The story of the unstripped startup
A year and a half ago, I wrote a post * about Altasfera. It was a very ambitious project, inspired by the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek about private money and an active discussion about the global economic crisis. Since then, the concept of the project has changed several times, the interface has been worked on, people have gone and came to the team, new functions have been added, various ways of promotion have been tried. Last summer, the money was finally out, investors were not sought and the project was not frozen for an indefinite period. I still think that many of the basic ideas of Altasphere are correct. Most likely, they will somehow be embodied. But in that particular implementation, we made a lot of mistakes. I had time to reflect on them and in this topic I would like to share my experience with you. Perhaps I will repeat the theses already well-known to the audience, but at the same time I hope that what has been stated here will help avoid some mistakes for those who are starting their own Internet project now or are planning to do it in the near future.
Three highly interdependent subsystems were designed in the Altasphere: the system of executives' reputation, the system of issuing liabilities-assets through which contracts were concluded, and the system of issuing private currencies secured by obligations. The problem is that the reason for entering into contracts arose after reliable ratings were formed, and there was no place for ratings to take in the absence of real contracts. The issue of money required at the same time high-grade work and a rating system and a system of obligations.
Each subsystem solves a well-defined problem and each individually can be an independent mechanism.
')
Startup freelancepro.me generates ratings of freelancers. Instead of trying to accumulate baseline data for these ratings within himself, he aggregates already existing information about the reputation of freelancers from third-party sources: odesk, linkedin, elance, github, etc. I think that over time educational services and sites of industry conferences may also get on this list. The recently launched Mozilla Open Badges carry the same approach: instead of self-contained systems, open ones are built that collect information from the outside and give to the outside.
Liabilities-assets in Altasfera are inherently very close to coupons and gift certificates. Services that allow them to produce and sell have been working successfully for a long time. The difference is only in the application of this tool: we tried to make commitments a full-fledged means of concluding contracts, and not a way to attract customers or sell specific services. Nevertheless, nothing prevented him from starting precisely with this.
Finally, systems of private currencies are also actively developing. The most notable example here is Bitcoin. The success of this project, of course, is largely ensured by a very strong cryptographic technology, but at the same time by a common approach: the user does not need anything to ensure the emission, except that he already has at hand - the computing power of his computer.
Probably, you can get to work immediately complex multi-component system. Great resources are needed for this: people, money, experience, connections — which you most likely do not have. As well as they did not have them. And the main thing is to have the ability to immediately design it correctly, which at all seems fantastic. At the beginning of their journey, all innovative companies started with a single product: Google from search, Apple from personal computers, Facebook from personal pages.
We had some idea about the point “A”, the current structure of the economy and society, there was some vision about the point “Z”, about how we would like to organize socio-economic processes with the help of the Altasphere, vague guesses about how it all could evolve further and no clue about intermediate letters. How do we get from point “A” to point “Z”? How many stages are there? What resources will be needed to move from the current stage to the next? We not only did not know the answers to these questions, we did not even look for them. It seemed that only one light, flickering somewhere in the front through the fog, was enough, and there somehow, one way or another.
“Somehow” did not work. We hired people, but periodically not those. We could not hire all the necessary ones simply because of financial constraints, but we did not understand this and therefore we squandered the available forces. We used the tools that were available to us, but not the ones that were needed: we shot promotional videos, made emails to the purchased databases. Promotional videos did not bring any effect (simply because the effective cost of other money), and email-mailing and did more harm than good. The site was filled with people who clearly do not share the philosophy of the project, at some point, even a wave of spam from MMMs. Accordingly, the already small attractiveness of the project for a person from our target audience has only decreased: you come to participate in the development of a new economy, and you are greeted by announcements about MMM, forex games and astrology, you feel unpleasant and you leave.
Having survived a number of unsuccessful attempts to gain momentum, we guessed that some intermediate point was needed. We decided that, probably, the idea of ​​private money is too complicated, it is necessary to simplify it somehow. In general, they chose a way to simplify quite by accident: the books about networking and Altasfera came to be called “the network of useful connections”. Networking itself is a worthwhile practice, and of course there is a place for a service that helps you find useful connections. One of the recent winners of StartFellows is just such a service - takepin.com
However, the problem is that networking does not lie on a trajectory leading to a system of private currencies. From the change of the slogan Altasfera did not become a convenient tool for finding useful links. All that we have achieved in this way is new obstacles for the target audience and new waste of resources on adding unnecessary functions, on negotiations with networkers, trips to their conferences, etc.
