How we did a cafe-club with a full calculation on visitors from the network
In the topic - the history of an offline project, completely focused on visitors from the network. The business itself for Habr is not very thematic, but almost everything in its preparation and development was done with the help of network mechanics and remotely from another city. This story will also be interesting as an example of how a project is evaluated before launching and how niche selection is made.
We have cookies.
I think many people want to open their cafe. I also once wanted to open up in the region, decorate the walls with 5-inch floppy disks and generally make such an IT romance with a cup of tea. But in order to open a cafe at the most minimal estimates, you need to have 2-3 million rubles, depending on the city.
')
The main expenses are the organization of kitchen, washing and other things for which our state quite rightly stocked a huge number of standards. Premises suitable for a cafe (more precisely, repairs under it) are very expensive, the repairs and equipment themselves are also far from a penny.
The standard model of the cafe is to get up on the stream and sell food and drinks with a large premium. If the cafe is a little further from the stream than a couple of meters, then you need to carry out regular activities that attract people. A glass of tea or coffee with a 1000% surcharge is designed to spiritually unite people.
We needed a different model: one that would allow starting with a minimum of costs, work out only on the social network and word of mouth and orient yourself to those people who are looking for a meeting place. The way out was the time payment model that was popular in Europe: it first began to be used in the Internet cafes of the 90s, then it was used in a couple of clubs and finally reached Russia right now. At the time of the project’s miscalculations, two establishments were already operating according to the payment model for the time: then the trend was not established, and it was not clear whether such a thing would work at all.
The principle is quite simple: today, the payment model for time is very well combined with the fact that the cafe does not need, in fact, food. People come to cafes to talk, meet, talk about personal matters, business, and so on. If you look at the criteria for evaluating a cafe, then remember that five or ten years ago only the kitchen and the location were taken into account. Later the atmosphere, the interior and in general everything that creates communication became important. Approximately the same processes went to IT: remember the transition from the "best hardware" model to the "best software" model: IBM followed the first, Google and Apple followed the second.
So, it was necessary to a cafe-club, where you can come and have a good time. The first stage is the collection of information and analysis of what a business plan might look like.
Since we never opened a cafe (but opened clubs), all the pitfalls were grouped precisely in terms of various organizational, legal and other aspects. Here the principle is very simple: you do not know - find someone who knows, and ask.
The first step was to search the blogs of the cafe opening stories. Most of the data was given by one closed social network, where there are not only juicy stories about Russian realities, but also a lot of answers to quite frank questions.
The next step is to raise all social contacts in networks and real life and search for people who really understand the topic. Offline acquaintances gave two people (the manager of a large chain restaurant and a lawyer), through social networks they advised a lawyer in charge of restaurant approvals, plus the art director of a cafe on Kuznetsky Most. I slowly traveled around all these people and during two or three-hour meetings I learned a lot of new things: for example, about security, about features of inspections, about details of rules, about the practice of interpreting unclear places in laws in a particular region, and so on.
By the way, many were surprised that our establishment, where there will be no alcohol and it will not be possible to smoke, will be able to attract people. Practice has shown that they were wrong.
It became clear that it is possible to open up in theory, there appeared knowledge of how to do it and what is needed.
Now it was necessary to find a leader, and in another city. Here, fortunately, I already had an excellent candidacy. Let me explain: the leader is the soul of the project, and his ability to live in a club, to find the right people and create the right atmosphere is ten times more important than experience. Without a good manager, such a project simply could not be opened.
We decided to go to the already open cafes at different times and take measurements in order to understand how much money brings space per day, how many customers, who these people are, and so on.
All the skills of social engineering were useful: the staff of existing cafes is always ready to share important data for us just in conversation. The main thing is not to make it clear that you really need this data.
It turned out that the network contains quite a lot of documents on corporate standards for cafes, several franchise books, a lot of data on processes, personnel training, and so on. A lot of things can be found in the franchisee offers, some of them got caught up in “fishing” to search for links to file sharing sites and filter file names. Unfortunately, almost all of these documents belonged to restaurants with food, so we were of little use.
