As a team of techies created his studio. The experience of the first months. Achievements, feil, inference ...

I am sure that many techies were visited by the idea of ​​creating their own business. So, at a certain moment, all the stars have turned out in such a way that it seemed to be a win-win option: a strong technical team, from nowhere managers appeared, ready to sell our services, there are even a couple of projects to start. Sin is not to try. And we took the chance. In fact, everything must be put from scratch. And in the very first month everything turned upside down.

Managers just as suddenly fell off as they appeared. The projects we were counting on did not go right away. Something had to be done: either roll up and scatter through offices at the RFP, or move on.

So, from the beginning, what we have in the first month of life :

• Strong technical team of 5 people. Everyone has extensive experience in large projects. All techies.
• Two projects on the support, the total budget of not more than 150K per month. Does not pay for the team budget.
• I have a little business experience (online store, 4 years in the black, there is an IE).
• Office in the center of Moscow for the support of the project, do not spend money.

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The first thing was the question that no one wants to lose the RFP: loans, rent, I want to eat ... I took many risks upon myself, and with the team I discussed a gradual improvement in terms, which reduced costs in the first months. Options with shares not rolled: either it is not necessary, or monthly income is strongly needed. Stabilization Fund - personal savings. I figured that I could draw out a maximum of two monthly budgets. The salaries of the guys rather big, at the market level for their experience.

The second and most important question: where to find projects? The portfolio is too small, mostly it is either its projects, or what was done in the evenings / nights on freelancing. Another last big project that we did on full time and took the caliper in the end. The only plus is that almost all of them are large and complex, tens / hundreds of thousands of lines of code are well written ... Minuses - almost all of these are startups: some are closed, some are enterprise and difficult to show in action. They did not include in the portfolio what each individually did in different jobs, only team projects lately.

Then immediately there was a question of positioning . First, we figured out what we can do really well:

• Mobile applications for iOS, Android.
• Web projects (backend, frontend).
• Adaptive sites for mobile phones.
• We know and use good engineering practices TDD, Patters, DI ... in short, we can write normal code.
• There is a tester / coder in the team.
• There are proven partners in prototyping, design, flash, SEO, low-level development.

Second, we chose which segment we specialize in large. We decided to focus on mobile applications: much less competition, a more promising market segment. We do not dismiss web projects at all, except small ones, here we are not competitors with our level of RFP. The rest of the non-profile, if you suddenly need, we will work with partners.

Third, we decided to focus on the technical level of the team, experience. I perfectly understood the situation in the market of applicants - good developers have been looking for months and years. I myself have been collecting this team for years. Consequently, any customer will be happy to get such a team - I was). Plus, for a while, I worked as a technical director in an ordinary studio, and I know perfectly well that everything, even the largest ones, rely on - cheap developers with one / a couple of strong team leaders and expensive management.

Fourth, mobile apps are far too wide. What are we better than others? Where is our expertise needed? Last time we did startups, we decided to focus on them. This is a completely separate segment of the market, in which the classic outsourcing schemes for Fixed Price greatly slow down the project, speed and flexibility are very important here. Just in this we have a lot of experience. This is where the technical level of the team is displayed. Startups seemed like the perfect option:

• These are not typical projects. Technically interesting to us.
• They do not have time for months / years to assemble their team. Investors / the market is waiting for the first version in the near future.
• We have ready-made developments, the customer receives them immediately, without spending a penny.
• We know how to prepare startups, many rakes have long been passed, conclusions have been made.

