Market packaging startups on their own experience
Before each developer, sooner or later questions arise: “How to call my project?”, “How to tell clients about the project?” Or “How to choose a simple and free domain name?”. In this article I tried to restore the history of the formation of our company Marva . I hope this information will give you confidence on the road to success.
The idea of creating an online consultation system was born in an effort to revive the Internet in 2006. Then we with the team stamped typical sites "turnkey", but I wanted something more. Among our clients were several restaurants, and I suggested that the main page of such sites be an interactive overview of the interior. It seemed original and very functional. A visitor walks through the restaurant right on the site, looks at the menu, communicates with the hostess or the bartender. And so, came the first such order.
Immediately, a fairly simple module was developed that allowed the user to scroll through the panoramic photo in all directions, creating a navigation effect. The photo housed animated elements and interactive tags. When clicking on such a label, the next photo was loaded, moving the user to a new viewpoint.
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But what to do with the technology of communication? Needed a messenger or something like that, and working through the browser. Then I “laid the first stone” and made a demonstration prototype.
After the success of the first project for the restaurant, we wrote an article in the newspaper Business Petersburg. More precisely, it was not even an article, but an advertising text block called “Reviving the Internet”. We offered restaurants, car dealers and shops to make websites based on our technology.
Whenever I came to the customer, I heard: “A virtual review is a really interesting idea, we will definitely think about it and sometime prepare a budget. But this is your messenger for communication - how much does it cost? We are ready to deliver it even today! ” There were no other options - it was necessary to develop a functional version of the web messenger.
Of course, I was lucky to have the possibility of multiple presentations of a product not yet developed to potential customers. If you find such an opportunity, it can remove many of the risks, and give you confidence. After all, if your product is needed every second company, what's the difference that many critics say. For example, the expert council of one “Venture Fund” decided: 1 — such technology cannot be developed and 2 — market size: 10 clients. But I already knew that there would be at least 30 of them, which means that the most important thing is to develop;) Another important point in such “preliminary” presentations to clients is that you can see the project through their eyes. If you listen to them, they themselves will tell you the correct positioning in the consumer market.
When the system was ready, we thought: “How to call it?”. This question concerned both the new brand and the type of system - the term defining its class (in some cases this is a brief description of the project). After all, if you have developed something fundamentally new, you should think about how people will call this technology or similar resources. It will also help in creating presentations and talking about the project in general. For example, Facebook is a social network, Adriver is an Internet advertising management system, and so on. I would recommend that you consider this point quite thoroughly. In addition, the brand itself is better to start with the same letters as the description. It will simplify the promotion in search engines. I remember one pretty bright example. In St. Petersburg there are two networks of sports clubs - Sportlife and Fitness Huas. If a person is looking for a "sports club", when you enter the first two letters of "SP" - the search prompts Sportlife. But when you enter the letters "FI" search engines advertise for free Fitness House in the options auto-complete.
While writing the top paragraph, I remembered one piece of advice often found in Western materials on the topic of startups: “Start selling your product as soon as possible. Do not be afraid to market the raw product. ” This advice was very useful to me, otherwise we would still probably bring the product to perfection, not daring to launch it.
As for the brand, in the development process we called the project “General Connect”, planning to buy the domain “gc.com” in the future. This name seemed to us too ambitious for a fresh and raw Russian version. It was necessary to simplify it. So in 2008, by combining and flair, the brand Marva was invented. It is often asked what it means. It was already later that we learned that there is such a mountain in the Holy Scripture, or that it is the name of wormwood in Latin. The British at Cambridge said that in English Marva also sounds quite “valid”. But in fact, the brand was coined intuitively and to some extent even mechanically. It looked like this: we need a short title, a maximum of 5 letters, in which there would be at least two vowels. Most commonly known to us global and Russian companies are named with the letter M. For example, “Microsoft”, “Macdonalds”, “Mercedes”, “M.Video” and “Magnit” supermarkets. The domain “marva.com” was busy, and we decided to postpone the issue of an international brand until better times. In case you choose the “talking title”, you may find the resource www.hugedomains.com useful.
Regarding the type of system, when analyzing foreign markets, we are confronted with the terms “Live support” or “Live chat”. By the way, one funny case is connected with the prefix “Live”. When I was in negotiations with the ABRT venture fund, I was corrected by its founder Ratmir Timashev. “Not LIVE chat, but LIVE chat,” he said. “This is not a verb LIVE, but the word LIVE. So LIVE. It turns out that we ourselves did not know what it was that we developed. What can we expect from users in this case? Then I decided to invent a Russian term. The most simple and understandable. Desirable, rather general. Online consultant. So we called the company, hoping to consolidate its position in the search engines. And we were lucky, because this name has become a household name today, denoting a whole class of such decisions.
