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The story of a Ural startup



I decided to write a detailed story (serious, despite the picture) about how our 9facts project appeared and developed, how we presented it to Steve Blanca , participated in the All-Russian Innovation Convention and two StartupPoint , as well as all the problems with which faced our team. The story is still far from complete - perhaps, we now have the most difficult and dramatic period: we already know what does not work, and it’s pretty clear which way we should move, but there’s not much time to make decisions, since the first ones "Our investment is coming to an end. I think this story is quite typical for a startup.

Get ready - the story will be long, but I will try to make it interesting.

Introduction


9facts is a service that allows users to compare virtually any achievements among various groups of people (friends, residents of a city or country, university students, etc.).
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Show a snapshot of the first page 9facts whole

Using 9facts, you can find out who is in Yekaterinburg:
I gave links to tops for Yekaterinburg just because our team is in this city. The service continuously updates achievement ratings for any cities, regions, countries, groups of people (for example, your university, employees of your company or a group of your friends) and keywords.

Achievements (or rather, the facts) can be obtained from third-party services automatically, as well as add them manually. We have not yet opened an API that allows any sites and devices to send facts to 9facts, but we have built-in support for the most popular services (Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, RescueTime, etc.).

In addition, they will soon earn money on the service [removed the spoiler, since the whole section “Pivot” is devoted to this topic - perhaps this is its most interesting feature.

Idea


The 9facts idea arose in April of this year - almost immediately after the end of Startup Weekend Ekaterinburg , where I presented my other idea - the Agile-fu project. Agile-fu was one of the winners of the weekend - IMO, it was the most developed project, among others. As a result, I received an investment proposal from Arkady Moreynis , although it still seemed to me that this idea could be somewhat improved - I really wanted to turn the service into something really massive. Perhaps, because on Sunday, April 10, we, marking this small victory in the company with a couple of classmates, came to the conclusion that Agile-fu is a completely niche service.

On Monday, having broken my head a little, I came to understand that the key Agile-fu “trick” is not at all in that it collects data to evaluate the effectiveness, but in the fact that it can show the results of evaluations in the same way as people would like to see them - i.e. show ratings to users by several independent parameters related to their effectiveness. It became clear that the emphasis should be placed on this - people like to compare themselves with others, show off achievements, etc. Moreover, it is also interesting for companies - having a universal tool for comparing their employees, they could use it as a means for competitive motivation.

So, it is interesting to compare not a specific set of indicators, but arbitrary achievements of people. It was April 11th - the very next day after the end of Startup Weekend. I remembered well that after such an “insight” I literally immediately called a friend with whom we were discussing the service on Sunday, and spoke about the new idea. He liked everything (and he is a good critic) - so I received the first confirmation that the service for mass comparison of people on a completely arbitrary set of metrics is not as crazy an idea as it may seem at first glance.

Investor search


The most serious moment has come: the search for the first investor. My own company at that time already financed one internal project, so we practically did not have the money for a good launch. I also did not want to work on a prototype for a long time: the competition in the modern world is incredibly high. But the main reason was still the fact that investors, as a rule, can give a more sober assessment of what is intended, and their cash money is the most important indicator of what the project should be taken.

On the same day, I sent a presentation of the new project (it was clear that this was not Agile-fu at all) to Leonid Volkov.

A logical question: "why not Arcadia Moreinis?" - the answer to it is complex, but on the whole it is this: I communicated with Leonid much longer, and believed (as it turned out correctly) that we had a trusting relationship, and therefore I can calmly send him a description without fear that it will go to third parties, even if we can not agree. I could also say only good things about Arcadia - no doubt, his reputation as an investor is much higher. But since we communicated significantly less, Arkady lost Leonid in terms of mutual trust. Probably, I was slightly scared away by “the idea is not worth anything” (in this he, by the way, is 99.99% right) and “why should I not finance another team for the same money that comes to me with the same idea?”. In addition, I knew about the parameters of Arkady's transactions, and I really didn’t want to give a significant share of the project at the very first step - I don’t think that this is very good . On the other hand, for startups in Russia, its conditions are completely adequate.

