Startup alone. My-Wins Story

Hello, Habr!
My name is Alexander. I am a programmer from Minsk and would like to share with you the experience that I received when creating my project - the service for assessing the achievements of the people of My-Wins .



I will tell you how the idea was born, how I managed to implement it alone and what happened after the launch.

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What happened to My-Wins?

Nobody wants to work for uncle. I began to think about business as a student. In my graduation year, 2011, my friend and I had a lot of ideas: real estate, car ad websites, an online clothing store (like ebay) and much more. Some began to be developed, but always curled after a couple of weeks. What turned out, it was impossible to call quality - everything was just awful. I realized that without experience nothing shines for me.

Got a job. I first learned what a framework is. In early 2012, I began to sort out ideas again. But they all seemed very laborious to me now. I understood that sitting with folded arms is not an option either - water will not flow under a rolling stone. I decided that the best option would be an uncomplicated pilot project, which would give me an idea of ​​how a site on the Internet works, what Google Webmaster Tools is, and besides, there was a chance to make money on Adsense.

All summer and my vacation I did an article site about business - business-notes.ru. Articles planned to translate from foreign counterparts. It took me about 3 hours to find and translate an article, it was a lot. I invited a translator to this job - $ 5 per article, about $ 150 a month.

In the meantime, business-notes were not very popular.



A small advertising campaign on Vkontakte in April showed that people of this kind of articles are not interested, and search engines don’t like the unique content. As a result, I concluded that without serious financial investments in advertising, a high site traffic cannot be obtained. Only very high-quality material or something revolutionary new can evoke people's interest.

How was the idea of ​​My-Wins born?

In early 2013, I went to freelancing. No public transport in the mornings and evenings, sleep as much as you want, organize the day as you want - a fairy tale ?! Not really. It turned out to be very difficult to organize myself at home, but most of all I began to lack communication with my colleagues on work issues. Discuss the algorithm, ask for advice, help with advice, find out how this or that problem was solved. I wanted to get an assessment of my work by another specialist, as relatives and friends understood little in programming. In addition, I wanted to be aware of the success of other colleagues.

In the middle of February 2013, I had the idea to solve the problem of “loneliness” by creating a service for sharing my achievements with people of the same profession, with the ability to evaluate these achievements, both positive and negative (after all, there is a lack of dislike in social networks). In addition, such a service would be useful not only for programmers, I was sure that in almost any area of ​​life, people would like to know the opinion about their successes. Be it work, hobbies, relationships, sports. The system of achievements exists in a variety of computer games - players like to get “achivki”, competing with other people. Why not create a similar system for people?

I was inspired by this idea! The first minutes, creating images of the finished site in my head, I saw how popular and demanded it would be. With great excitement, I opened Google and started looking for analogues. Nothing was found! Neither the Russian site, nor the English. I was delighted! Immediately decided that I would do a multilingual website with a domain in the zone. Com. I started to choose the right domain name: with the word achievements everything was taken, I tried the synonym wins and - good luck! The short, easily remembered and indirectly conveying essence of the project domain "my-wins.com" was free!

Start of development

I was in no hurry to start developing. Having read various articles about start-ups, I understood that the idea should sound just as good after some time. I decided to make a cap Under construction and wait a bit.



Waiting dragged on. On weekdays, I was engaged only in freelancing (I could not organize work from 9 to 18). Over the weekend, I read Getting Real (from 37 signals), helped my parents build a house, and sometimes I was just lazy. However, this pause turned out to be the way - in the main work for one task I developed a small and simple framework based on CodeIgniter, which was later used to develop My-Wins. In addition, the ideas expressed in Getting Real helped me a lot - I did not include a bunch of functionality in the first release.

At the end of May, the idea in my head sounded as good as it did in February, and the mindset was to work. I proceeded.



I had no experience in design, so I drew a prototype as I could. I understood that from the first time, what would be comfortable and beautiful would not work.

The basis of the design was the Under Construction page, which I found on the Internet. I liked the background with two colors and the container in the center. I love the blue shades, but I did not want to do the project in the same colors as Facebook, Vkontakte and Twitter. Chose green. With the logo, everything turned out to be very simple: in a series of experiments in Photoshop over the letter W , a crown was found, which hinted well at the element of rivalry.

Having made a rough layout for several days, I wanted to add some “wow” effect. I was always amazed at the beauty that the guys are doing here and decided to make the transition through the pages with a cool CSS3 effect. But it was not so easy to impose a 3D effect on the main container, I never came across this in my work - it was very difficult. When something worked out, it didn’t look very nice, so 3D was replaced with “floating” (scale + opacity).