At the same time, it immediately became clear that the standard model, according to which all establishments with time payment work, is very vulnerable to competition. They are all the same in service: it is worthwhile to open up to a more convenient location, a cheaper or just another place, as the public begins to spread. The exception is coworking, but when you open a coworking, you should do it. The result - one simple feature was needed that would highlight a new place very clearly and vividly. This feature has become board games for us.
Why nastolki? The answer is very simple: for all the holidays we take them. To communicate live (not in social networks), they are very suitable. They collect companies. They introduce people and bring a sea of ​​positive. They are already in many cafes, but in small quantities. People are going to play and love it.
The next stage was to bring all the data together and get a piece that receives all variable environments (people flow, room size, number of tables and seats, operation time) and other parameters at the entrance, and other parameters at the output and gives two predictions - pessimistic and normal . Optimistic, she also builds, but does not show: in her business plan, optimism is superfluous.
I drove all the data into Excel, linked them with dependency formulas and built costs on each indicator. Roughly speaking, if it is known that the flow in the street is almost zero, the room is medium in size, the rent costs so much - you can understand how many tables and chairs there will be, what the approximate workload for the time of day will be, how much the work of the staff will be based on the work schedule + load. Total - how much the launch and operational activities will cost in the end.
In this table, in turn, fit all approximately suitable options for the premises (in the primary search), until a corridor of criteria to the place was formed. Obviously, it should be the center of the city, not very far from the subway, it is better - at the transport hub, it is possible in the second line. Now it was necessary to find a specific room.
Each room had a plan available on the site with ads or in the database of real estate. Most often - photo documents BTI or something like that. This plan was neatly dimensioned in Visio, the equipment was displayed for a specific plan, and equipment and footprint data were entered in a nameplate for a business plan.
Plan with arrangement and the initial plan (on the right below).
In the end, there are 5 rooms left that were physically worth seeing. Olya (the head) has scheduled views for one day, our team went from Moscow to a place to look.
It turned out to be optimal on Dmitrovsky, 10, not far from Dostoevskaya and Mayakovskaya, so that it would be convenient to get from any part of the city. The traffic on the street itself is zero (perhaps it was a mistake, but we were counting on the network, so ruthlessly threw all the parameters out of the model), everything else is pretty decent. By the way, there used to be an IT office there, plus the whole atmosphere of a big Soviet apartment was preserved.
In Moscow, the room can be found through a network or simply order a search in a major real estate agency. In St. Petersburg (yes, we opened in St. Petersburg), the agencies just started building an IT infrastructure, so there is no data exchange between them, and the market is fragmented. There is a stratum of intermediaries who, in fact, take from 50% to 100% of the monthly rent just because they have the right address. Agents, by the way, in real estate love about the same as in IT they love SEOs. We had to work through an agent: the woman was worried until the last moment that she was being thrown, prevented her from communicating with the owner, and in general she obviously did not play for us. After a couple of attempts to explain that we are paying, so we need to defend her interests, she had to be carefully pushed back and communicate directly. Paying her probably wasn’t worth it, but we still did it.
Further the beginning of the epic delivery of sundries into place. Tables had to be assembled, chairs arranged, packaging flew almost everywhere, all the free surfaces were lined with boxes ... First, furniture was collected by friends, then the games were arranged (there were a lot more than we thought at first - thanks to the insane game storekeeper). Many acquaintances fit in with the collection of games: this is how we got a couple of German hits and a Finnish game that no one understands.
The first water cooler naturally flowed, the first coffee machine naturally broke down, the alarm unit had to be changed to a new one, the cashier didn’t have time to open it (and the first day worked for free) - well, horror. The contractors tried several times to add unnecessary equipment to the bill, but the basic knowledge in the field and the ability to ask questions for each incomprehensible line reduced the percent checks by 15 minimum.
All this is quite actively covered in social networks and we constantly had assistants who were interested to learn about the discovery and participate.
Two weeks before the opening, Olya started looking for people and interviewed 20-30 people. Searched only through the network and only vacancy announcements. The principle is very simple: ordinary people respond to a banal vacancy, positive people respond to a positive one. Accordingly, if you are looking for unusual people, you can never trust to write a job to an HR specialist: he will make plain text with requirements. We wrote as a letter to a friend whom we want to see as a guest.