Here the concept of rentateam was born, the team was rented (only later we learned that scientifically it is the Dedicated Team). For the customer, we should not differ from our own team; we should maintain maximum flexibility, high speed of changes, and clear transparency in the results of our work. It makes no sense to force a startup to write TK, to drive into clear requirements, after a few months the vision of the product may be quite different. Fixed Price for startups is in 98% of cases a failed project, exceptions are only large contractors who can easily request a weighty price that includes all the risks and not save on quality. A small team, no one ever will give such budgets, so all the work will be on the Time & Material Model (T & M) . The customer determines how many weeks / months he takes the team, all or part, describes the first front of work. We are rolling out versions weekly, giving progress reports, planning a new iteration. The customer pays in small portions, seeing a specific result, reducing the risks with each release.
Analytics over, got down to business. Calculated T & M normal hours (proceeded from the budget to zero with low profitability) and Fixed Price normal hours (takes into account the typical risks of project evaluation before implementation). Here are the main ones: the risk of underestimating the complexity of the project, planning of finance / parishes, change management (bug / change request), temporary departure of resources (illness, unplanned vacation, dismissal). They made the site, registered as an employer in all funds ...
The current two projects were in fact the team’s rental scheme, everyone was happy with it. Began communication with new customers.

Fail number one - focus on quality. Our focus on quality and experience was an empty ringing for customers. Typical conversation: “Yes, yes, of course, you do well, experience great blah blah blah. How much money? ”For a customer, we are no different from hundreds of other companies that say exactly the same way that they have the coolest developers. Neither estimate nor check the client can not, white noise). The only thing that the customer clearly understands is the price! Those. we are no different from a team of 3rd year students from Nizhny Balaganov, and for the price they are no match.

Fail number two - rent a team, what are you talking about? How much time and money? To be honest, it's hard to call it a file. It is quite expected that many customers will consider only Fixed Price, many have not even been offered T & M. According to our modest statistics, most of the leads (potential customers) want a Fixed Price, most of the actual customers work with us on Dedicated Team or T & M.

Fail number three - there are fast, feed-based options for new customers.

• Posted in social. networks, when meeting with friends, told me what I am doing now ... As a result, one large project. My friend knew our level, current contractors did not suit him - bingo. But not everything is so simple, for the first 2-3 months we made our way through the jungle of approvals, legal nuances, long expectations ... And every week it was from “just starting to work” to “everything went dead”. Another good friend works in one of the largest studios, in a good position, and they do not have a mobile direction. It would seem that we have the desire and experience, the ready-made team, they have a large flow of clients. Win-win! A month later, I realized that there was no chance.
  
• The rate of expertise in a particular area is HR. The last major project was in this market. Found projects that do not have a mobile application, wrote personal letters to everyone. There were not many of them, almost all of them either did not answer, or answered that they had not yet thought about a mobile application.
  
• The same sales team, which was supposed to provide us with a stream of new orders, as I wrote, merged. Find from the side - on the move failed. I hired a lot of techies, but I never came across salespeople, and thank goodness. All responding characters either showed no activity, or signed up for interviews and did not come. I thought I was doing something wrong, then HR friends said that it was always like that, only to catch up with crowds, only hardcore. So far I decided to close the position myself.
  

As a result, the first two months, we pulled at least somehow on a couple of projects, made our own. Since we have no standard projects, the sales cycle is very long.

In order to somehow stir up a large project of a friend, they took a risk, made the first draft on an oral agreement, without a contract and specific promises of payment. After a month and a half, we received a long-awaited contract, the flow of projects started and disappointment arrived.

Fail four - the most promising client turned out to be a stillborn project for us. We didn’t recognize it right away . It seemed that a large mobile project, not the first year on the market, there are living users, they earn something, everything is cool, what is needed for our team. As it turned out, we jumped into the last car: the project slowly collapsed, the team dispersed. They didn’t want to hear about the lease scheme, only FixPrice, only for raw TK (sometimes there was not even a description for some modules). There is no way to influence the result, even among the techies inside the company, their hands fell. We were cut off from making any decisions, despite all our attempts. Everything was agreed for an insanely long time, the deadlines flew even before the implementation phase, so there was no time for anything. The description of the works, the design - all this arrived and was refined closer to the deadline. In addition, mobile applications were very large, with a decent amount of technical debt. I don’t know how miraculously we managed to deliver the projects on time or earlier, each time it seemed almost impossible, a huge respect for the guys. I will not describe all the problems, there were many of them, they were different. The fact is that the team was dissatisfied with neither the process nor the result. I was reminded that my old experience with the state. subcontracting projects.