Leonid was in the USA at that time, but he answered on the same day — he liked the idea immediately. I liked both the scope (the whole world, and not only Russia), and the novelty - by the way, at that time I still didn’t really know if there was anything like that. There was almost complete certainty that no (“otherwise we would use it!”), But seriously I haven’t checked it yet. In the first letter I asked a direct question to Leonid: is he ready to invest in such a project? He replied that he was ready to discuss this as soon as he returned to Yekaterinburg, which was a very positive signal that the idea should be worked out to the end - in simple terms, to describe everything in detail, and even better to make a prototype UI (I use free online for this version of Balsamiq ) and write the most important user stories.

The key problem at the time sounded like this: how to describe the most diverse achievements? I needed something simple to do that. Soon a concept was born that is very similar to the one that is now being implemented in 9facts: an achievement description is a template that is filled with parameters (mostly with terms from a large taxonomy) and contains a metric that allows you to compare achievements that are parameterized in the same way. Later it turned out that the idea with keywords is also good in that it allows us to select the templates qualitatively in the text of the fact, and moreover, to identify the whole categories to which the fact relates. Knowing that a specific parameter of a template is a car brand, we can confidently say that it will not be suitable for describing a fact in the text of which a car brand does not appear. The same applies to measures - a pattern implying the existence of a measure "speed" is not suitable for describing a fact in which it is long.

"And the service should have a very simple API that allows anyone to" fill in "almost arbitrary facts about people." - it opened up quite fantastic possibilities.

So, the 9facts outlines crystallized gradually. Then I rummaged through the entire Internet in search of something similar to what I had invented. Nothing like this could not be found. All that is is niche services that solve a similar problem for one or two types of facts. In addition, it turned out that no one is building “local” ratings - there are practically none on the web. There are global ratings (a typical example is the Stack Overflow user rating ), but it’s clear that people would be interested to know their place in a similar rating by country, city, school or university.

Leonid left a preliminary description of this concept. I will quote his answer in full:
The autowashing of positive facts about a person is a mega-idea. I really like that such a simple concept crystallized in the end. In the end, the practical any human activity is reflected in the form of facts that can be collected in one or another established format. "Has two dogs." "Flew over the year more than 100 thousand miles." "Published 10 articles." "Very much appreciated by colleagues." And I agree that many of these facts about the modern "electronic" person can already be collected and confirmed automatically.
Another day of active correspondence and communication via Skype passed, and I received a clear investment offer from Leonid. There was no personal meeting - however, we met and communicated before, so in fact it was not very important. But anyway, it was awesome - the idea (April 11), two days, and - ta-da! - I offer real money for its implementation (April 13)!

Further events began to develop rapidly: we negotiated with Leonid on investment conditions, at the same time I began to look for investors for a project in the USA (obviously, conditions can be improved only when there is competition among investors). It turned out that with investors in the United States everything is somewhat more complicated than it seemed to me at the very beginning: on the one hand, I received some indirect evidence that the chances of finding money there are very high. On the other hand, in order to get them there, you have to be there. And not just to be, but to do a project in the USA - otherwise they will not talk to us. It became clear that this would delay the start of work for at least 2-3 months.

The situation was a stalemate: on the one hand, I wanted to do everything as quickly as possible (I wrote above why); on the other hand, I wanted to improve the investment conditions, but for this I had to sacrifice speed. It seemed to have to choose one of two things.

Fortunately, everything was resolved very well: both I and Leonid went to mutual concessions - as a result we received more expensive, but also more “quick” money .

It should be said that monetization didn’t really worry me or Leonid at that moment - it was clear that the service that stores key facts about people can be monetized in a variety of ways, and the market will be large enough in any of the options. In the presentations, I gave at least 5 options for monetization, but we did not seriously discuss any of them.

Prototype


In May, I was engaged in three major tasks:
The second investor was my own company. More precisely, based by me - at that time I was one of its 3 co-founders. Thus, in total, we "raised" $ 70K:
The original plan was:
It should immediately say that everything went completely wrong. Details - later, but for now about how we rather quickly put together a good team:
Not all of these people worked on the project full time. However, key people worked practically around the clock, so I think, on average, 7-8 full-time developers actually worked on the project.

It would seem that 8 people are a big enough team to do everything very quickly. However, things didn’t go as smoothly as we would like: at the end of August (about 3 months after I started participating in the development at 100%), we had something that very vaguely resembled modern 9facts:
There were no ratings, no groups, no likes, no confirmations - in fact, there was nothing that made it clear why this thing was needed at all. Oh, yes - since there were a lot of us, the work was often parallelized, and therefore there were unfinished parts in the application - access to them was simply blocked at the time of release.

