From the history of a startup
By the will of fate, launching another project, I was faced with a rather interesting fact.
Many of my friends somehow try to do projects, it turns out for a few.
I want to tell you on small examples about what to do in the project, and what you can score, even if it contradicts your intuitive aspirations.
The above is not a recipe for all occasions, it is my personal experience and does not claim to be absolute truth. It is always possible to nginx ingenious nginx for two years, which will then soar without any marketing due to exceptional quality and gain popularity, but the likelihood of making such an IMHO product is even lower than a successful typical startup.
')
So, we started to do a project of the association of companies, and special offers should have become the center section. Each company has its own website, as well as one or more successful projects, and there are promotions and discounts.
The site was supposed to combine these special offers and discount offers in the group style, and on the projects themselves to remove sections by inserting widgets there. Programmers know the principle of DRY / SPOT, it works in project management.
I will say in advance that the project became successful in less than a month and paid for itself, began to earn money, but more on that below.
There were four people in the team: two managers (I as a consultant, a programmer in the past, and a project engineer myself, a designer in the past), a designer and a programmer. Designer and coder were involved in piecework.
The first thing I would like to mention is the peculiarities of professional deformation. This is one of the first reasons for the failure of projects. The bottom line is that in case of uncertainty, each specialist, either at the beginning of the project or at the time of a pause in development, is drawn to do what he is fumbling about. The programmer sits down to write the perfect code or refactor the existing one, the designer to redraw, and so on. While problems usually lie in another area, and their omission leads to the failure of the project.
In this case, at the initial stage, we also began to slip a little - we thought through a complicated ideal form of sending an application for a share from the site, the project designer was trying to redraw something.
But we took ourselves in hand and did the right thing to do every time.
First, we set the digital goals of the project under the designated vector. The vector was to create a stream of stock orders from the site, which were then transferred to sales for processing.
Digital goals were as follows: the minimum number of hosts per day, the minimum number of views per visitor, the minimum number of requests per day. For each indicator, the three ranges of values ​​are satisfactory, good and excellent (an ideal is taken for one hundred percent, 75% exc, 50% chorus, 25% beats). And conversion at the rate of 0.5 percent minimum - 100 hosts give 0.5 applications.
The second step was to make statistics on the site in addition to the standard tools, which allows you to count clicks on all the tools and see the whole cycle - from where the client came from, what they clicked and watched, to the ID of the applications they send.
It also contradicted the usual ideas that you just need to let the traffic and all. In the future, thanks to measuring the number of clicks before the application, we came up with many things, such as the day’s action, selection of individual actions, transfer of the application form from a separate page directly to the promotion page to reduce clicks, variations of the submission button names, a / b testing different text options. It is simply impossible to generate ideas (and steal too) and measure their effectiveness without fine detailed statistics.
Next, we painted, from which sites and how we will increase traffic. We added statistics to analyze the effectiveness of traffic sources. In the process of the startup, we, measuring the effectiveness, also tried different advertising options. It turned out that specific offers of shares on banners are many times more effective than the general words “special offers for travel agencies”, and narrowly targeted mailings to clients from the CRM database to payers who were interested in certain stocks by the structure of their past purchases were also effective.
The move went well, when a thematic plan was distributed before March 8, and when the last day of certain actions was announced. With the usual five bids per day, such moves made it possible to receive up to 20 bids, with about 10 percent of customers buying three to five shares at once by sending several bids from the site.
Extremely unusual were the daily releases for the programmer. It was also not easy for all of us that the site on many pages did not have text, had a non-ideal design and layout. This was contrary to the idea to fill the site and lick the design, which is what everyone wants. However, applications from the site went, customers bought, and it pleased.
Another interesting feature was the simplification of the interface. Consider the example of the application form. Initially, there were fields in it: the project to which the action is tied, the list of actions itself, name, phone number, e-mail, comment. After the launch of the project and the first hundred hosts for three days did not go application, and I decided to simplify the interface. At first, this caused protests in the team. I left: all shares in one list, name (optional), and phone / e-mail (one field). And the application went!
After that, we wrote a traffic training plan, when it became clear that a hundred hosts were few. And we have developed up to 250 hosts per day, 800 views on average. And for the month of the project’s work there are already more than 120 applications, services for several hundred thousand rubles have been sold!
Perhaps the story is somewhat chaotic, so I will try to summarize:
1. At the time of launching the project, it is important to have a narrow scope, a vector, a task that it must solve.
2. It is important to clearly understand the audience (in our case, these are travel agencies that can buy something at a discount, as a rule, from the regions)
3. It is important to paint the digital goals of the project, analyzing which every day and even an hour, you will finish the project
4. The secondary elements of the site that are not related to a narrow task - design, content, beauty and thingies are not important.
5. It is crucial to understand the behavior of the client on the site before each click and keystroke, you need to make efforts for the most accurate tool for measuring the behavior of your visitor
6. Marketing efforts to attract traffic, and finalizing the project by analyzing statistics and the dynamics of digital targets, eats up to 80 percent of the time. Design, layout, programming in the first stage should work on this point, especially programming - changes should be made as soon as possible.
7. After reaching the stage of proof of concept (we had the idea of ​​a “twitter-like specials feed from many sites through which you would order”) you can choose the second vector, giving programmers time to refactor, people to fill the site with content, designers to fucking shadows and modern metro ui redesign. And they themselves have already started a new section.
We took the second concept under the code name "electronic manager".
