The history of creating a startup

As part of supporting Habrom startups, we open a series of articles about our company. As stated in the rules of the competition, we will be “fascinating to talk about the development of the project, how to solve problems and achieve the goal”.

Supl.biz is an electronic marketplace for businesses that simplifies the purchase of goods and services.
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The first article is the history of creation, and in the following we will talk about participating in several start-up competitions, about finding investors, in addition, there will be several purely technical articles, for example, organizing a mailing list and system architecture.

The story began in the summer of 2012, when two important events happened in my life.

The first is related to my scientific career: I was chosen as one of the 500 best young scientists from around the world to participate in the meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the German city of Lindau ( see more ... ). This event of my life has significantly changed my values ​​and aspirations. To the question “how can such a success be achieved?” All the great people with whom I communicated answered: “you need to do only what you like”.

The second key event of that summer is the resignation from the post of general director of my first company that provides services of remote assistants ( read more ... ). I created this business from scratch in 2011 and for the year brought it to payback, and then my partners were put in management positions, who are still at the helm and successfully develop the company.

In the second half of 2012, I had a lot of time to think about what I would like to do next. I almost did not have any business: sometimes I helped business partners, a couple of times a week I led a couple with my students. I spent a lot of time reading. Then I realized that if I like entrepreneurship and information technology, then my next business should be in IT.

Experience in the classic business is extremely useful to founders of startups. After analyzing the work of private business (and my first business allowed me to look inside many Russian companies), I realized that buying goods and services now looks as barbaric as searching for information before Google - people went to libraries and spent hours searching for information in books through cardboard catalogs.

For example, if a company needs to purchase something for business: furniture to the office, printing for advertising, some equipment or consumables, then you have to browse hundreds of websites and price lists of companies, then call them and clarify details. It also takes hours and sometimes days for libraries.

I decided to create a product that will be like Google to search for the right products and services for a business. Imagine you are placing an order for the supply of something, and the suppliers themselves set their own conditions and price - you do not need to look through a lot of websites and price lists.



I thought about this idea for a long time and tried to involve my friend Alexey Krasnoperov in the team - the coolest programmer I know - as a lead developer. Alexey doubted my idea: the monetization model was the stumbling block. Existing trading platforms either took away a percentage of each transaction, or demanded to buy a subscription for several thousand rubles a month - this is unacceptable for small businesses and complicates the use.

As it often happened, the insight came to me during my trip, this time in the United Arab Emirates in December 2012. It became clear to me that the most convenient monetization scheme is contextual advertising on the website and in e-mails, which is targeted around the city and field of activity of the company.

No need to reinvent the wheel when you can use the Facebook and Google monetization scheme!

Thus, we have a fundamental difference from all of our competitors - the main functionality of the trading platform becomes completely free for all participants. In addition, all functions can now be used even without registering on the site.

While on holiday in the UAE, I read Keith Ferrazzi’s amazing book Never Eat Alone. This book gave me inspiration, attitude for action and recommendations for finding solutions to various issues. I decided that when I returned home I would begin to assemble a team to work on this project, and if I did not have enough own capital, I would look for outside investors. All possibilities were written in my diary and a list of people who could potentially help me was compiled.

I told Alexey about my insight on January 2, 2013 for a bottle (as Keith Ferrazzi advised) of the 10-year-old Portuguese Porto, and Alexey agreed to participate in the project as technical director and lead developer that evening. My delight knew no bounds, I knew that by bringing Alexey to the team, we would create an excellent product.

A few days later we met for a more serious discussion of the project: we counted our expenses, painted the functions of each and set the size of the investment. We decided that the amount of labor costs would be the same, I additionally cover any financial expenses of our startup, so Alexey’s share will be 40%, mine - 60%.

The following months were productive. I wrote a technical task, Alexey implemented it. My assistants at that time conducted an analysis of competitors, determined their best solutions that can be borrowed.

All the assistants became our testers for half an hour a day: placed orders from virtual companies and responded to them, revealed errors. With the help of assistants, we also gathered a huge database of companies - almost all companies in the country.

The public version of Supl.biz was launched on July 16, 2013.

We placed the first order ourselves - to print 600 leaflets that we needed to advance to Seliger ( read more ... ). During several working hours, 10 responses were received to the order in the price range from 3,500 to 12,000 rubles. Our employee visited the printing house, which offered leaflets for 4300 rubles, assessed print quality, and we ordered from them. As a result, we received excellent leaflets and saved more than 5,000 rubles.

So on the very first day of our service, we ourselves benefited from it! At this moment, we even more believed in the success of our startup. Now we have more than 1000 orders and dozens of new ones appear every day.