Approximately 2 weeks before 09.09, we stopped making new features, switching only to testing and fixing problems. On the ninth of September it became clear that all of them could not be fixed in the remaining hours. As a result, we posted everything "as is", and the project's blog has the first record that the release took place on the planned date. The time of publication of this record is two minutes 2 minutes 10 September. I joked that it was good that Yekaterinburg time.

The next two days (ie, the whole weekend) we fixed the remaining problems. The 9facts prototype, which did not fall out of the blue, was born closer to September 12th.

Start-up Rocket and presentation to Steve Blanca


I learned about the Start-up Rocket in August - it was clear that we really need to get on it. And moreover, we have all the chances for this:
I applied for participation at the end of August - then we didn’t have a prototype yet. But nevertheless, by the time the commission began to select projects, it had appeared. In addition, for some reason, there was a delay on the side of the commission with the actual selection process - it was completed only on Monday, September 12. Late that night, I received a call from a person from StartupPoint who told me that we were selected with 9facts. Later, I learned that we passed precisely because of the guys from StartupPoint — they liked both the scale and the idea itself, and as a result they somehow defended us in front of colleagues.

The next day I flew to Moscow. On Thursday, there was a trial presentation of the project at the PwC office - it seemed to me that everything went smoothly there. Later, I realized that everything was completely wrong - the fact is that I was not able to convey the essence of what we are doing in the allotted 5 minutes (real time for the presentation), but it turned out very well to do it in the next 25 minutes of conversation with PwC representatives. By the way, the trial presentation was in English, but I’m writing “not bad, but I’m noticeably worse,” somehow got out. I remember that there were no serious interferences when communicating.

On the day of the presentation, I was terribly nervous, although I rehearsed my speech for more than 6 hours, making more than 60 repetitions. In addition, I spoke first, i.e. I did not know what questions I should wait for, and how everything will be, to be honest.

In 5 minutes I told everything I had planned - not too smoothly, but everything seemed to be quite acceptable. Steve was listening, writing something, and occasionally looking up at the screen - it was clear that for the most part he was busy with something of his own. Nevertheless, at the end of the presentation, he reduced all my efforts to nothing with just two questions:
- Do you already have users? - a five-second pause, and I say:
- No, we don't have them yet.

In fact, at that moment we had about 150 users, and I had to say this, since not all the participants could even boast of it. However, we didn’t draw conclusions from what these users do (as I understood later, the next question could be about that), so even if I said yes, the next question would have put me anyway to a dead end.

Steve's second question was:
- Do you know Klout service? It seems to me that what you are doing is very similar to this project.
- No, I hear about him for the first time.

I really could not answer this question better, because I did not know what was going on. No more questions were asked - the public had an opinion that we were doing a clone of some famous project that Steve knows about, and the interest was gone.

I immediately sat down to find out what Klout is and how could I not know about the competitor. I found out that Klout has nothing to do with us - this is a service that tries to evaluate your network impact by the way users react to the messages you post, and this rating is more informative than, for example, the number of your followers on Twitter, because many can follow you, but very few of you are really interesting. It is clear that this is not 9facts, although there is something in common with us. Probably, only that we also collect from met-networks different metrics that characterize you, and compare them. However, we do this for each of the metrics individually, and moreover, we are not at all limited to social networks - with the same success we can compare your reputation at Stack Overflow, your height, weight, or the amount of alcohol you have drunk today.

Why did Steve decide we were like Klout? Probably because the slide about which external services we already support was one of the most striking, or because during his discussion I said a lot of keywords that settled in Steve’s head. Or maybe he just listened to me only at the moment of the slide show - to say that it was actually difficult, but one thing was clear: I did not manage to convey the essence of what we are doing, neither to Steve, nor to the audience.

It was an epic file that had to be corrected somehow. I approached Steve one of the first ones already at the reception after the event, and directly asked him if he would be ready to present us to investors in the US if he would like our project in the next 5 minutes. Steve asked: “Ok, what is your startup?”, And I told everything in my own words, at the same time touching on the topic of Klout. It turned out that it was much easier to talk with him personally - he listened very carefully, considered what he heard and asked very specific questions. Now it’s hard to remember everything, but the key questions were:
“Why do you think that someone needs this?”
- Give an example of your target audience?
- Another example?
- How do you plan to market the product?