After long interviews (everyone who responded was invited) Olya found just a magic team.
What is very important, these people were inside our target audience. And that means they knew and understood the client’s language, hung out in the same places on the network, and knew what worked and what didn’t appear on social networks. It is important to listen to their opinion.
We have free wifi in the room, so we needed internet. The orange cable of Corbin lay on the floor, but they didn’t even call back when they promised. Therefore, when on the fifth day no one contacted us, we are tired of the cable hanging under our feet. We simply cut it off and installed a router, where we stuck Yota's “whistle”. No problems before replacing the frequencies - then the router had to be moved from the window to the courtyard to the window to the street: the attenuation of the signal in the yard made access almost unreal.
At this time, Olya was looking for food. This is perhaps the only question that could not be resolved through the network, I needed a phone. All strived to come and show the prices on the spot on paper: just a religious taboo on postage.
Yes, if you have never flipped through the price lists of suppliers, it should be done at least once. There are sweets "Taste" and other masterpieces of naming, which, at times, are simply killed by just the name.
On freelancing, I found an illustrator and ordered a character, which then would become the basis of the image. More precisely, as: two illustrators. One suffered 5 days, sent something cool, which I immediately put in the search for images. The output is the logo of a large foreign tea network. The freelancer thought she would.
The second specialist worked faster and gave what was needed. True, a week later it turned out that my ideas about style were hopelessly outdated: our team (only 5 years younger than me on average) drove into the concept and said how and what to do. Actually, very quickly we changed all our leaflets and business cards. It was somewhat painful (we were preparing for another, and had to be redone on the fly), but very important for the audience.
At first it was necessary to choose a name that would allow one to unambiguously find the institution in the search. We chose “Chaypey”, but already faced with the fact that it was worth including something about games in the name. Most likely, you will have to sign something else like a short definition before the name, where it will be clear that this is not a tea shop.
First, despite the fact that we are a cafe-club of board games, it was absolutely impossible to rely on the table players. This is what it is: really enthusiastic people keep a collection at home, and they don’t go out to play in a cafe. Therefore, we immediately removed all relevant resources from the promotion program. More precisely - they put the lowest priority: there will be time - we will tell, no - we will not.
Most of our audience was hanging out on VKontakte. It quickly became clear that people are most interested in celebrating birthdays at the club: here and check about 250 rubles per person, a lot of sweets and tea, and a festive atmosphere and, most importantly, a lot of games, plus animators. Vkontakte is targeting by birthday: you can warn for a day and for two. Unfortunately, there is no targeting for the event “birthday of a friend”, but this was enough.
Conversion of this ad from 0.05 to 0.1%. Many by the standards of contact.
To understand how to work with the media, I traveled to a good friend who has been doing this for many years. She told how much a click is worth in reality (we take the recommendation Contact and divide by 3) what to do if the campaign “knocks out” (it’s necessary to start a new one, their priority) how best to draw pictures (the whole manual) and, most importantly, what CTR normal for any sites in general. By the way, she convinced me that the banner ad was still alive: it was quite unexpected.
The second important tool is the Vkontakte group. Understandably, content, you need high involvement so on. I did not want to engage in demotivators for repost, so we went a little differently: almost every club event has a thematic group, where we added information with the permission of the moderator. For example, if an evening of games with native speakers - you can go through the English groups and forums and carefully recommend. The main thing is to make a recommendation, not a stupid advertisement.
The third theme is events. We do a lot of things, and in each case the organizing participants themselves write about themselves. For example, if a lecture is on Theory and Practice, the garage-sale is on Luk-et-mi plus in its blogs. Interesting events are really collected by many people: for example, in my lecture on the development of board games there was a full room. On the other hand, the Startup Habraigre tournaments , which I announced here in "Events" and "I am PR", gathered a bunch of people in Moscow and quite a few - in St. Petersburg.
During his work, a lot of interesting acquaintances appeared: here both visa specialists, wonderful people from Habr, and various businessmen of the city. We are changing experiences, we are advised on the site in the network, recommend different things. In general - very cool clean communication. I know that every trip to St. Petersburg is necessarily a pair of excellent business contacts due to the club.