Ultimately, we didn’t have an answer even to the question of why we are doing the Altasphere. It began this story, it seems, as an altruistic project to change the world for the better. About making money out of the question. There was an idea and some budget from the savings of the founder of the project. When these savings began to dry up, we attempted to bring a commercial component to Altasfera - made it possible to buy badges that increased the user rating. And even before Altasfera gained at least some popularity. As a result, the last money was spent on commercial services, which only aggravated the situation: where did the world change for the better was completely incomprehensible.
Big things are being done step by step: right at the beginning you have neither knowledge, nor experience, nor resources.
We live in an amazing time and work in an amazing industry: here and now the Marxist criticism of capitalism turns against itself. Marx wrote about inhumanity. For the capitalist, the worker is a function, easily renewable fuel for a huge factory car. The capitalist, who owns machines, workshops, mines, is more necessary for the worker than for the capitalist worker with his low qualifications, one of many of the same. Therefore, the inner world of the worker is not interesting to anyone, except for his relatives and relatives. The impetus to manifest humanity arises in the capitalist only in the line beyond which riots and pogroms begin.
The production tool for a web developer is a $ 500 laptop. Necessary infrastructure - servers, software, domains, access to the network - either through the cheap, or completely free. The main value is now in people, in their skills, abilities, aspirations. If you want to become a capitalist, i.e. to profit from the addition and resale of labor of the people you hired, then your inner concern should be your main concern. Because nothing more you can not give them. They already have laptops. You can give what they do not have: interesting tasks, satisfaction, material and moral, balanced working environment. The same people work very differently depending on the conditions.
In the Altasphere, we almost did not think about the general mood in which we work. We had remote developers, sometimes relationships were lined up pretty tough, and almost always there was a feeling of a feverish negative: deadlines were broken, something constantly needed to be repaired and finished. Rarely when the opinion of the developers themselves about the need for a particular functionality was taken into account. Additionally, the situation was complicated by the fact that the service was originally developed at an outsourcing and we inherited a code of very dubious quality. It’s hard to work on what you don’t really believe in, keeping bad code in an atmosphere of haste and guessing that the fruits of your thread will remain unclaimed.
In fact, we took the worst of both approaches. From the old approach - hierarchy, inattention to the inner world; from the new - the opportunity to isolate from the near Skype conference.
One hundred years ago, in order to be a successful capitalist, it was required to own factories and mines. Today we must be able to build a beneficial atmosphere around you.
In the physiological and epistemological sense, we live in a world of illusions: our brain constantly builds models of reality, signals from the senses only correct the current model and the cycle repeats. “Our perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality,” says English neurobiologist Chris Frit in his book.
There is always a gap between what the world really is and how you perceive it. This gap is the more, the less often you subject your models to verification and the more confident you are in your a priori judgments. The brain is easily deceived when the gap between reality and our fantasy about it is relatively small — when we just look around. When you fantasize about the necessary services people, how they could solve everyday tasks, how you could change the world with the help of technology, your brain deceives you almost certainly.
Altasfera began with the composition of a treatise, in which a rather inept attempt was made to describe the economic and socio-cultural crisis of Western civilization. No more and no less. Half a year this text was written. We imagined something about the world and cut off all sorts of signals that would allow us to bring our model into conformity with reality. First, out of fear that the idea of ​​Altasfera will be stolen, then simply out of self-assured self-righteousness, worthy of the main character of Nosov’s books.
The main problem of all builders of utopias is that the scheme, so beautiful and elegant on paper, does not withstand meeting reality: people do not fit in the roles they have prepared for them, side effects arise, out of place competing trends appear, etc. At the subconscious level, the desire to protect his invention from the outside world is formed: before the Altasphere was presented to the public, it was completely rewritten, the design was altered twice. When a collision with the outside world all the same occurs, psychologically, I strongly do not want to notice the consequences. This is the psychology of the gambler: the more you invest / lose, the harder it is for you to stop, the higher the cost of defeat is for you. It seems that here is another step and will be a success.