Finally, Steve asked:
- Ok, how much money you raise? - I began to frantically think how to say $ 350K in English, but in the end I hurried and said:
- $ 40K
- Really?
- Oh, sorry, $ 400K
- Ok, how much is this in Rubles?
- About 10 millions - I thought then clearly not very
- I just want to calculate this :)

After a couple more minutes of conversation, Steve suggested recording his e-mail. In addition, he said that he was ready to help us with the introductions and talked about when and where he would be in the United States soon, and also said that he does not mind meeting again - apparently, in response to my reply to that I plan to visit the United States in the coming month.

It is clear that I was beside myself with delight - "Steve Blank promised to help us intro in the USA!" - then I thought that the next round of investing was sooo close. As it turned out, in vain - read about it further.

Presentations of all participants of the Start-up Rocket can be viewed here (it seems that only SpeakToIt presentations are missing).

Alpha release, first problems


Our further actions I saw something like this:
However, the first trouble happened where we did not expect it at all: on September 23, Facebook announced the Open Graph API. It became clear that everything that we did in terms of fixing the facts of users (or activities in terms of Facebook), lost its uniqueness, since Facebook would make all this mass much earlier. And accordingly, we will have to change both our far-reaching plans and presentation materials for investors.

We decided that it makes sense to focus on:
The development of all this took much more time than planned - we released an update on November 10, although we planned to do it on October 10. It was very unpleasant - a large enough team worked on the project, and every month it cost us about $ 13K. The means at our disposal came to an end.

As soon as we did, I wrote to Steve Blanca, and also asked him to be my friend on Facebook and LinkedIn. He answered only the third message - at that time he was giving lectures in New York, and, judging by the context, he could not answer right away. However, all he promised was to read our Executive Summary and send it further if he finds it interesting. Those.in fact, nothing concrete - I quickly realized that his answer meant roughly the same thing as the famous "Don't call us, you call you". After that, I didn’t write to him, although I think I’ll write again after we have an obvious traction. I have a 100% feeling that traction, as a result of analysis and adaptation to the actions of users, is exactly what it is waiting for. He writes, speaks about it, and this is exactly what many other investors are waiting for.

Ok, back to the service. The most important and unpleasant indicator for us was that a week after the launch of alpha we didn’t have any significant user growth, and moreover, there was a feeling that even if we chased a lot of users there, the service would cease to be for each of them interesting quickly enough: ok, several times they will share their mega ratings in social networks, they will call several friends, and what's next is not clear. From the providers of facts, for which it makes sense to observe constantly, we only had RescueTime; It’s not very interesting to watch your and other people's reputation on Stack Overflow, since significant changes happen rarely there.

However, it was clear that these problems simply would not exist if we had many users and applications that support our API (which hasn’t been there yet). There was a feeling that we were faced with the classic problem of chicken and eggs.

By the way, there were almost no viral features at the time of launching alpha - they are not there even at the time of this writing. It would seem that one could just start adding them, evaluate the result, and move on, slightly adjusting the direction. Not a bad option, given that we had a whole list of what should be implemented in this part:
However, most of all I liked the other version of the development of the service, significantly changing its concept. I will tell about it in the "Pivot" section - first I want to tell you about my experience of participating in StartPoint.

StartPoint


I participated in two Startpoints - the 30th point in Moscow and the 4th point in Yekaterinburg , making two-minute presentations of 9facts. The conclusions in both cases are about the same:
I think the following rule for assessing the quality of your presentation is applicable:
Summary: I highly recommend that you try to tell about your project at one of the points. If they understand you (i.e., you get more than a third of the maximum votes cast by someone), then the investor will probably understand you. If not, you need to change something. Those presenters who scored the minimum, as a rule, made completely gross mistakes.

Pivot, or a radical change in the concept of service


At the end of November, I had a good idea about which direction we should go. An internal dialogue led to its appearance:
- What is our biggest problem now?
- No users.
- Is our service useful for users now?
- Yes, although it cannot be said that it is obvious to every user immediately. In addition, it is not obvious how useful it is to the user in the long term.
- Why is its usefulness not immediately apparent?
- All he gives you now is local ratings plus one more confirmation of your high results (at best). Our service also collects many results in one place. Someone is interested, of course, but it is clear that not everyone is interested in this.
— , ?
— , . Klout. , . — , - , .
— , ?
— .