The site as such is needed only for the address and passage, plus a search and links in press releases. Here the case is extremely simple: the site needs answers about what it is, where it is, how it works, how to get there and what happens. Everything fit on one page, which was done for half an hour. At the same time, I quite suddenly found out for myself that the era of layout was over with tables and opened by the modern Dreamviver. It sounds ridiculous, but in the past few years, as it turned out, it has always been easier to order a website (for a large project) or start on some CMS than to make it by hand. Now the main area of ​​the one-page is the VK widget. The site is scary, but it works and solves its problem. Let's go for a payback - we will redo it.
As such - absent. After the opening, an average of 5-6 establishments appeared with payment for a time in a month. Some hammer on standards and work “as is”. The most painful thing is reusable dishes: if we do not equip a sink (which is hellishly expensive, there is a whole range of difficulties from the room and ventilation to filters for drains), then we can work only with disposable dishes - in our case, with large beautiful cardboard cups. Right in half a kilometer from us, there was an example of why we should work normally - the dial in the living room opened near Mayakovskaya, then it closed naturally, as they wrote, by a court decision.
Competitors introduced our people to the payment format for time (now they don’t have to explain how it is) and very clearly helped in differentiation: we are the only informal institution where you can make noise, quickly and suddenly move furniture as conveniently and generally want to do.
We started before the start of the seasonal recession, so for the time being we are in the red in the aggregate. In the fall, the high season begins, there is a chance to go to zero on the return of investments by January. If the system is worked out, it will be necessary to document all the processes (pitfalls - the sea!) And start scaling: first open another 2-3 places to install the model, then move on to franchises. True, it’s too early to think about all this.
Club days:
Book reviews and suggestions: something like it - hang another box.
During the day we are quiet, many people like to sit on the windowsill with pillows and sit on the net:
This is from the lectures: in this case we had something Indian.
Nikita makes a feature: a person drops something under the table, sees a robot, rejoices:
Habraigre Startup Tournament:
And, of course, I am ready to answer your questions.
We have cookies.
Introductory
I think many people want to open their cafe. I also once wanted to open up in the region, decorate the walls with 5-inch floppy disks and generally make such an IT romance with a cup of tea. But in order to open a cafe at the most minimal estimates, you need to have 2-3 million rubles, depending on the city.
')
The main expenses are the organization of kitchen, washing and other things for which our state quite rightly stocked a huge number of standards. Premises suitable for a cafe (more precisely, repairs under it) are very expensive, the repairs and equipment themselves are also far from a penny.
The standard model of the cafe is to get up on the stream and sell food and drinks with a large premium. If the cafe is a little further from the stream than a couple of meters, then you need to carry out regular activities that attract people. A glass of tea or coffee with a 1000% surcharge is designed to spiritually unite people.
We needed a different model: one that would allow starting with a minimum of costs, work out only on the social network and word of mouth and orient yourself to those people who are looking for a meeting place. The way out was the time payment model that was popular in Europe: it first began to be used in the Internet cafes of the 90s, then it was used in a couple of clubs and finally reached Russia right now. At the time of the project’s miscalculations, two establishments were already operating according to the payment model for the time: then the trend was not established, and it was not clear whether such a thing would work at all.
The principle is quite simple: today, the payment model for time is very well combined with the fact that the cafe does not need, in fact, food. People come to cafes to talk, meet, talk about personal matters, business, and so on. If you look at the criteria for evaluating a cafe, then remember that five or ten years ago only the kitchen and the location were taken into account. Later the atmosphere, the interior and in general everything that creates communication became important. Approximately the same processes went to IT: remember the transition from the "best hardware" model to the "best software" model: IBM followed the first, Google and Apple followed the second.
So, it was necessary to a cafe-club, where you can come and have a good time. The first stage is the collection of information and analysis of what a business plan might look like.
Networking
Since we never opened a cafe (but opened clubs), all the pitfalls were grouped precisely in terms of various organizational, legal and other aspects. Here the principle is very simple: you do not know - find someone who knows, and ask.
