How to come up with an idea for your project (using the example of WORKZILLA)

It all started about 4 years ago, in February 2009. Then we worked with my future partner Sergey in an electronics company in South Korea. Both were eager to do something, and had plenty of free time. Sergey worked as a developer, and I was engaged in logistics ...

We had some kind of network experience: Sergey at that time successfully sold a photo tile, and I was engaged in a blog about green technologies.
From time to time we got some ideas and we even engaged in their implementation, but they didn’t pull at anything meaningful.

Brainstorm

We have come to understand that we need a real Brainstorm, so that the palm trees bend and the ships stagger. An evening was appointed when we, together with the trophy brandy, decided to initiate our global hegemony. I will not say that cognac is an obligatory element, but with it a flight of fancy passes a little higher.
Just to get together in the evening with brandy is obviously not enough, so we came up with some plan by which we will hold the event. Plan:
1 Write out the requirements that each of us makes to the business;
2 Write out the areas that interest us;
3 Generate ideas from interesting areas;
4 Impose a filter requirements on ideas;
5 For more detail paint several promising ideas.
')
List of criteria:
- service, not production. We could not remotely deal with stocks, logistics, etc .;
- work with end users. There are a lot of end users and the risk of losing them all is not very great;
- process automation. I wanted to develop technology and not my management skills;
- remote control. We were going to do business in Russian, and we were in South Korea.

Areas of interest (approximately):
-video;
-remote control;
-delegation.

Generation of ideas
This stage is actually the core of the whole process. It is very important not to criticize, but rather to support the flight of fantasy, fixing it. Ideas can be the most extravagant or too futuristic - the main thing that they were. Not all people can make themselves easily gush of ideas, so this should be done only after discussing areas of interest that helps generate ideas.

To anyone who is going to create a new business, I would recommend reading Paul Graham's article “How to Get Startup Ideas”, which I found thanks to XX . IMHO, the article is absolutely brilliant.

How to choose an idea after brainstorming?

After that evening, three promising ideas crystallized. There must be at least two of them in order to have something to choose from in more detailed examination. The task of the brainstorm is not to choose an idea, but to propose options. To make serious decisions, you need to sleep with ideas, and better not once.
At this stage, it is worth choosing carefully and scrupulously. We used standard and simple Pros & Cons Analysis, which really helps. The principle is incredibly simple, but it really works. FOR and AGAINST with weights for each option and estimate the amount of FOR and AGA. Of course, this is all subjective, but you will be surprised how effective it is if you have never used this method before. It is worth emphasizing that it is necessary to write out the points, and not to think about them in my head. And, of course, it works if there are few options, for example, 2 or 3.
At this stage, it is necessary to conduct a small analysis of the market: an overview of potential competitors, market size, etc. A few hours spent with search engines will help you find many answers. So within a few days we dropped two ideas and decided to create a Virtual Personal Assistant.

Why Virtual Personal Assistant

The idea of ​​WORKZILLA was born out of consideration that millions of people around the world are sitting in front of computers and doing all kinds of garbage, and could do something useful or at least make money.
We wanted to use this potential and create an opportunity for earnings where it was not there before. At that moment, we were not thinking about network professionals, but about ordinary people who may not be able to do something special, but can have a lot of non-specials. There are housewives, students and young mothers. A separate line was thoughts about people with disabilities who could also be able to honestly make money online.
On the other hand, the service was supposed to increase the efficiency of its users. They can easily assign tasks that usually take a very long time. A very narrow layer of people has a personal assistant, and we wanted to make it accessible to everyone. A couple of years after the launch, we had a slogan that well describes our proposal: “Focus on the main thing - entrust us with the routine”.

