Let's talk about startups 2 or again about design and most importantly - what to spend money on?

Greetings to all. Not long ago, I started writing about startups and raised the controversial question about using standard (open or commercial) ready-made solutions. We also promised to raise the related topic of standard designs, but even the first part of the material turned out to be quite pretentious and launched a heated discussion in the community . Today I decided to continue the topic, finally touching on the design and another reverent question - where is it actually worth spending the investor's money (if any).

Much of this material, according to the comments of my partners and friends, is more suitable for single start-ups, that is, when one person, or at most, a small group of friends is going to make a mini-revolution and get a pass to Google / Microsoft / Silicon Valley. But certain things will apply everywhere. In addition, much of what has been described is quite obvious, but it is often silent for this reason, which means many newbies may miss this tritely, so if something for you is absolute truth and self-evident, skip it and don’t bother yourself with comments like “ and so it is clear to all to the author of a failure ":)


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And so, the first question - is it possible to use standard design and themes for CMS systems? Opponents of this say that it immediately pushes away visitors, they say, if they come in and see that they saw the same design fifteen minutes ago on the New Zealand website about breeding aquarium fish, and now on the blog about new technologies in developing VLSI - they will be dismayed, spit and erase even the site address from the list of visited addresses. By no means! Let's take a closer look.

Basically, people do not want to remember the design, especially sites on which they only briefly, for example, logged in through a search engine. What to speak about the visitors of free design galleries, from where free templates are actually taken - these are only a small percentage of visitors, usually also site owners, developers, and just IT “sympathizers”. Therefore, very few people in general will pay attention to the fact that they have seen the same design somewhere else, and those who do, however, very few people will take it negatively. Of course, this will be so only when the design fully meets the requirements for all other indicators - it is comfortable, ergonomic and usable, beautiful (which also includes, in my understanding, and rigor), correctly displayed in the main browsers and screen resolutions. That is, if the design does not interfere with the user to work with the site, and even helps him, then what he specifically - only a few will notice. Good and convenient things are those that you use and do not notice (in the good sense of the word), while they perform their functions well, but immediately pay attention to errors and breakdowns. The same with design - they start to notice and criticize him only when he doesn’t satisfy the visitors with anything, but not at all when someone realizes that he saw the same design yesterday. After all, it is no secret that the design, like the product wrapper, performs purely utilitarian functions - yes, it is designed to improve the site’s performance, helps visitors and sets them up in a certain way, improves understanding, but shouldn’t, here I’ll emphasize, shouldn’t replace the very meaning and essence of the project.

A small digression. Anticipating a flurry of indignation and a nod to the rest of the industry, where design is often the main competitive advantage and is even emphasized in product advertising. Just think out for yourself that the design of the package or the product itself became so important at the moment of saturation of the market, when the product’s performance of its main function became almost perfect and there are still XX products of various manufacturers on the market that identically perform the same function and also satisfy the user's needs. . And only after this, the manufacturers switched to the manipulation and experiments with the secondary signs of the goods in order to stimulate sales.

Look at this blog (meaning www.abrdev.com ). Yes, I will not hide, the blog is based on the open free Wordpress engine, and moreover, its design theme is also free, the chosen truth, after a long search, but it fits perfectly and does exactly what is required - beautiful, stylish, moderately strict recognizable (although I myself have already seen one blog with the same topic). And I am more than confident that all our visitors, which is about a hundred unique per day and a little more than a hundred RSS feed readers, hardly accepted the fact of the engine and the theme for free, and come here just for the sake of these lines, or rather, for the unique and interesting content that is no longer on other sites. Of course, this blog may not be pulling at a full-fledged start-up, but on the other hand, why not, assuming that this is a full-fledged online media. However, these are details. The second example is more mundane.