In contrast , the first successful experience appeared with a new project . Exactly the opposite situation: not a large client, the usual tasks for a large number of online stores, written somehow (this is not put in the portfolio). But what is the approach of the customer! He changed a bunch of teams, amassed a huge technical debt, and as a result he ate “as if cheaper” in full. He needs a quality result, he is ready to listen and trust. It's cool that the project was found by our developer, and he also became his manager within the team - also an interesting experience. We immediately told how we work, for which there was a similar answer: “Guys, for a couple of years no one can really do anything for me, I threw a lot of money into nowhere. Where were you? ”He trusted us, understood that we can do well, and we ourselves wanted to do well, despite the govnokod and other difficulties of the current implementation ... Just a month later, we cleaned out the most deadly bugs, raised our productivity twice, closed a bunch of business problems, received positive feedback from the client - he was happy. Everything according to the Dedicated Team scheme, which raised our spirit, showed that this scheme can be in demand in the market and, most importantly, it brings a significant result for everyone, WIN-WIN .

Six months passed from the start. At the moment we have three active projects, 6 in the portfolio, each developer or group is engaged in exactly one project at a time. We do not have salespeople, PMs, accounting, lawyers, secretary ... only techies work. We do not earn millions, although we manage to keep in the pros. I mainly deal with business tasks, anyone can be the PMOM, the rest is outsourced. We realized that it is not enough to be just a team of techies, the overwhelming number of clients need to explain, show, prove, think over with them not only the technical aspects of the project, offer options. And the most important thing is trust, we don’t wait when we are asked to give a report, tell about the results or mistakes, do it ourselves and regularly discuss with the customer. Trust must be earned, at the very beginning of communication with the client this is very difficult to achieve. Somehow it is necessary to show the customer their technical level, the ability to quickly and efficiently solve business problems. The best option is to prove it in practice, according to actual results. We have introduced the practice of paying for the first week of the team at the discretion of the customer - no risk for the client, a great opportunity to demonstrate what we are capable of doing. If the client is satisfied with the result and quality, we sign the contract, we get paid, we continue to work. We have just begun to promote this practice: for us these are big risks. Conclusions do early. There is still one implementation experience, and it is successful.

What are we aiming for now? Yes, all the same - do great projects!
We also want to streamline the search for customers, now it is small and unstable, for this a lot has been done and much remains to be. We make our projects in our spare time, we invest in new technologies: we have experience in navigation inside buildings based on iBeacon, soc. application based on Bump technology, Facebook API, VK API.
In fact, a cool team at an outsourcing is almost equivalent to a class of its own for most companies. There are restrictions, there are nuances, but this is a topic for a separate article, I can show it with numbers and examples, if interesting.

We sincerely believe in WIN-WIN. Only strong and harmonious teams can create really necessary, interesting projects. We believe in our part of WINa, we are sure that we will not fail as a minimum. We are looking for another part of WINa, whether it will be an external project or an internal one - it does not matter.

Brief conclusions:

• A strong technical team at the start is very important, but you, as experienced employees, have nothing to do with a strong outsourcing company. These are different things, it is necessary to prove it. Nobody conducts technical interviews, although in vain. Only after signing the contract your experience will play on you.
• Do not expect quick results if you do not have a cool, replicable solution. Sales cycle 1-3 months.
• The flow of customers from friends is unstable, you need to look for more predictable sources.
• To focus on a specific market is important and necessary, however, at first it is necessary to take on any project in order to survive.
• Startups are very complex customers. Failures in financing, delays in payments, persuasion to work without a contract and any guarantees (“we will receive 100% investment next week”, etc.). With all this you need to be able to work.
• You will have to develop new competencies in the team. The broader the competencies of each team member, the easier and more efficient it is to work. Narrow specialization is too expensive. In our case, everyone had significant experience in at least two different technologies (mobile + web).
• You need to be able to stand out against the background of hundreds and thousands of other teams - there are no universal solutions.
• Every client is important, even the smallest project can bring unexpected positive results.