Prospects Digital startups. Interview with Alena Popova

We are continuing a series of interviews dedicated to digital start-ups in Russia. This time, Alena Popova , the ideologist and founder of the Startup Afish project, which is a hub for entrepreneurs, investors and organizers of start-up activities in Russia, became our guest.
Are there any universal recipes for success for startups? What are the current trends of the Russian digital market? Where to find inspiration for a startup? We talked about this and many other things with Alyona.

WebProfessionals.ru: What, in your opinion, are the main differences between Russian startups in e-commerce and web development from Western ones?

Alena Popova: In the Russian e-commerce most of the mobile development is related to payment processing, and a huge number of applications are developed on the foreign market due to the fact that the user shares, that is, the so-called “social shopping”, and analytics of user actions within applications.

WebProfessionals.ru: Which startups from your practice are the most memorable? Which have achieved the most significant success, and what is the reason for their success?
')
Alena Popova: Really bright startups in domestic practice, I can not say.
The gaming industry performed well: for example, the story of Alice Chumachenko and Game Insight , when in a few days the game becomes the first in the Android Market. The company's capitalization is skyrocketing, which arouses the interest of the largest international investors who are lining up.
I was very interested in how the Island will develop after the large amount of investments that they were given. But I don’t see a strong success story either.
In Startup Poster, we aggregate information on projects and help a large number of projects. But I'm not ready to name any outstanding startups, because I am very skeptical about the Russian startup community. We have a large number of developments in the field of copying foreign experience. We analyzed, for example, the possibility of creating an Instagram- based project for young mothers in Russia. It could have been a huge success story with a small financial investment. But such a story yet.

WebProfessionals.ru: How do you see the vector of development of web startups? What are the trends and opportunities?

Alena Popova: I think that the gaming industry and e-commerce will combine their business models, i.e. The main and most successful business model will be the so-called freemium model. It is already successful now, but the Russian market is only getting used to it. The essence of this business model is that you get some of the services for free, and for some of the services you have to pay an extra amount for different models.
I believe that all e-commerce will move to a gaming analytical framework. therefore, absolutely all startups that do not create another online store, but create a CRM, CMS and all that concerns analytics inside these systems, will be interesting for investments.
Another trend observed in our market is cloud technologies, we need to invest in them. I am sure that this will be a big boom, like the so-called SMART systems. But this investment, calculated on the next 5-10 years. If you need a way out of the project for 2.5 years, you need to talk about the mass consumption sector. And this is the sector at the moment - the combination of e-commerce and electronic games.
Moreover, I believe that the most successful investments are investments in niche target groups. Within these groups, permanent and serious growth is taking place. This, for example, such audiences as children from 6 to 14 years old and women 22-44 years. If earlier these were women 18-25 years old, now it is 22-44. These are young mothers, the sector of consumption of goods and services for children and women. The female audience is more consistent, less volatile, and adequately related to competing resources that are in the same niche. They can go to several identical online stores and constantly make purchases there.
If we talk about the b2b sector, then it is also worth going. Russia is developing well here. This is evidenced by a very large number of regional projects, projects related to the internal support of the company, logistics systems.

WebProfessionals.ru: Over the past year, web start-ups have begun to appear more frequently in large companies (for example, Enter - the Svyaznoy project, e5 - Crossroads). Should we expect more mass attention to the topic of a new online business?

Alena Popova: I have a good attitude to the so-called spinouts and spin-offs. This is an effective business development principle. You leave valuable personnel in the company and at the same time increase the value of the business as a whole. Often subbusiness becomes a donor for the entire business. There are a lot of such examples in world practice - this is a normal approach. Moreover, often new directions need to be legally separated from the company.
This is a very promising topic, because people who are engaged in the development of spinouts and spin-offs (for example, PricewaterhouseCoopers, CityBank, Tinkoff) laid down the growth of such companies by 17% for the next year. This is a lot, especially when compared with the growth of the e-commerce market.

WebProfessionals.ru: Share your experience, what parameters should a startup have to meet in order to reach a return on investment and make a profit in the planned period?

Alena Popova: There is no such recipe, no matter what anyone says. The main success story of a project is when you dynamically change a business for a target audience. Those. if the target audience likes to do something on your project that you did not pay attention to, then the momentary success of the project depends on whether you will develop this area.
If we talk about the payback of a startup, then on average this period is about 18 months. In reality, it can pay off more and less. It used to be that if within a year and a half the project did not bring cashflow, it would be better to close it. But now there is a separation of the market into projects that are designed for the short and long term (as on the exchange).
The success of projects designed for the short term, I have already voiced - to adapt to the audience. The more the audience uses some service, the more attention is paid to it. As a result, an increase in the user base is realized, which at the moment brings you a large amount of money, but in this case you will not be able to build a business that would cost billions.
If you are focused on a business that would cost billions, then you need to invest all the money in the development of the community and not collect a large amount of funds from the audience. And then either sell a ready-made community, or create a service based on it. The most important thing in this case is that you will have a ready-made audience, because the main theme of the success of startups is working with an audience. If there is an audience, then it is easier to figure out how to monetize it than to start thinking about monetization before collecting an audience.

WebProfessionals.ru: Advise our audience sources of startup inspiration and external experience.

Alena Popova: My inspiration in my mistakes. The more mistakes I made, the more I received inspiration. I get up at 6.30 am and until 7.30 am I study information related to markets, start-ups, how various start-ups develop, plus technological resources about the business. This affected, for example, the fact that Startup Poster as a project will now be heavily upgraded and perhaps more like TechCrunch .
I also draw inspiration from our market. I like the fact that our market has learned to smarterly copy already working models. I have always believed that copying is good, but it’s better to create something of your own. From the point of view of money, this is not always the case, since the copied model already has tried and tested practices. Creating something new, I was regularly mistaken. Now the market is so “accumulated” that the developments have already begun to appear in order to create a unique business. This is the right way, since it was Korea, India. We can say that Russia is running at this stage.
Another source of inspiration is not so much about projects as about the behavior of the target audience. I follow the principles of Warren Buffett - I invest only in what I use myself. For example, I would hardly have invested in Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs, because I hardly understood what they were talking about. It should be understood what problems your project will solve. In this case, the project will develop and grow.