Hello, we are looking for an investor

Under the cat you will find a story about the past, present and future of the project.

Growth, prioritization, monetization plans.

In the comments ready to answer your questions.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Development

Before nekto.me, I tried to raise several completely different startups, but almost all of them, for one reason or another, did not meet the expectations. This was due, primarily, to my inexperience.

I did a lot of things wrong, but one of the main mistakes was to make a project with partners, divided into shares.

It ends is trite - one of the partners is distracted, changes priorities, loses enthusiasm and pulls the project to nowhere. In general, I will not dwell on this moment. Theme for a separate post.

Launching nekto.me, I, taught by experience, wanted to share a percentage with programmers.

It was the right decision, because over time the enthusiasm disappeared at all.



For all the time more than 20 freelancers had a hand in the project.

Most of them were from Ukraine or from the average population of Russian cities.

')

In general, the project development strategy on the Internet should be very flexible, because often they are dying because of the inability to adapt to rapidly changing realities.

At launch, the project was planned as a simple independent addition to existing social networks, but over time I realized that it was better to expand. Addition - a temporary thing.

Six months after the start, blogs and photos, private messages, updates were launched ...

The project gradually acquired various services and turned into a separate portal.



The first additional service was an anonymous chat.

I tried to make it myself, using the source code of the English-language chat Omegle.com

Russified, installed, disappointed. These sources were either from the beta version of Omegle, or did not refer to it at all, because they worked using mySQL and were inadequately resource-intensive.

Messages were not even deleted from the database!

Realizing that the source version is not suitable, I decided to find a performer on the freelance exchange.

A programmer from Ulyanovsk responded, who was in his sixth decade :)

Of course, I was skeptical, but he implemented the required functions in the stipulated time frame.

Chat was written on the same php + mysql. Not fun, but for starters it was enough.

Then, the programmer, as often happens, suddenly disappeared.

Due to the flaws of the first version, I had to rewrite everything from scratch.

Now the chat is written in C ++ and does not bother the server at all, even at 2000 online.



One time it seemed to me that it would be nice to do a section with p2p games,

Oddly enough, sensible blanks on the Internet was not found. I had to write almost from scratch.

Wrote chess, checkers and the fool. Thought out a rating system for victories.

The time has come to integrate this good into the site, and it dawned on me here - the support of this section will be cost-per-work disproportionately more expensive than the benefits of it.

So, at the last stage I had to abandon this idea.



For the organization of the workflow, megaplan was first used, but it seemed rather heavy.

Then they used planary, but eventually settled on the local myTinyTodo. Now it has 60+ tasks.

Growth dynamics

The project shows a very good growth rate.

Now every day with us:

45,000 unique visitors

370,000 page views [not counting ajax reloads]

10,000 comments

20,000 ratings

700 new users



In the graphs below, I compare the data for the end of August of 2011 and the end of March of 2012.

The project was launched in January 2011.











By the way, the project has 4 servers [2 dedicated, 2 VDS], but actually the main server with QuadCore Xeon 2.53GHz / 4Gb RAM / 2x147Gb SAS parameters holds almost all the load.

Everything weighs - 80 GB [of course, 95% of the volume is pictures].

If you have any questions regarding the experience of optimizing server software on the example of this project, do not hesitate to ask in the comments.

About money

At the start, the project did not need big finances. Enough of my earnings.

But expenses gradually grew. I resorted to the use of borrowed funds.

Most of the money spent on the promotion of the project. I have not used black / gray methods, this is dangerous.

We haven’t even done mailing to users yet :) Maximum mutual respect, yes.

Advertising was posted on Facebook, on Facebook, on thematic sites.



At the end of the summer I found the first investment. Rather, I did not find, but I was found :)

A private investor bought me a 25% stake for $ 20,000. Now I am going to raise more funds.

If you have something to offer me, I'm open to everything new:

shaidakhidirov@gmail.com and skype - nektome_shaida.



It is planned to start monetization in about a month. Let's go at once in three ways:

contextual advertising

Most likely, we’ll stop on Google Adsense, because at the start I’ve already posted it and was pleased.

With the current audience, two small AdSense units will bring about $ 1000-1500 per month.

There is, however, and a minus at Adsense - money comes with considerable delays.



Premium accounts

For additional money, the user will be able to get additional functions and privileges, such as page pre-moderation, rating increase, limits withdrawal, lack of advertising, etc.

Let's connect the sms-aggregator and robokassa.



Link block

We have 270 thousand pages in the Yandex index, a million in the Google index and not the smallest TCI [350].

With "soft" use, a block of links in the basement within a month after placement will begin to bring more than $ 1,000. We already placed the sape block at the start, but then we did not have a TCI.

The advantage of this type of advertising is that it is possible not to show it to authorized users.

Future plans

More actively others we develop 3 directions:

Blogs

Initially, the audiotour site was predominantly teenage and we tried to attract the brains with blogs. It succeeded. Now we have a lot of decent posts. About 300 tons are written per day.

Therefore, we believe that the improvement of blogs is the main priority for development.

It was decided to radically reorganize their structure.

At the moment, the new structure is almost fully prepared and is being tested.

I admit honestly, the basis of the new system was borrowed from the toggle switch.

By the way, not so long ago I was organizing a program for the weekly promotion of bloggers .



Opinions

We will change the commentary structure to a tree-like one, which, due to much greater convenience, should inevitably lead to an increase in user activity in this regard.

We also plan to give users the opportunity to subscribe to the opinion, that is, writing is not anonymous. Optional.



Mobile applications

This direction was unexpectedly promising for us.

For example, you can take the text chat application for Android . Launched a week ago, it already has 4000 downloads and is on the first page in the Social category.

In the near future we will provide coverage of all project functionality with applications for Android and iOS.



nekto.me is a unique social network. You can even say, asocial :)

While the leading social networks of Runet open the private data of users without their knowledge (full disclosure of contacts, publication of the last visit time, display of the track being listened, etc.), we give users the right to anonymity.

We, among other things, do not even need to register to express your opinion.



Thanks for attention. I hope you were interested.