The first step was to search the blogs of the cafe opening stories. Most of the data was given by one closed social network, where there are not only juicy stories about Russian realities, but also a lot of answers to quite frank questions.
The next step is to raise all social contacts in networks and real life and search for people who really understand the topic. Offline acquaintances gave two people (the manager of a large chain restaurant and a lawyer), through social networks they advised a lawyer in charge of restaurant approvals, plus the art director of a cafe on Kuznetsky Most. I slowly traveled around all these people and during two or three-hour meetings I learned a lot of new things: for example, about security, about features of inspections, about details of rules, about the practice of interpreting unclear places in laws in a particular region, and so on.
By the way, many were surprised that our establishment, where there will be no alcohol and it will not be possible to smoke, will be able to attract people. Practice has shown that they were wrong.
It became clear that it is possible to open up in theory, there appeared knowledge of how to do it and what is needed.
Now it was necessary to find a leader, and in another city. Here, fortunately, I already had an excellent candidacy. Let me explain: the leader is the soul of the project, and his ability to live in a club, to find the right people and create the right atmosphere is ten times more important than experience. Without a good manager, such a project simply could not be opened.
Intelligence and Sotsinzhiniring
We decided to go to the already open cafes at different times and take measurements in order to understand how much money brings space per day, how many customers, who these people are, and so on.
All the skills of social engineering were useful: the staff of existing cafes is always ready to share important data for us just in conversation. The main thing is not to make it clear that you really need this data.
It turned out that the network contains quite a lot of documents on corporate standards for cafes, several franchise books, a lot of data on processes, personnel training, and so on. A lot of things can be found in the franchisee offers, some of them got caught up in “fishing” to search for links to file sharing sites and filter file names. Unfortunately, almost all of these documents belonged to restaurants with food, so we were of little use.
At the same time, it immediately became clear that the standard model, according to which all establishments with time payment work, is very vulnerable to competition. They are all the same in service: it is worthwhile to open up to a more convenient location, a cheaper or just another place, as the public begins to spread. The exception is coworking, but when you open a coworking, you should do it. The result - one simple feature was needed that would highlight a new place very clearly and vividly. This feature has become board games for us.
Why nastolki? The answer is very simple: for all the holidays we take them. To communicate live (not in social networks), they are very suitable. They collect companies. They introduce people and bring a sea of ​​positive. They are already in many cafes, but in small quantities. People are going to play and love it.
Business plan
The next stage was to bring all the data together and get a piece that receives all variable environments (people flow, room size, number of tables and seats, operation time) and other parameters at the entrance, and other parameters at the output and gives two predictions - pessimistic and normal . Optimistic, she also builds, but does not show: in her business plan, optimism is superfluous.
I drove all the data into Excel, linked them with dependency formulas and built costs on each indicator. Roughly speaking, if it is known that the flow in the street is almost zero, the room is medium in size, the rent costs so much - you can understand how many tables and chairs there will be, what the approximate workload for the time of day will be, how much the work of the staff will be based on the work schedule + load. Total - how much the launch and operational activities will cost in the end.
In this table, in turn, fit all approximately suitable options for the premises (in the primary search), until a corridor of criteria to the place was formed. Obviously, it should be the center of the city, not very far from the subway, it is better - at the transport hub, it is possible in the second line. Now it was necessary to find a specific room.
Each room had a plan available on the site with ads or in the database of real estate. Most often - photo documents BTI or something like that. This plan was neatly dimensioned in Visio, the equipment was displayed for a specific plan, and equipment and footprint data were entered in a nameplate for a business plan.
Plan with arrangement and the initial plan (on the right below).
In the end, there are 5 rooms left that were physically worth seeing. Olya (the head) has scheduled views for one day, our team went from Moscow to a place to look.
It turned out to be optimal on Dmitrovsky, 10, not far from Dostoevskaya and Mayakovskaya, so that it would be convenient to get from any part of the city. The traffic on the street itself is zero (perhaps it was a mistake, but we were counting on the network, so ruthlessly threw all the parameters out of the model), everything else is pretty decent. By the way, there used to be an IT office there, plus the whole atmosphere of a big Soviet apartment was preserved.