Thinking about the technologies of service advancement, from the very beginning we focused on sales through partners. In practice, however, it turns out that working through partner networks is comparable to the cost of attracting "direct" customers. So I don’t know if this was the right decision. If the service is really good and useful to people, the most powerful promotion channel is word of mouth.
The main message of the first PR campaigns was formed by the functionality of the service: “It’s great that you can call visitors and communicate with them right on the site.” For Runet 2008, it was an interesting and exciting technology. Journalists were happy to write about us, fortunately, for free. The crisis contributed in addition - companies invested in the growth of sales through the Internet. All this gave us the first customers, including such large ones as Rosgosstrakh. There is another term: "Active sales through the site."
After a while, customers began to appear more and more often, who needed a feasibility study, ROI and KPI calculations. It became clear that we need to offer a new look at our service. After many hours of discussion, a preliminary customer survey and sales analysis, we identified a new feature of our service. Customers like that Marva influences the statistics of visitors leaving the site. The slogan of the new campaign was the call: “60% of visitors leave your site forever. Do not expect that they will call - call them yourself! ". In fact, we, of course, do not know how many visitors leave each specific site. The figure only reflects the fact that mostly they are more than half. But we know that Marva really helps to reduce the percentage of such treatments on average by half. At the same time, you can reduce advertising costs, better understand your visitors and your website, by allocating a certain budget for managers who will work with Marva. In the end, whether it is profitable or not decides each individual client, we are only trying to provide companies with the best tool on the market.
When launching the project, it was not even believed that in 3 years more than 1,500 companies would be our clients. Moreover, the service is used by such well-known companies as Bank Trust, Alarm-Motors, Gdetetodom.ru and Eurowindows. Laura, Petersburg Real Estate, Renaissance Insurance and Top Shop TV shop.
In the development process, we became winners and finalists of many contests: Start-08 from the FPA Assistance Foundation in the NTS, MIPT Innovation Contest, PC Magazine rating, Russian Innovations 2009, Zvorykinsky project and General Director 2010. The participation and victory in these contests contributed significantly to our success. You cannot know in advance what will give you an event, but one thing clings to another, and in general, if you are limited in resources and connections at an early stage, it is better to find time and go this way.
The Bortnik Fund and the Microsoft company helped us a lot in the development of the project. In the Bortnik Fund, I received a grant for the development of the system, and Microsoft provided us with free access to BizSpark software and a unique source of knowledge that helped to deal with such a difficult issue of building high-load web services like clustering. For the successful development of startups, the environment in which they originate is very important. I hope that in Russia in this regard it will continue to warm up.
The origins of the idea
The idea of creating an online consultation system was born in an effort to revive the Internet in 2006. Then we with the team stamped typical sites "turnkey", but I wanted something more. Among our clients were several restaurants, and I suggested that the main page of such sites be an interactive overview of the interior. It seemed original and very functional. A visitor walks through the restaurant right on the site, looks at the menu, communicates with the hostess or the bartender. And so, came the first such order.
Immediately, a fairly simple module was developed that allowed the user to scroll through the panoramic photo in all directions, creating a navigation effect. The photo housed animated elements and interactive tags. When clicking on such a label, the next photo was loaded, moving the user to a new viewpoint.
')
But what to do with the technology of communication? Needed a messenger or something like that, and working through the browser. Then I “laid the first stone” and made a demonstration prototype.
After the success of the first project for the restaurant, we wrote an article in the newspaper Business Petersburg. More precisely, it was not even an article, but an advertising text block called “Reviving the Internet”. We offered restaurants, car dealers and shops to make websites based on our technology.
Whenever I came to the customer, I heard: “A virtual review is a really interesting idea, we will definitely think about it and sometime prepare a budget. But this is your messenger for communication - how much does it cost? We are ready to deliver it even today! ” There were no other options - it was necessary to develop a functional version of the web messenger.
Demand study
Of course, I was lucky to have the possibility of multiple presentations of a product not yet developed to potential customers. If you find such an opportunity, it can remove many of the risks, and give you confidence. After all, if your product is needed every second company, what's the difference that many critics say. For example, the expert council of one “Venture Fund” decided: 1 — such technology cannot be developed and 2 — market size: 10 clients. But I already knew that there would be at least 30 of them, which means that the most important thing is to develop;) Another important point in such “preliminary” presentations to clients is that you can see the project through their eyes. If you listen to them, they themselves will tell you the correct positioning in the consumer market.
Branding
When the system was ready, we thought: “How to call it?”. This question concerned both the new brand and the type of system - the term defining its class (in some cases this is a brief description of the project). After all, if you have developed something fundamentally new, you should think about how people will call this technology or similar resources. It will also help in creating presentations and talking about the project in general. For example, Facebook is a social network, Adriver is an Internet advertising management system, and so on. I would recommend that you consider this point quite thoroughly. In addition, the brand itself is better to start with the same letters as the description. It will simplify the promotion in search engines. I remember one pretty bright example. In St. Petersburg there are two networks of sports clubs - Sportlife and Fitness Huas. If a person is looking for a "sports club", when you enter the first two letters of "SP" - the search prompts Sportlife. But when you enter the letters "FI" search engines advertise for free Fitness House in the options auto-complete.