Perseverance, own vision - these are excellent qualities. But at the same time Socratic is also necessary “I know that I know nothing.” Everything that you think about your project is nothing more than hypotheses, and they all need the toughest test. And the more important for the existence of your project one or another hypothesis, the earlier it needs to be checked.
PS
* when the concept changed, I hid that first post about Altasphere. Now I no longer have the opportunity to get it back, so it is available only as a pdf-file .
Focus on one thing.
Three highly interdependent subsystems were designed in the Altasphere: the system of executives' reputation, the system of issuing liabilities-assets through which contracts were concluded, and the system of issuing private currencies secured by obligations. The problem is that the reason for entering into contracts arose after reliable ratings were formed, and there was no place for ratings to take in the absence of real contracts. The issue of money required at the same time high-grade work and a rating system and a system of obligations.
Each subsystem solves a well-defined problem and each individually can be an independent mechanism.
')
Startup freelancepro.me generates ratings of freelancers. Instead of trying to accumulate baseline data for these ratings within himself, he aggregates already existing information about the reputation of freelancers from third-party sources: odesk, linkedin, elance, github, etc. I think that over time educational services and sites of industry conferences may also get on this list. The recently launched Mozilla Open Badges carry the same approach: instead of self-contained systems, open ones are built that collect information from the outside and give to the outside.
Liabilities-assets in Altasfera are inherently very close to coupons and gift certificates. Services that allow them to produce and sell have been working successfully for a long time. The difference is only in the application of this tool: we tried to make commitments a full-fledged means of concluding contracts, and not a way to attract customers or sell specific services. Nevertheless, nothing prevented him from starting precisely with this.
Finally, systems of private currencies are also actively developing. The most notable example here is Bitcoin. The success of this project, of course, is largely ensured by a very strong cryptographic technology, but at the same time by a common approach: the user does not need anything to ensure the emission, except that he already has at hand - the computing power of his computer.
Probably, you can get to work immediately complex multi-component system. Great resources are needed for this: people, money, experience, connections — which you most likely do not have. As well as they did not have them. And the main thing is to have the ability to immediately design it correctly, which at all seems fantastic. At the beginning of their journey, all innovative companies started with a single product: Google from search, Apple from personal computers, Facebook from personal pages.
Have a strategic vision
We had some idea about the point “A”, the current structure of the economy and society, there was some vision about the point “Z”, about how we would like to organize socio-economic processes with the help of the Altasphere, vague guesses about how it all could evolve further and no clue about intermediate letters. How do we get from point “A” to point “Z”? How many stages are there? What resources will be needed to move from the current stage to the next? We not only did not know the answers to these questions, we did not even look for them. It seemed that only one light, flickering somewhere in the front through the fog, was enough, and there somehow, one way or another.
“Somehow” did not work. We hired people, but periodically not those. We could not hire all the necessary ones simply because of financial constraints, but we did not understand this and therefore we squandered the available forces. We used the tools that were available to us, but not the ones that were needed: we shot promotional videos, made emails to the purchased databases. Promotional videos did not bring any effect (simply because the effective cost of other money), and email-mailing and did more harm than good. The site was filled with people who clearly do not share the philosophy of the project, at some point, even a wave of spam from MMMs. Accordingly, the already small attractiveness of the project for a person from our target audience has only decreased: you come to participate in the development of a new economy, and you are greeted by announcements about MMM, forex games and astrology, you feel unpleasant and you leave.
Having survived a number of unsuccessful attempts to gain momentum, we guessed that some intermediate point was needed. We decided that, probably, the idea of ​​private money is too complicated, it is necessary to simplify it somehow. In general, they chose a way to simplify quite by accident: the books about networking and Altasfera came to be called “the network of useful connections”. Networking itself is a worthwhile practice, and of course there is a place for a service that helps you find useful connections. One of the recent winners of StartFellows is just such a service - takepin.com
However, the problem is that networking does not lie on a trajectory leading to a system of private currencies. From the change of the slogan Altasfera did not become a convenient tool for finding useful links. All that we have achieved in this way is new obstacles for the target audience and new waste of resources on adding unnecessary functions, on negotiations with networkers, trips to their conferences, etc.