What is worth remembering when choosing a domain

I do not consider myself an expert in domain selection, but I can tell you about one important aspect that should be taken into account. To work, we chose the domain poruchite.ru. And there is a call, it seems clear about what, and it is spelled unequivocally. But you will easily notice that for some reason it is different from our current workzilla.ru.
About a year after we started our work, we received a letter from the porucheno project, which stated that our domain is too similar to them, and we should change it. We did not take this seriously until we received a letter from our hosting provider, who threatened to shut us down for the same reason without trial. The hoster apparently received a similar letter from porucheno and for some reason decided to pressure us. I do not know why he decided to act this way, but this is already a separate conversation.
We consulted with lawyers and they confirmed that there really is a problem. Domains are close to being confused, and our areas of activity overlap greatly. And in the case of the court we will lose, because our domain was registered later.
At that time, there was practically no “brand” capital, so we just decided to change the domain. Although, of course, at all stages of work, this incurs additional unpleasant costs: changing texts, website design, banners, losing the “reference base” ...
From here a conclusion: before a choice of the domain study competitors carefully. Let me remind you that we almost didn’t do it, and if we had devoted more time, we would have found this project and would not lose time and money to change the domain.

To invent or copy?

Now we can say that we approached the choice of ideas quite adventurously. No additional analysis, except what I described above, we did. We did not calculate the economic prospects, did not consider how much, it would cost us to attract users, what will be the costs of developing the system and maintaining it. We understood that the basis of our earnings will be the commission model, and somehow we will think up additional ways of making money along the way. We simply liked the idea of ​​giving people the opportunity to earn money, and the ability to give up routine problems to others.
We believed in history that, having created something useful and popular, we will always figure out how to make money. By the way, when we created WORKZILLA, social networks were popular enough for everyone to use them, but they themselves did not yet know how they would earn. At the same time, no one was going to turn off social networks, which means they believed that there would be a way out. Also, once Google found how great it is to monetize search through contextual ads.

When the question of choosing an idea comes in, the question always pops up: is it worth creating something new or is it only worthwhile to deal with projects that have been tested in other markets. Again, I will not insist on the truth of my judgments, but we had a desire to come up with something new and useful. The Russian language at school was not easy for me, but I always preferred writing to presentation. This approach stirs the interest of the creators, because there is no limit to satisfaction, if your idea and its implementation work. There is something in this tube as opposed to cold business. Of course, along with the lamp heat come the risks that everything will fail. We decided to take risks and, to be honest, we didn’t even have any thoughts to copy something.

The idea of ​​WORKZILLA we completely invented ourselves. Having no competitors in the first few days, we were even more convinced that we were the first to invent it. We found the first similar sites only after several months of active work. This discovery upset us greatly. In an instant, from the pioneers “on horseback” we turned into catching up. The mood was at zero and there were thoughts to throw it all.
But, as always happens, the negative shock passed and we soberly assessed the situation. The sites we found were only partially similar, none of them allowed us to do what we wanted. They allowed us to perform part of the tasks that we were going to solve, but did it in a completely different way. Plus, we were reassured by the fact that we did not google these sites at the beginning of our journey, which means that their popularity is insignificant and we can easily compete with them.

How are we different from freelancing?

I am talking here about the uniqueness of our idea, and people may have a reasonable question: how does your project differ from classic freelancing?
A few key differences:
- speed
We focus on the rapid response of performers. Therefore, at first we did a desktop application that will notify itself about the new task, and not wait until the executor comes to the site. Now the desktop client is no longer there, but the response to the tasks averages 3 minutes and can be reduced.
-Spectrum tasks
Our focus is simple simple tasks that may arise for everyone, and not just for those who want to make a website. Accordingly, almost everyone can work, because most tasks do not require specific knowledge.
- Price
Simple, simple tasks that are easy to place and quickly performed should cost a bit. Initially, we estimated the average price at 30-50 rubles. In reality, we have several hundred, but not thousands.
- Selection of candidates
We wanted to really quickly solve other people's problems, so it was necessary to immediately provide several suitable candidates, and not to force the customer to choose from the sheets of the respondents.
- Price bargaining
Again, for speed reasons, we wanted to exclude the price discussion stage. The task has a price right away. If you want to work for this price - you agree, you don't want - you disagree.
- Guarantees
Warranties to both parties, therefore, before starting work, money is reserved, and transferred only when the customer himself confirms the fact of work.