In Moscow, the room can be found through a network or simply order a search in a major real estate agency. In St. Petersburg (yes, we opened in St. Petersburg), the agencies just started building an IT infrastructure, so there is no data exchange between them, and the market is fragmented. There is a stratum of intermediaries who, in fact, take from 50% to 100% of the monthly rent just because they have the right address. Agents, by the way, in real estate love about the same as in IT they love SEOs. We had to work through an agent: the woman was worried until the last moment that she was being thrown, prevented her from communicating with the owner, and in general she obviously did not play for us. After a couple of attempts to explain that we are paying, so we need to defend her interests, she had to be carefully pushed back and communicate directly. Paying her probably wasn’t worth it, but we still did it.
Logistics
Further the beginning of the epic delivery of sundries into place. Tables had to be assembled, chairs arranged, packaging flew almost everywhere, all the free surfaces were lined with boxes ... First, furniture was collected by friends, then the games were arranged (there were a lot more than we thought at first - thanks to the insane game storekeeper). Many acquaintances fit in with the collection of games: this is how we got a couple of German hits and a Finnish game that no one understands.
The first water cooler naturally flowed, the first coffee machine naturally broke down, the alarm unit had to be changed to a new one, the cashier didn’t have time to open it (and the first day worked for free) - well, horror. The contractors tried several times to add unnecessary equipment to the bill, but the basic knowledge in the field and the ability to ask questions for each incomprehensible line reduced the percent checks by 15 minimum.
All this is quite actively covered in social networks and we constantly had assistants who were interested to learn about the discovery and participate.
Staff
Two weeks before the opening, Olya started looking for people and interviewed 20-30 people. Searched only through the network and only vacancy announcements. The principle is very simple: ordinary people respond to a banal vacancy, positive people respond to a positive one. Accordingly, if you are looking for unusual people, you can never trust to write a job to an HR specialist: he will make plain text with requirements. We wrote as a letter to a friend whom we want to see as a guest.
After long interviews (everyone who responded was invited) Olya found just a magic team.
What is very important, these people were inside our target audience. And that means they knew and understood the client’s language, hung out in the same places on the network, and knew what worked and what didn’t appear on social networks. It is important to listen to their opinion.
Wi-Fi
We have free wifi in the room, so we needed internet. The orange cable of Corbin lay on the floor, but they didn’t even call back when they promised. Therefore, when on the fifth day no one contacted us, we are tired of the cable hanging under our feet. We simply cut it off and installed a router, where we stuck Yota's “whistle”. No problems before replacing the frequencies - then the router had to be moved from the window to the courtyard to the window to the street: the attenuation of the signal in the yard made access almost unreal.
Food
At this time, Olya was looking for food. This is perhaps the only question that could not be resolved through the network, I needed a phone. All strived to come and show the prices on the spot on paper: just a religious taboo on postage.
Yes, if you have never flipped through the price lists of suppliers, it should be done at least once. There are sweets "Taste" and other masterpieces of naming, which, at times, are simply killed by just the name.
Visual image
On freelancing, I found an illustrator and ordered a character, which then would become the basis of the image. More precisely, as: two illustrators. One suffered 5 days, sent something cool, which I immediately put in the search for images. The output is the logo of a large foreign tea network. The freelancer thought she would.
The second specialist worked faster and gave what was needed. True, a week later it turned out that my ideas about style were hopelessly outdated: our team (only 5 years younger than me on average) drove into the concept and said how and what to do. Actually, very quickly we changed all our leaflets and business cards. It was somewhat painful (we were preparing for another, and had to be redone on the fly), but very important for the audience.
Promotion
At first it was necessary to choose a name that would allow one to unambiguously find the institution in the search. We chose “Chaypey”, but already faced with the fact that it was worth including something about games in the name. Most likely, you will have to sign something else like a short definition before the name, where it will be clear that this is not a tea shop.
First, despite the fact that we are a cafe-club of board games, it was absolutely impossible to rely on the table players. This is what it is: really enthusiastic people keep a collection at home, and they don’t go out to play in a cafe. Therefore, we immediately removed all relevant resources from the promotion program. More precisely - they put the lowest priority: there will be time - we will tell, no - we will not.