So, what can significantly increase the value of the service in the eyes of new users? Obviously a direct benefit. More precisely, it is obvious when you already have an idea of ​​how exactly you can interest all parties in the implementation of the plan, which will also lead to the emergence of a direct benefit for the users themselves. And it is not at all obvious when you do not know exactly how to achieve this.

Here is the updated 9facts concept:

Show the layout of the next version of 9facts entirely.

Such an approach to the promotion and positioning of the service is also good because the steps to implement it are completely transparent:
In this situation, I was most struck by how strongly the question of promoting the service is related to the question of monetization: until a certain moment we thought that monetization was completely unimportant for us in the next year or two - it’s just how many new users we can attract . And suddenly we realized that the number of users that we can attract is directly related to how much money those same users can save thanks to us! The more famous sellers and brands we attract, and the more interesting discounts and gifts they can offer, the more we will have users. No magic

Yes, for some time the service will be free for sellers and manufacturers of goods, but for us it practically does not change anything: the value of 9facts is determined solely by its audience and turnover. By the way, at that moment it became clear to us what the peak cost of such a service could be - we can probably count on 5-10% of the cost of Groupon if we do everything really quickly and efficiently.

And I could not help but pay attention to the following fact: judging by the reports of Startup Genome, each startup, on average, 1 time significantly changes its concept. It was quite obvious that now was the moment for us - we had to change in order to turn into what users want to see. And I really hoped that we correctly guessed the direction of our transformation.

With these positive thoughts, I went to bed on Monday, November 28th. I couldn’t fall asleep that evening - His Majesty Chance turned all my plans over.

All-Russian Innovation Convention - Dave McClure, Garry Tan (YC), Harj Tagger (YC), Peter Vesterbacka (Angry Birds) and other interesting people


Before going to bed, I decided to take a look at Facebook, where I found this offer by Vitaly Akimov . It's funny that I usually do not follow Facebook continuously - I look there once or twice a day. But it turned out that I read Vitaly's message at the same moment when it was published, and almost immediately sent him an answer, in which he briefly described our new marketing strategy and my desire to participate in the convention.

At that moment I had no idea what exactly I would need to do there, how the event would take place and whether I would even have the opportunity to make a presentation. But the list of speakers and guestsI was interested right away - we were registered on AngelList, and I knew that Dave McClure and Garry Tan are extremely well-known investors. It was clear that the chance is very unique, and it can not be lost. In addition, I was already in Digital October, and I knew well that at least I would be able to get to it by the morning of Moscow (then it was about 23 hours in Yekaterinburg).

Vitaly confirmed our participation fairly quickly - probably as soon as he read my message. Probably, I was just the first of those who wrote to him - already in Digital October it turned out that he did not read my message carefully, i.e. it was pure luck.

In the morning I was in Moscow. At the entrance to Digital October there was a rather long queue for registration - it became clear that there would be a lot of guests and participants. I checked in a little late - there was a hitch related to the fact that they invited me only yesterday, and went where my eyes were. I did not have the program of the event - as I understood, the organizers distributed all its circulation the day before.

In the great hall was the opening of the convention. Broadcast from this room(see the first entry) was conducted on many other screens, located both in the hall and in smaller rooms. The event was opened by Steve Wozniak and ... Vasily Yakimenko. I won’t be much mistaken if I say that for me it’s about the same thing as seeing Henry Ford and Joseph Goebbels speaking at the same time. By the way, in general, the event cannot be called politicized - everything that was said from the stage related to anything, but not to politics. The organizers made a lot of effort in order to make it as interesting as possible for participants and guests, for which they thank you so much.

At the same time, I found that the top investors from the United States — Dave McClure, Garry Tan, and others — are located on the stage next to the bar counter. It turned out that they have some very interesting sections in English, and they will all take place in this part of Digital October. And the funniest thing was that it was in this part that there were a lot of empty seats, although there were only ~ 70 chairs around the stage. It seems that most of those present either didn’t imagine what kind of people they were, or didn’t really understand live English.