The key feature of My-Wins, it seemed to me, should have been the ability for the user to view victories from that area of ​​life that interests him, to exclude victories from his tape from a completely different area, because he could not rate them properly. A system of categories with many subcategories was invented.



I thought that a user who wants to read about achievements in the field of mathematics should not see the progress of schoolchildren in this subject. Therefore, hundreds of different categories and subcategories were created that were designed to help the user read what he is interested in. In total, about 3,000 categories and subcategories with English translation each were created. It took a lot of time and, as it turned out, wasted. But more on that later.

In general, I expected to finish the main functionality in a few weeks, but I finished it in 3 months. I have been fiddling with the main page for a long time (the victory slider), where filters were applied and history was preserved. I went through the values ​​of CSS properties for a long time so that everything looked as good as possible. It turned out to be very difficult to write text for the main page. But one way or another, the basic functionality was done by September.

Launch

The hosting has been chosen cloudy. I never worked on setting up servers, so I asked a friend to do it for me for a small amount. Then I started setting up authorization - Facebook, Google and Vkontakte and quickly testing everything.

In October, I invited my friends and asked them to add at least one victory each. I thought that this would give a sharp start to the dissemination of information about the project. However, it turned out that almost everyone has a lot to do, and most of them could only register. It upset me a little, but looking at the situation from the other side, I realized that people had their own affairs and problems, and it was hardly worth counting that by asking friends one could attract thousands of users.

It was pointless to start any advertising campaign with 5 wins - too little content. Therefore, I turned to Advego (exchange of articles) for help. Having created an order for adding new victories there, the authors received a very good response. Many of them praised the project, thanked for the payment and wanted to continue cooperation. At first, I was very pleased with the praise, but watching the attendance, I began to understand that almost none of the authors on My-Wins are returning! The authors who wrote the victory simply did their work.

In the meantime, I decided to add comments, no ratings, answers, subscriptions — just comments. This was quickly done over the weekend. In addition, I began to receive complaints about the annoying CSS effect, the one I had been sitting on for more than one day! How so? I liked him! Added checkbox to profile settings, which removed it.

In November, decided that it was time to add a subscription system, because the user will be more important in the first place to read the victory of his friend. In parallel, I continued to check every work of the authors, add the missing categories to the database. Gradually it began to bother, it seemed that these categories were endless. All these sports, hobbies, jobs, various diseases, their classifications - ate up a lot of my time. After weighing all the pros and cons, I decided to replace the Categories with the Tag system. It was unpleasant to refuse to work, which, probably, a total of about 50 hours invested. But the tags turned out to be very convenient, and the form of filtering was easier and clearer.



Mid-November was the start of the Yandex.Direct advertising campaigns and Google Adwords. Yandex was unpleasantly surprised by the lack of the ability to pay with a plastic card (for non-residents), and the bank transfer fee of $ 14 was completely upset. However, the most interesting was the result of the work of these campaigns.



Conversion is a user registration. And Yandex and Google for some reason thought it was not entirely correct; there were one and a half times more real registrations excluding the authors Advego. But in any case, about $ 10-15 per new user is not cheap. Perhaps this price is due to a kind of “product” of advertising, because users hardly wanted to find an assessment service for achievements. Before the start of advertising campaigns, I read quite a few articles on their proper construction. In early December, I created separate pages for tags, where there was a limited list of victories and a call for registration (for example, the Smoking tag ). After that, specially for them added new ads:



CTR (% of clicks per impression) increased 2 times, the conversion remained the same.

The poor results of search advertising made me understand that in order to find the best advertising, the project should be promoted on all fronts, including social networks. Were created pages in Vkontakte, Facebook and Twitter. A little later, a mail notification system was added about new events.



Now plans to publish in the media.

findings

A good idea comes when you encounter problems or situations in real life. Paul Graham talked about this and I just now understood what he meant.

Development is the simplest thing that can be in a startup. I was very mistaken, hoping that after the release, thousands of users will run out of nowhere. It’s not so simple to manage promotion, development and parallel parallel freelancing, it is exhausting a lot. By the New Year, I was completely exhausted and paused for a week.

Creating a startup alone has only a number of advantages - you will never have a conflict with a partner and you will like all the decisions you make. But the disadvantages are much more - your decision is not always the right one; the project is being developed slowly; you only spend your time, effort and money; you solve problems from another professional field that may annoy you and which may be solved incorrectly.

Tips from Getting Real turned out to be very useful - a lot of secondary functionality for the release of the project really turned out to be unnecessary, because you can add it later by uploading to the server in a matter of minutes.

All these conclusions are just my point of view, and I will be glad to receive any comments, suggestions or advice.

If this article seemed interesting to you, then I will be happy to share with you the results of the habro-effect and the details of the advancement in the media in the next article.