Where to get money

When there is a story about the start of some projects I always, like many, always have a question about securing financing. Where did the creators take the money? The bag as in the picture above is not at all.
In the beginning, we did not have any significant funds. We were too young for significant savings, and the salary was quite modest. But it did not stop us at all. We planned to spend money on a minimum, and most of the work done independently. Creating an entire system, we “by eye” estimated about $ 2m, which should have included the client application and the site. We decided that we could find that kind of money and began to work.
It is worth saying that we have invested not temporary money, but monetary capital. Therefore, total investments turned out to be colossal, but they did not require significant money.

Testing your idea

Admittedly, we did not immediately rush to program and spend money. We already had some business intelligence, and we began to discuss our idea where it was possible: with our friends, colleagues, without fear. At that time we had a marketing club at work, where we shared professional discoveries, discussed articles, etc. In this small club, I also made a presentation of our idea, after listening to a lot of criticism and interesting advice. Today I can say that this was comparable to the experience of speaking at a startup event, which is very useful for understanding your idea.

I will not write again, why ideas are worth nothing, even though the “ghost of secrecy” still runs around the Russian Internet. But I am firmly convinced of this and I suggest that all entrepreneurs focus not on the safety of the idea, but on its implementation.

During public debates, we received various comments from “nobody needs it” and “you can’t spin anything without serious money” to restrainingly approving ones. The main thing is that we did not find any noticeable minuses in the model and decided to start work.

Implementation plan

We understood about what we want to get, but the question arose how to implement all this. Sergey sketched a small plan on a piece of paper, what and when we need to do. There were three components: a desktop client under Windows, a server with which the client will contact and a site where the client can be downloaded. I do not remember the exact time estimates, which were voiced by Sergey, but they certainly did not exceed two months. We knew that such cases were never executed in time, and threw a month on top, naively expecting to receive something in 3 months.

The first steps

The real work began when we started writing the TK. It was necessary three TK: TZ for the design of the entire system, TZ site, TK client. They were drafted in exactly the order dictated by the implementation plans. Server Sergey was going to write himself, so he did not need TZ. I decided to undertake the preparation of TK, despite the lack of experience in this area.
Here Google helped, which gave some useful materials on the queries “how to write TK”. Strongly contributed to viewing the TZ, which I found on the freelance sites, where they hung customers for their projects. The process of writing TK was quite time-consuming. All TK took at least a month. After completion of this work, the stage of selection of performers began. This was the beginning of a large history of work with remote employees, which will also be disclosed in a separate article.

PS

With this post we begin a series of publications where we want to share our accumulated experience in creating and working on the WORKZILLA.RU project. We do not pretend to omniscience and universal genius, but we want to tell you about our mistakes and findings - they can be useful to someone. For us, this is an opportunity to talk about useful service, find partners and hear interesting ideas / advice.
Articles can be divided into two main types: technical and non-technical. We will try to alternate these two species.
We are the two founders of the project and its current leaders.

This is my first article on Habré, so please do not judge strictly. Ready to consider constructive criticism when writing the following articles.
Sample list of future non-technical articles:
- Search for first employees
- Run the first version
- Search for first users
- What difficulties have we encountered
- Remote team work

Sample list of future technical articles:
- Servers
- Preparing for a mass advertising campaign with JMeter
- DR - how we solve the problem of force majeure.
- More about backups
- Service monitoring with Munin, Nagios, etc.
- The problem of choosing a reliable SMTP server

What is WORKZILLA?

WORKZILLA is a service for solving problems that you do not want or cannot do.
An algorithm is used to select candidates, the service gives guarantees to both parties, 90% of the tasks are confirmed with a “+” rating. A few more facts at the time of writing this post (March 2013):
- monthly turnover of the service - 2 million rubles;
- the number of registered users is about 100 thousand;
- several hundreds of tasks per day;
- the average time of appearance of the candidate selected by the algorithm, 3 minutes;
Below is a section where I tell in detail how we differ from freelancing.
Examples of tasks: text recognition / audio / video, writing / editing texts, all kinds of design, help with studies, tips, technical advice ...
Examples of completed tasks can be found here .