I wish success to everyone who is doing projects, and I hope that I have helped with something!
Many of my friends somehow try to do projects, it turns out for a few.
I want to tell you on small examples about what to do in the project, and what you can score, even if it contradicts your intuitive aspirations.
The above is not a recipe for all occasions, it is my personal experience and does not claim to be absolute truth. It is always possible to nginx ingenious nginx for two years, which will then soar without any marketing due to exceptional quality and gain popularity, but the likelihood of making such an IMHO product is even lower than a successful typical startup.
')
So, we started to do a project of the association of companies, and special offers should have become the center section. Each company has its own website, as well as one or more successful projects, and there are promotions and discounts.
The site was supposed to combine these special offers and discount offers in the group style, and on the projects themselves to remove sections by inserting widgets there. Programmers know the principle of DRY / SPOT, it works in project management.
I will say in advance that the project became successful in less than a month and paid for itself, began to earn money, but more on that below.
There were four people in the team: two managers (I as a consultant, a programmer in the past, and a project engineer myself, a designer in the past), a designer and a programmer. Designer and coder were involved in piecework.
The first thing I would like to mention is the peculiarities of professional deformation. This is one of the first reasons for the failure of projects. The bottom line is that in case of uncertainty, each specialist, either at the beginning of the project or at the time of a pause in development, is drawn to do what he is fumbling about. The programmer sits down to write the perfect code or refactor the existing one, the designer to redraw, and so on. While problems usually lie in another area, and their omission leads to the failure of the project.
In this case, at the initial stage, we also began to slip a little - we thought through a complicated ideal form of sending an application for a share from the site, the project designer was trying to redraw something.
But we took ourselves in hand and did the right thing to do every time.
First, we set the digital goals of the project under the designated vector. The vector was to create a stream of stock orders from the site, which were then transferred to sales for processing.
Digital goals were as follows: the minimum number of hosts per day, the minimum number of views per visitor, the minimum number of requests per day. For each indicator, the three ranges of values ​​are satisfactory, good and excellent (an ideal is taken for one hundred percent, 75% exc, 50% chorus, 25% beats). And conversion at the rate of 0.5 percent minimum - 100 hosts give 0.5 applications.
The second step was to make statistics on the site in addition to the standard tools, which allows you to count clicks on all the tools and see the whole cycle - from where the client came from, what they clicked and watched, to the ID of the applications they send.
It also contradicted the usual ideas that you just need to let the traffic and all. In the future, thanks to measuring the number of clicks before the application, we came up with many things, such as the day’s action, selection of individual actions, transfer of the application form from a separate page directly to the promotion page to reduce clicks, variations of the submission button names, a / b testing different text options. It is simply impossible to generate ideas (and steal too) and measure their effectiveness without fine detailed statistics.
Next, we painted, from which sites and how we will increase traffic. We added statistics to analyze the effectiveness of traffic sources. In the process of the startup, we, measuring the effectiveness, also tried different advertising options. It turned out that specific offers of shares on banners are many times more effective than the general words “special offers for travel agencies”, and narrowly targeted mailings to clients from the CRM database to payers who were interested in certain stocks by the structure of their past purchases were also effective.
The move went well, when a thematic plan was distributed before March 8, and when the last day of certain actions was announced. With the usual five bids per day, such moves made it possible to receive up to 20 bids, with about 10 percent of customers buying three to five shares at once by sending several bids from the site.
Extremely unusual were the daily releases for the programmer. It was also not easy for all of us that the site on many pages did not have text, had a non-ideal design and layout. This was contrary to the idea to fill the site and lick the design, which is what everyone wants. However, applications from the site went, customers bought, and it pleased.
Another interesting feature was the simplification of the interface. Consider the example of the application form. Initially, there were fields in it: the project to which the action is tied, the list of actions itself, name, phone number, e-mail, comment. After the launch of the project and the first hundred hosts for three days did not go application, and I decided to simplify the interface. At first, this caused protests in the team. I left: all shares in one list, name (optional), and phone / e-mail (one field). And the application went!
After that, we wrote a traffic training plan, when it became clear that a hundred hosts were few. And we have developed up to 250 hosts per day, 800 views on average. And for the month of the project’s work there are already more than 120 applications, services for several hundred thousand rubles have been sold!
Perhaps the story is somewhat chaotic, so I will try to summarize:
1. At the time of launching the project, it is important to have a narrow scope, a vector, a task that it must solve.
2. It is important to clearly understand the audience (in our case, these are travel agencies that can buy something at a discount, as a rule, from the regions)
3. It is important to paint the digital goals of the project, analyzing which every day and even an hour, you will finish the project
4. The secondary elements of the site that are not related to a narrow task - design, content, beauty and thingies are not important.
5. It is crucial to understand the behavior of the client on the site before each click and keystroke, you need to make efforts for the most accurate tool for measuring the behavior of your visitor
6. Marketing efforts to attract traffic, and finalizing the project by analyzing statistics and the dynamics of digital targets, eats up to 80 percent of the time. Design, layout, programming in the first stage should work on this point, especially programming - changes should be made as soon as possible.
7. After reaching the stage of proof of concept (we had the idea of ​​a “twitter-like specials feed from many sites through which you would order”) you can choose the second vector, giving programmers time to refactor, people to fill the site with content, designers to fucking shadows and modern metro ui redesign. And they themselves have already started a new section.
We took the second concept under the code name "electronic manager".
I wish success to everyone who is doing projects, and I hope that I have helped with something!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/173055/
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