies to the most patient users who read the note to the end.

Technology

When I came up with Inviter, I could [irony] program only in HTML, jQuery and Smarty [/ irony], but I could draw tolerable interfaces. Therefore, the choice of technologies at that time was obvious and straightforward for me: PHP / ZendFramework + MySQL + Apache. On this bundle, the site somehow lived and developed for more than a year, until I thoroughly tasted Rails and could not look at my old code without a shudder (by the way, Cyril Mokevnin described these symptoms of infection with Rails on Habré ). Successfully discarding themselves that new ideas require a new architecture, which means UNIVERSAL RECRUITMENT, in a few months has reproduced the basic functionality, at the same time refreshing the design. As a result, the project is now working on the Nginx / Unicorn + Rails 3.1 / MySQL + HAML / SASS / CoffeeScript bundle. Of course, the code is still far from ideal and there are errors, from which the head goes steeply, but all the same - it became much faster and more convenient to debug and search for them.

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Promotion

I would not say that the project was advertised somewhere purposefully. The main role in attracting the audience was and continues to be played by word of mouth and search engines, while the rest of the promotion methods had an episodic effect.



While writing the last paragraph, I remembered that Inviter publicly released himself, nevertheless, not at Habré, but at Leprochka , and although the post was quickly removed by the government, the first mass feedback and part of the audience was able to get there. But after the post on Habré, links to Inviter began to appear on the pages of other online publications. The most significant in this series of posts was the story about the Weaver in the “Sites of the Day” of the Rambler, after which the server lay down on the flank.



In general, there was a certain interest of the audience, who strongly motivated to continue the project. At some point, it was understood that once the site, as they say, popped up with domestic users, and the platform is more or less stable and does its job, you need to do localization and start more for the English-speaking public, thanks to which attendance will increase several times. In practice, everything was not so rosy. Firstly, the process of translation of the service itself, the possibility of multilingual which was not initially considered (something else is fun), took several times longer than expected. Secondly, the long-awaited growth of the audience amounted to ten percent at best. It's hard to say why. Most likely - it was not possible to convey the idea of ​​service to the western public. Or this idea is simply not interesting to her. We wrote on Hackernews, published a review on Digge, pestered the editors of Techcranch and Mashable, posted a description of the project on a dozen less eminent resources - the results of the work were miserable percentages of new users. So, in the column “Interaction with Western Audiences”, the mark FAIL was made and put in the same direction with the device.



There was another moment that strongly inspired me at that time - my teenage dream came true: I wrote about the site to the editor of the journal ] [ and received a reply stating that they know the site and are already preparing a number for printing, which will certainly be about Inviter written by And they did not deceive you! On the last page of the journal, in the column of regular reviews, there was a block with a screenshot of my work and a brief description of it). Wow, how much was joy! I wonder how I didn’t rip it off and hang it in a frame on the wall. Probably regretted the magazine. But this is all the lyrics. The paragraph is not about Hacker at all, but about offline activity). And the result of offline activity is this: after the publication of a note in a paper magazine, users began to arrive more than after all our efforts aimed at attracting a western audience.



Recently experimenting with social networks. For example, if the user so desires, requests for new invites, along with a link to his profile, are automatically broadcast on Twitter, Vkontakte, Facebook. The effectiveness of such crossposts is not particularly great - out of all three networks on the links comes a hundred people a week. The registration comes even less. But this is not interesting - it is interesting HOW to register. Not so long ago, I connected the authorization and registration of new users through designated social services. In your opinion, which of the three social networks does our, very specific, audience prefer to use? Here I am, when I am lazy, I register via Twitter, and then I will think about it ten times whether to entrust my token to the site. And our users quietly go through Vkontakte. Such is the interesting fact.

I need advice

Two years is a huge time for any undertaking. During these two years, my daughter learned to walk and talk. One of these days she will already go to kindergarten ... But Inviter is marking time. It is very difficult to practically and in one person, on sheer enthusiasm and in the background, to maintain and develop a web service. I want to quit everything and plunge into the “My possible projects” tasklist). But I convince myself that it is necessary to carry out our plans to the end, and even at least on obstinacy to ensure that the service pays back the invested forces.



Inviter practically does not make money. Even if we count the funds that are sent by users as donates. By the way, if someone is interested in reading about connecting the donation system and the results of its work, there are a couple of notes on my blog on this topic ...



And there should have been a subtitle from the series “How to make money on your own shortcomings,” but since I haven’t managed to earn a lot yet, I’ll just write about a more or less intelligible way of monetization that I recently invented. The fact is that by default I think most people are good and adequate. I would like to believe that on the resource created by me good people are the majority. But, unfortunately, the imperfection of our model lies in the fact that this statement cannot be verified in automatic mode. So it turns out that while some users send their invites to others, their partners with a clear conscience merge to get what they want. How then to judge who deceived whom? It turns out that without the intervention of a third party, at the stage of concluding a transaction, it will not be possible to manage. At this intervention, and is expected to earn. As you understand, this is not my invention, but merely a variation of the intermediary service, familiar to many of the freelance exchanges.



For the exchange moderation service to start earning enough money, a greater number of users are required. So far, among the 25,000 registered participants and 500 daily visitors, this feature is not very popular (.



Perhaps, reading my note, you saw a good model of monetization of the service, which I’m missing. Or, what the hell is not joking - you have resources with the help of which you can seriously increase the popularity of the service and you are ready to share them on mutually beneficial terms. Or maybe you are a good Rails developer who would be interested in developing the project in exchange for a share in it. In general, I will be immensely happy with any suggestions and opportunities for cooperation. Best of all - write in a personal.

Cookies!

And now - cookies! In honor of the upcoming anniversary, Inviter is ready to donate a certain amount of intra-service currency to its users. True, not disinterested, but on the condition that they will bring their friends). Details of the action can be found at http://www.inviter.ru/promo . Yes, you are right, this is another experiment to assess the conversion of advancement in social networks, but you don’t feel sorry, do you?