Most of our audience was hanging out on VKontakte. It quickly became clear that people are most interested in celebrating birthdays at the club: here and check about 250 rubles per person, a lot of sweets and tea, and a festive atmosphere and, most importantly, a lot of games, plus animators. Vkontakte is targeting by birthday: you can warn for a day and for two. Unfortunately, there is no targeting for the event “birthday of a friend”, but this was enough.
Conversion of this ad from 0.05 to 0.1%. Many by the standards of contact.
To understand how to work with the media, I traveled to a good friend who has been doing this for many years. She told how much a click is worth in reality (we take the recommendation Contact and divide by 3) what to do if the campaign “knocks out” (it’s necessary to start a new one, their priority) how best to draw pictures (the whole manual) and, most importantly, what CTR normal for any sites in general. By the way, she convinced me that the banner ad was still alive: it was quite unexpected.
The second important tool is the Vkontakte group. Understandably, content, you need high involvement so on. I did not want to engage in demotivators for repost, so we went a little differently: almost every club event has a thematic group, where we added information with the permission of the moderator. For example, if an evening of games with native speakers - you can go through the English groups and forums and carefully recommend. The main thing is to make a recommendation, not a stupid advertisement.
The third theme is events. We do a lot of things, and in each case the organizing participants themselves write about themselves. For example, if a lecture is on Theory and Practice, the garage-sale is on Luk-et-mi plus in its blogs. Interesting events are really collected by many people: for example, in my lecture on the development of board games there was a full room. On the other hand, the Startup Habraigre tournaments , which I announced here in "Events" and "I am PR", gathered a bunch of people in Moscow and quite a few - in St. Petersburg.
During his work, a lot of interesting acquaintances appeared: here both visa specialists, wonderful people from Habr, and various businessmen of the city. We are changing experiences, we are advised on the site in the network, recommend different things. In general - very cool clean communication. I know that every trip to St. Petersburg is necessarily a pair of excellent business contacts due to the club.
The site as such is needed only for the address and passage, plus a search and links in press releases. Here the case is extremely simple: the site needs answers about what it is, where it is, how it works, how to get there and what happens. Everything fit on one page, which was done for half an hour. At the same time, I quite suddenly found out for myself that the era of layout was over with tables and opened by the modern Dreamviver. It sounds ridiculous, but in the past few years, as it turned out, it has always been easier to order a website (for a large project) or start on some CMS than to make it by hand. Now the main area of ​​the one-page is the VK widget. The site is scary, but it works and solves its problem. Let's go for a payback - we will redo it.
Competition
As such - absent. After the opening, an average of 5-6 establishments appeared with payment for a time in a month. Some hammer on standards and work “as is”. The most painful thing is reusable dishes: if we do not equip a sink (which is hellishly expensive, there is a whole range of difficulties from the room and ventilation to filters for drains), then we can work only with disposable dishes - in our case, with large beautiful cardboard cups. Right in half a kilometer from us, there was an example of why we should work normally - the dial in the living room opened near Mayakovskaya, then it closed naturally, as they wrote, by a court decision.
Competitors introduced our people to the payment format for time (now they don’t have to explain how it is) and very clearly helped in differentiation: we are the only informal institution where you can make noise, quickly and suddenly move furniture as conveniently and generally want to do.
Finance
We started before the start of the seasonal recession, so for the time being we are in the red in the aggregate. In the fall, the high season begins, there is a chance to go to zero on the return of investments by January. If the system is worked out, it will be necessary to document all the processes (pitfalls - the sea!) And start scaling: first open another 2-3 places to install the model, then move on to franchises. True, it’s too early to think about all this.
Pictures
Club days:
Book reviews and suggestions: something like it - hang another box.
During the day we are quiet, many people like to sit on the windowsill with pillows and sit on the net:
This is from the lectures: in this case we had something Indian.
Nikita makes a feature: a person drops something under the table, sees a robot, rejoices:
Habraigre Startup Tournament:
And, of course, I am ready to answer your questions.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/151228/
All Articles