While writing the top paragraph, I remembered one piece of advice often found in Western materials on the topic of startups: “Start selling your product as soon as possible. Do not be afraid to market the raw product. ” This advice was very useful to me, otherwise we would still probably bring the product to perfection, not daring to launch it.
As for the brand, in the development process we called the project “General Connect”, planning to buy the domain “gc.com” in the future. This name seemed to us too ambitious for a fresh and raw Russian version. It was necessary to simplify it. So in 2008, by combining and flair, the brand Marva was invented. It is often asked what it means. It was already later that we learned that there is such a mountain in the Holy Scripture, or that it is the name of wormwood in Latin. The British at Cambridge said that in English Marva also sounds quite “valid”. But in fact, the brand was coined intuitively and to some extent even mechanically. It looked like this: we need a short title, a maximum of 5 letters, in which there would be at least two vowels. Most commonly known to us global and Russian companies are named with the letter M. For example, “Microsoft”, “Macdonalds”, “Mercedes”, “M.Video” and “Magnit” supermarkets. The domain “marva.com” was busy, and we decided to postpone the issue of an international brand until better times. In case you choose the “talking title”, you may find the resource www.hugedomains.com useful.
Regarding the type of system, when analyzing foreign markets, we are confronted with the terms “Live support” or “Live chat”. By the way, one funny case is connected with the prefix “Live”. When I was in negotiations with the ABRT venture fund, I was corrected by its founder Ratmir Timashev. “Not LIVE chat, but LIVE chat,” he said. “This is not a verb LIVE, but the word LIVE. So LIVE. It turns out that we ourselves did not know what it was that we developed. What can we expect from users in this case? Then I decided to invent a Russian term. The most simple and understandable. Desirable, rather general. Online consultant. So we called the company, hoping to consolidate its position in the search engines. And we were lucky, because this name has become a household name today, denoting a whole class of such decisions.
Promotion
Thinking about the technologies of service advancement, from the very beginning we focused on sales through partners. In practice, however, it turns out that working through partner networks is comparable to the cost of attracting "direct" customers. So I don’t know if this was the right decision. If the service is really good and useful to people, the most powerful promotion channel is word of mouth.
The main message of the first PR campaigns was formed by the functionality of the service: “It’s great that you can call visitors and communicate with them right on the site.” For Runet 2008, it was an interesting and exciting technology. Journalists were happy to write about us, fortunately, for free. The crisis contributed in addition - companies invested in the growth of sales through the Internet. All this gave us the first customers, including such large ones as Rosgosstrakh. There is another term: "Active sales through the site."
After a while, customers began to appear more and more often, who needed a feasibility study, ROI and KPI calculations. It became clear that we need to offer a new look at our service. After many hours of discussion, a preliminary customer survey and sales analysis, we identified a new feature of our service. Customers like that Marva influences the statistics of visitors leaving the site. The slogan of the new campaign was the call: “60% of visitors leave your site forever. Do not expect that they will call - call them yourself! ". In fact, we, of course, do not know how many visitors leave each specific site. The figure only reflects the fact that mostly they are more than half. But we know that Marva really helps to reduce the percentage of such treatments on average by half. At the same time, you can reduce advertising costs, better understand your visitors and your website, by allocating a certain budget for managers who will work with Marva. In the end, whether it is profitable or not decides each individual client, we are only trying to provide companies with the best tool on the market.
When launching the project, it was not even believed that in 3 years more than 1,500 companies would be our clients. Moreover, the service is used by such well-known companies as Bank Trust, Alarm-Motors, Gdetetodom.ru and Eurowindows. Laura, Petersburg Real Estate, Renaissance Insurance and Top Shop TV shop.
In the development process, we became winners and finalists of many contests: Start-08 from the FPA Assistance Foundation in the NTS, MIPT Innovation Contest, PC Magazine rating, Russian Innovations 2009, Zvorykinsky project and General Director 2010. The participation and victory in these contests contributed significantly to our success. You cannot know in advance what will give you an event, but one thing clings to another, and in general, if you are limited in resources and connections at an early stage, it is better to find time and go this way.
The Bortnik Fund and the Microsoft company helped us a lot in the development of the project. In the Bortnik Fund, I received a grant for the development of the system, and Microsoft provided us with free access to BizSpark software and a unique source of knowledge that helped to deal with such a difficult issue of building high-load web services like clustering. For the successful development of startups, the environment in which they originate is very important. I hope that in Russia in this regard it will continue to warm up.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/133318/
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