1 minute for good

Most startups in Runet pursue a “simple” goal - to make the world a better place, and, in the meantime, to earn N millions of dollars for their creator. But in this topic we will focus on the project, which focused only on the first component.

Charity startup 1minute.ru was launched on November 14th. Its essence is that the user spends one minute of his time, for example, he watches a video paid by the advertiser, and the funds received for this action go to give gifts to children or other good deeds. The user himself does not spend money. One of the first advertisers was Pushkino Bank, Comdi Internet broadcasting service, Google search engine and several other companies.

Now the first action is going on - funds are being raised for New Year presents for pupils of 37 orphanages. Over the past three weeks since the start of the action, more than 9,000 people took part in the project, spending a total of more than 10,000 minutes on the proposed actions. The funds received are already enough for 624 gifts (at the time of writing the topic). These numbers are constantly increasing. You can follow them on the online counters on the site.
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You also have the opportunity to spend 1 minute of your time for good. To do this, just go to 1minute.ru and perform one of the proposed actions.

Under the cut interview with one of the creators of the project - Lev Grunin ( Orangeleo ), who was the first developer of the project, and now switched to its marketing. He talks about the birth of an idea, the search for money for it, about attracting traffic and the prospects of the project.

Yuri Bryzgalov: Leo, when was the idea of ​​the project born?
Lev Grunin: The idea was born in February 2011 at the innovative practice of the FIVT (Faculty of Innovations and High Technologies of the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute). In the US, there is a similar project Social Vibe , which made a very cool team. They have gathered tens of millions of Facebook users. From February to May, in parallel with our studies, we made a prototype of the service, and thought about the general idea. For example, the first name was He-Ad, abbreviated from Help Advertising. The concept of “1 minute for good” was not born immediately.

YB: We met at the Technovtsy Cup, where you had a beautiful stand and a vigorous team in branded T-shirts. The site looks very nice. A reasonable question arises - for what means does the project exist?
LG: Since May 2011, we went with a prototype for investors. But we were told: “Guys, you need to remake the prototype. We can offer something, but it will be another company in which you will be hired employees. ” After an unsuccessful search, the command faded out. A break was taken for the summer.

In the fall, we applied for participation in the MIPT university competition. They took 3rd place on it and received a grant of 200 thousand rubles. With this money, a designer and programmer were hired, a company registration process was launched, and much more. In just two weeks, the project site was made and partners were found. As a result, on November 14, our first action was launched together with the charity foundation “ Mercy ”.

We decided that during the first campaign we would transfer 100% of our earnings to charity. But in the future we will have to include an element of monetization for the payment of hired workers, management of accounting, the legal part of the project, but the same hosting will need to pay. While we can not say exactly how this will happen, but there is such a need.

YB: How effective was the project in terms of generating money?
LG: From the moment of launch, about 25,000 unique users have arrived. They performed about 10,000 actions. The funds received from advertisers will be enough to purchase at wholesale prices more than 600 gifts. These are “sweet sets” for the New Year and more valuable gifts for children from orphanage №48. We went there ourselves and asked the children to write their wishes to Santa Claus (photos of the children and their wishes are shown on the main page of the project).

YB: Why do you give “sweet sets” instead of supporting individual children?
LG: Now it’s difficult for us to predict how much we can collect in a month. For example, you negotiate with a large resource, it publishes something, and there is a peak when 50-60 gifts are received per day. But tomorrow this peak may not be. And if we agree to support an individual child, we must allocate a fixed amount every month - this is a big responsibility. Therefore, we decided to take something that can be easily shown, in which there is no dirty trick and which is nice for children.

YB: I want to return to the site. Where do visitors come from? And what percentage of conversion for different actions?
LG: A large percentage of people switch from social networks. About 40-50% of them perform actions on the site, for example, follow a link or download a browser. Every fourth "likes" project. In his "likes" come another 1-2 people.

YB: What are the plans for the development of the project?
LG: We want to provide advertisers with more opportunities for advertising targeting. To do this, we want to write social networking applications that will take data about the user from his profile. We want users to watch ads that they are interested in, so that everyone can bring not 1-2 gifts, but 10 and more.

In addition, we plan to rewrite the technical platform. Today, our video player is working on a flash, but it is planned to switch to HTML5, so that owners of Apple devices can freely use the service. Also, new elements of design and functionality are constantly added, based on feedback from users, statistics of views and heat map of clicks.

Well and, by itself, to carry out new actions.

YB: When is the next action planned?
LG: The current action ends on December 25th. Then, most likely, there will be a pause for the preparation of the next one, and the new action will begin after the New Year.