Anyone who develops any applications, whether it is web or ordinary, knows that you often need a large variety of graphic elements — icons for various buttons and other controls. The typical approach is yes, let's order all these icons to the designer, and they will be unique and inimitable. And this approach can work, it is likely that the designer will cope with the task, and you will have really unique icons on the buttons in the mail system, denoting standard entities, such as folders, letters and files. And it is better that your visitors do not bother to guess what this or that icon means. But there is another way - for example, to use a standard set of icons, for example, Silk Icon set , which contains excellent icons for almost all occasions, and they are made quite professionally and your visitors will never think again what this button means. . This set is used, yes, you are not afraid, there are a lot of projects, for example, the MetaCoding service, and the interesting iBlogstats blog statistics research service (by the way, they have a slightly modified standard icon in the logo) - and this does not change their value to the user at all . Quite the contrary, standardization allows the user not to think over each button, immediately intuitively recognizing the indicated action. And just saving time and money - really, count how many icons of various actions, often completely second and third, you need, and estimate how much it can cost (assuming that a high-quality icon may well cost a few dollars or more) . Or, an example from the software - in an excellent IDE for developing web applications (in my opinion, just a mandatory startup kit) Aptana IDE is a component, a message center through which users can receive news about updating components and other messages from the developer and authors of plugins . But the icons denoting standard actions (such as deleting messages, reading notes, display settings) are also taken from this set. The professional version of this IDE costs 99 USD per year, and believe me, it fully justifies these funds. And to some extent, perhaps because the developers focused on developing unique functions, such as the IE debugger for JavaScript (an analogue of Firebug ), at the same time, minor modules utilize ready-made free solutions as much as possible, which means they leave time and resources to developers main functions. And the IDE itself was developed on the basis of the open platform Eclipse , which is its undoubted advantage, and that is what attracts many users. Imagine if the project would be so popular, powerful and expandable if the developers decided to first implement the entire infrastructure on their own? Hardly.

Of course, it is not always possible to find the right one, and if you create something unique, then it is quite possible, you really need to create part of the design and graphics, but believe me, with a sober approach to design, you will see that this amount is quite small and will allow reduce both time and required costs. And how much money to make the money free? Here we will talk about it now.

And so, you have an investor who is ready to finance on conditions that satisfy you, or you and your team have gathered with free funds - it does not matter. You have an idea, a vision of how to implement your idea, a team and a certain amount of money. Suppose this is a regular web project, what we understand as a startup - a website that implements a certain business process.

What do I consider it necessary and reasonable to spend money when creating a startup? Perhaps you have already read a lot of materials on this topic, both translated articles by foreign experts, and various Russian-language revelations by various authors. So we will add a couple of kopecks to this piggy bank of knowledge, experience, dreams and conjectures.