Ultimately, we didn’t have an answer even to the question of why we are doing the Altasphere. It began this story, it seems, as an altruistic project to change the world for the better. About making money out of the question. There was an idea and some budget from the savings of the founder of the project. When these savings began to dry up, we attempted to bring a commercial component to Altasfera - made it possible to buy badges that increased the user rating. And even before Altasfera gained at least some popularity. As a result, the last money was spent on commercial services, which only aggravated the situation: where did the world change for the better was completely incomprehensible.
Big things are being done step by step: right at the beginning you have neither knowledge, nor experience, nor resources.
Worry about the health of your team.
We live in an amazing time and work in an amazing industry: here and now the Marxist criticism of capitalism turns against itself. Marx wrote about inhumanity. For the capitalist, the worker is a function, easily renewable fuel for a huge factory car. The capitalist, who owns machines, workshops, mines, is more necessary for the worker than for the capitalist worker with his low qualifications, one of many of the same. Therefore, the inner world of the worker is not interesting to anyone, except for his relatives and relatives. The impetus to manifest humanity arises in the capitalist only in the line beyond which riots and pogroms begin.
The production tool for a web developer is a $ 500 laptop. Necessary infrastructure - servers, software, domains, access to the network - either through the cheap, or completely free. The main value is now in people, in their skills, abilities, aspirations. If you want to become a capitalist, i.e. to profit from the addition and resale of labor of the people you hired, then your inner concern should be your main concern. Because nothing more you can not give them. They already have laptops. You can give what they do not have: interesting tasks, satisfaction, material and moral, balanced working environment. The same people work very differently depending on the conditions.
In the Altasphere, we almost did not think about the general mood in which we work. We had remote developers, sometimes relationships were lined up pretty tough, and almost always there was a feeling of a feverish negative: deadlines were broken, something constantly needed to be repaired and finished. Rarely when the opinion of the developers themselves about the need for a particular functionality was taken into account. Additionally, the situation was complicated by the fact that the service was originally developed at an outsourcing and we inherited a code of very dubious quality. It’s hard to work on what you don’t really believe in, keeping bad code in an atmosphere of haste and guessing that the fruits of your thread will remain unclaimed.
In fact, we took the worst of both approaches. From the old approach - hierarchy, inattention to the inner world; from the new - the opportunity to isolate from the near Skype conference.
One hundred years ago, in order to be a successful capitalist, it was required to own factories and mines. Today we must be able to build a beneficial atmosphere around you.
Check yourself
In the physiological and epistemological sense, we live in a world of illusions: our brain constantly builds models of reality, signals from the senses only correct the current model and the cycle repeats. “Our perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality,” says English neurobiologist Chris Frit in his book.
There is always a gap between what the world really is and how you perceive it. This gap is the more, the less often you subject your models to verification and the more confident you are in your a priori judgments. The brain is easily deceived when the gap between reality and our fantasy about it is relatively small — when we just look around. When you fantasize about the necessary services people, how they could solve everyday tasks, how you could change the world with the help of technology, your brain deceives you almost certainly.
Altasfera began with the composition of a treatise, in which a rather inept attempt was made to describe the economic and socio-cultural crisis of Western civilization. No more and no less. Half a year this text was written. We imagined something about the world and cut off all sorts of signals that would allow us to bring our model into conformity with reality. First, out of fear that the idea of ​​Altasfera will be stolen, then simply out of self-assured self-righteousness, worthy of the main character of Nosov’s books.
The main problem of all builders of utopias is that the scheme, so beautiful and elegant on paper, does not withstand meeting reality: people do not fit in the roles they have prepared for them, side effects arise, out of place competing trends appear, etc. At the subconscious level, the desire to protect his invention from the outside world is formed: before the Altasphere was presented to the public, it was completely rewritten, the design was altered twice. When a collision with the outside world all the same occurs, psychologically, I strongly do not want to notice the consequences. This is the psychology of the gambler: the more you invest / lose, the harder it is for you to stop, the higher the cost of defeat is for you. It seems that here is another step and will be a success.
Perseverance, own vision - these are excellent qualities. But at the same time Socratic is also necessary “I know that I know nothing.” Everything that you think about your project is nothing more than hypotheses, and they all need the toughest test. And the more important for the existence of your project one or another hypothesis, the earlier it needs to be checked.
PS
* when the concept changed, I hid that first post about Altasphere. Now I no longer have the opportunity to get it back, so it is available only as a pdf-file .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/173867/
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