As a result, I spent most of my time in this part of the hall, talking to investors and startups that I found interesting in the breaks. It turned out that all the partners of YC are completely friendly and pleasant people who are no different from most people in appearance. If you spoke to them on the street, I would put 1000 to one that you would not recognize in them investors, who valued several thousand startups a year, and investing in dozens.

And the most colorful figure was, perhaps, Dave McClure - he was the only one who did not hesitate, and periodically switched to the mat. In general, he was simply the most emotional, and if he was cursing, then he was cheerful and appropriate. By the way, I didn’t communicate with him - at the very beginning he said from the stage that all this wouldn’t work with great probability: “Only the recommendations will work, so you shouldn’t bore me with pitches. Just imagine how many I hear every day, and how much it tires me sometimes "- if I remember correctly, the meaning of his words was like this. And I decided that it would be no worse if I talked to everyone else - if we make a really worthwhile product, I will find out about it anyway.

It makes no sense to talk about everything that happened on the stage - you can see for yourself.a full record of this (see the second video; by the way, there is also a version with translation into Russian). And I will tell you about the most important general conclusions from what I saw and heard in the next section.

In the meantime, I was able to find out about our new idea in the breaks:
By the way, emails and contacts willingly gave everything. But I think in the coming days, it only makes sense to send an offer to two of the investors with whom I spoke. In order to start communicating with YC or Dave McClure partners, we need to move forward with our plans a little further.

In addition, I met the authors of three interesting startups:That's all. It’s too early to write about any results of a visit to iConvention, but I think I can tell you everything in a couple of months.

findings


About planning, launching and promoting startups


1. You must do everything to start as early as possible and begin to analyze the real needs of your customers.

All your plans are based on hypotheses, most of which are not tested by the market. And early prototype production is often the best (and sometimes the only) way to test them.

"There are no facts inside your building, so get outside!" - such a signature was left by Steve Blank on each copy of his “Four Steps to Illumination” , presented to the participants of the Start-up Rocket. She is about that.

2. It is very important that the money that you "raised" during the first round should be enough not only to develop and launch a prototype, but also to demonstrate that your product has a market. You just have to show traction, otherwise the next investor will be very, very difficult to find.

Perhaps this is the most important conclusion I have received over the past couple of months of work on 9facts. We "raised" the amount, which was enough for the development and launch of 9facts, but ... We had almost no reserves, and the original plan was too optimistic. And this means that I will have to spend much more time searching for money right now, and probably pay more for it than I would like.

I think in the future we need to keep in mind that in almost 100% of cases, the original idea of ​​a startup degenerates into something else, but this “something else” cannot be obtained without seeing your potential customers and not offering them something that they can start using. The first version of the product you created is the first step towards customers, which is necessary in any case. But the important thing is that it is not the last: it’s likely that you will not do what your customers want to use en masse. So, you must have a reserve of resources for adaptation.

My recommendation is as follows: plan that the amount raised during the first round should last about 1 year of development (+ a small amount of progress). But you have to start as soon as possible. If it works out - after 1 month, if not - after 2, 3, 4 ... I think ~ 6 months after the start of work is the latest acceptable time limit.

The longer you pull the launch, the more unnecessary functionality you risk to do, and the less adaptation resources you have left.

3. “Give them a product and they will come” does not work for IT startups

This statement we checked in our own skin. It seemed to us that we are doing a new and interesting thing, which means there must be some share of users on the web who will go to us on their own and immediately. As a result, we have practically not been engaged in promotion so far: announcements in the local network media and mailings on the client base X-tensive.com - that's all that has been done.

Now it is clear to us that it was pointless to promote the service. It was worth considering at least the fact that so far there has not been a single English-language service that has become extremely popular in Russia. I already wrote that we found a solution, and now we are engaged in its implementation. But generally speaking, one could guess this without tests. If we took this path right away, probably in October we could launch what we are planning to launch in January.

So, very simple, but very difficult in terms of implementation advice: think about how to attract users to your resource. You will have to do more than just an interesting product: you must ensure that everyone blows about it, and especially those who can refer you to the users you need. And they will be ready to talk about you in only two cases:
If you find a working promotion channel for several months, you will have an excellent traction. If not - you just run out of money.

4. It is important to believe in what you are doing, but by no means blindly.

Sooner or later, but you have to adapt. And if this is not done on time, your startup will most likely die.