• It ’s worth spending time and money on developing and detailing ideas , for example, if you don’t have certain knowledge or information, you should get a paid consultation from a specialist, or just pay for lunch at a restaurant, discussing the idea with a reliable and knowledgeable person (if only with a friend who works in the neighboring field).
• To develop and refine business processes and ways to monetize a service — you need to know in advance and clearly imagine how you are going to make a profit from your project, what it can give users, what problems and needs it satisfies, what competitors there are the market, what the leading analytical agencies think about the market you are going to enter and other information that could clarify or suggest the missing links in your plan.
• On the review of competitors or just services and companies that operate in this area of ​​business, or related, or can quickly enter your market by changing their strategy or simply by acquiring another company. Yes, you should consider your competitors and in terms of whether such a thing could happen that some Internet giant will buy a closest competitor according to the idea (and we all know, I hope, who we are talking about) just for the sake of trying the same that you conceived. And maybe your winning strategy is to offer this customer exactly what they need?
• To use competitors' products for some time - for example, buy premium accounts from your competitors, work closely with their services, notice all the details and nuances, look in the forums and logs of technical support - this is where you will see what difficulties and problems users and This is what can push you to certain thoughts on how to improve your product.
• On infrastructure for development - a dedicated server or account for services for collaboration. If you work alone, then, in principle, you will not need a server first, but if there are several developers, it’s best to immediately take at least a VDS, on which you can immediately simulate all the necessary infrastructure, configure the necessary services, put SVN, bugtrack and internal wiki. All these resources will help you a lot to ensure a high-quality and fast development process, while at the same time it is a very simple solution in terms of costs (in principle, it will cost 20-100 USD per month, the main article is server rental).
• If necessary, for legal commercial software or Pro version of open source software . Yes, in many cases even open versions are enough, but look at things more real - if the necessary and critical functions for you are implemented in the paid version, do not be stingy, buy it. For example, the same Aptana IDE with its professional version. Among the paid functions there is a full-fledged debugger under Microsoft IE, as well as a visual JSON data editor and some other functions. And it perfectly justifies its money - for a web startup, the possibility of full development and debugging under all popular platforms (in this case, the browser) will be very necessary and justified. In addition, the software will remain, and you will be able to use it in other projects - which means, next time save money. Remember that the development environment and the surrounding infrastructure (server, SVN, wiki) are your professional tools and therefore pay attention to this - believe me, these tools will pay back all costs.
• Employee remuneration - this includes salary and various bonuses for employees. Yes, it is impossible to save on this, here it seems to me that, according to my own experience, there is more of a big problem where to find an adequate specialist who owns the necessary technologies and means. Again, this should worry you, if you are not working alone, otherwise ... no, even this is necessary, you will simply look for people for a specific job, in fact, outsource different support tasks for your project, the same design . This will help save valuable time - because for a startup, time is often the deciding factor.
• Testing - invite familiar people who could help test your service, gather those you trust and who will be able to qualitatively evaluate and suggest what the problems may be. It is even worth making a small paid test, even combined with PR, for example, to offer free of charge future accounts to the first users. There is a limitless fantasy, but you shouldn’t save on it.
• Advertising and marketing - yes, it is necessary to direct the main efforts and means here, since this is precisely what determines the fame and, ultimately, the profitability of your project. Much has already been written on this score, so I will not repeat too much.
• Primary staff — for example, editors or moderators, news gatherers, content managers, and similar specialists. Especially for content and social projects it is the most important, so it’s not worth saving, it’s better some time before the opening so that the information starts to be entered before the first real users arrive. In addition, these employees will become the first testers, which will help even inside the company to test and evaluate the project's usability. For example, in one of the startups I have designed now, we are laying the option that a dozen or even more editors will collect the first information for a certain reward, and they will start work almost immediately after the basic system is ready, one or two months before the project is opened to everyone. And funds for this are laid substantial, about half of the total project budget.

And now things that are not so obvious, but no less necessary for a startup:

• Good online feed . Yes, you really need a sufficient Internet channel, I really think at least 256 KB, with unlimited traffic. Of course, in the main cities this is no longer a problem, but there are still many places where it can be difficult, but this is one of the first things that you simply need for normal work. There is still a moment like this - having a good channel, the user's behavior in the network changes, and especially if you used to live with a dial-up or megabyte tariff. Now you can use various services, watch videos and listen to streaming audio, play online games, etc. All this seriously changes the behavior itself and allows you to better understand users, so you can immediately see a lot of opportunities, and during the development and planning process, believe me, you will have to browse websites a lot, use multimedia services, download software - so for any Internet startups this is indispensable and imperative.
• A good computer - most likely, you already have it, but it may well turn out that in order to work on a project you have to update it or purchase some devices. For example, an external hard drive with an automatic backup system, additional memory, a larger monitor. Strangely enough, this is a very important point, since the convenience and productivity of work depends on it, and yours, as the main person in a startup. So if you are still sitting in front of a 15 "monitor, you may be better to change it to a cheaper 19 or 22" panel. This seriously changes the style and convenience of work, so it’s best to spend this money that way - after all, your investor doesn’t need an exhausted programmer-project manager who is trying to do something unique on outdated equipment while sticking to his eyes. The computer is your main tool (after the head, of course), and take care of it. This does not mean that after receiving the money, you first of all embody the dream and buy a super MacPro with 8-core Xeon and 16 GB of memory (but if your startup involves powerful mat-modeling, serious work in prepress or three-dimensional professional graphics, it’s possible need to).
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