On the other hand, at each moment in time you must firmly know what exactly you are doing now, and why. Do not adjust your goals too often, otherwise you just will not come anywhere. And for this you need to believe that you have chosen the right path. But not blindly!

5. Do whatever it takes to reach your customers and find your market. All that is required.

I seriously thought about the significance of this statement when we decided to radically change the service.
If you’re looking for a product that’s been successful, it’s always a good deal. CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.

Do whatever is required to get to product / market fit. If you’re looking for your product, you’re reforming your .

- Marc Andreessen, Founder, Netscape

6. Criticism is different

I already wrote that ordinary people and investors evaluate projects completely differently. You will have to learn to filter all criticism and assessments, highlighting the most important things from the general flow.

My filtering rule is quite simple - attention to specific criticism should be proportional to:
Finally, be prepared for the fact that there will always be people willing to spend incredible efforts to prove to you that nothing will work out for you - just to say once again: “Well, I told you so!”. Most often this is not an expert assessment:

About investors


1. Traction - this is almost all that interests the "big" investors.

This was discussed many times both from the iConvention scene, and during conversations during the breaks. What is traction? These are strong indicators that your project will “fly up”. Examples of such indicators are the explosive growth of income or user base. But in general, traction is all that says that your startup is moving fast in the right direction. Signing a contract with a major player in the market (“if they need it, they probably need it a lot”), attracting a well-known investor is all traction.

If you do not have traction, only your track record, track records of co-founders, good references, etc. can help you.

2. There are two types of startups: those that run for investors, and those that investors themselves run for. Traction is all that distinguishes the second type from the first.

This is another formulation of the first paragraph, and most likely, it is somewhat closer to reality. Investors are ready to unite with each other to increase the amount of investment, to make a deal with a higher valuation of value and to do a lot of other concessions for you, if you have traction.

Conversely, you can spend all your time searching for them, but there will be no result until you show a traction.

3. The fact that “big” investors are exclusively interested in global projects is a myth

In fact, the size of the market share and its characteristics are important. If it is clear that it is large enough, and your chances of gaining a foothold on it are very high, you will probably be able to interest the investor. But if the market is small, or there is high competition in it, you will most likely be told no.

An example of a project confirming this conclusion is ostrovok.ru.

4. They also do not care in which country the project founders are located.

Yes, it is, and this was also said many times from the stage. The country in which the company is located now does not play any role, all other things being equal, and the startup Danila Koziatnikova (by the way, he hails from Angarsk) is a vivid confirmation of this.

5. English!

If you want to find investors outside of the Russian Federation - without this, simply nothing. Investors hate to communicate through a translator - it takes at least three times more time, and besides, there is no certainty that you hear exactly what the other side is saying. Imagine that you have only two minutes, and estimate how much time the translation will eat.

In addition, if you yourself can not submit your project, you probably will not be able to communicate with customers - that's how investors look at it.

Here is an example from real life: 3 projects on Start-up Rocket presented themselves as translators, and the main presentation went very smoothly. But over the next 5 minutes, their authors managed to answer only 2-3 questions; and the most unpleasant was that after the main part all the translators left, and as a result, the authors of the relevant projects lost the opportunity to communicate with Steve and other interesting people. But the rest of the startups enjoyed it with pleasure, so that each of them had noticeably more than 10 minutes allotted for the presentation in the framework of the main part.

6. Elevator pitch, made for the investor personally, often works better than the presentation at the competition

This is my personal experience. I think the fact is that in personal communication you can remove a lot of questions right away, and in addition, you can correct the pitch by evaluating the emotional reaction of the interlocutor. For example, if you see that the last phrase you said caused bewilderment, you can give a more detailed explanation. Conversely, if everything goes smoothly, you can safely move on, skipping less important details. ^ ^ On the other hand, the ability to make excellent presentations is an incredibly useful skill.

Conclusion


I am grateful to everyone who read this opus to the end - it seems that I have never written such an amount of text before. I really wanted to write briefly about everything, but for some reason it didn’t work out - it’s still difficult to squeeze in several paragraphs for almost 8 months of my life. Apparently, the additions will be brief.

Finally - a small instruction for those who decide to compare themselves with others at 9facts :
I will be glad to any of your questions and comments. And even more interesting ideas about improving or promoting 9facts.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/134054/

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