The sad story of the social network "Uberlov"

A little background, how this project was born.

Blame kashey . Six years ago from him on Habré there were several articles on Google Maps. And then, in general, the site also made e-sosedi. I looked at it all a disgrace, was salivating and decided - I also want “something with maps” and, of course, fashionable at the time, social!
There was no idea, but the desire was great, and I began to slowly write and invent in the evenings. All the ideas that were on the surface were already implemented or appeared in the near future, Wi-Fi points, ATMs, bus-service stations ...
And I did an abstract service with maps rushing from one idea to another. So far, my father did not tell me how he traveled, once again to go fishing. It wasn’t possible to explain in words where he got and how he went and went to look at the Google Map as he drove. Then I realized where my abstract maps would come.

I decided to make a map with places of fishing. Googling did not find anything like it in the Internet and began to figure out the functionality.

• Mark places on the map
• Add reports to sites
• Add events to places
• Have some sort of talker
• And pluses, minus, comments to everything, this

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The first moment that baffled me is how to describe the place. A simple text description did not suit me, I wanted some kind of systematization. Also in the reports, what are the important points and which are not.
There were no answers to these questions, and I tried to find them with the target audience - in fishing forums. Oh, I must say, and the kind of atmosphere there. 90% of the respondents perceived everything with hostility, skepticism went off scale, refused to accept any arguments.
At first, I thought it was the same on one forum, but no, I got rotten tomatoes and others.
Ok challenge accepted.
Gigabytes of reports and descriptions of fishing places, rivers, lakes, ponds, bases, reservoirs were viewed, on the basis of which, finally, the main parameters for reports and locations were compiled.
The main features are built on reports. Fishermen love to measure pussy catch. The report indicates which fish, how many, and how they were caught. According to this data, you can specify at the place: the average catch, fish species and the largest fish caught. The user has a favorite style of fishing, the greatest achievements and even graphics to draw success.

Forward code!

On the server side, I chose Symfony with Mysql, then the first version was then. Pictures decided to host imageshack.us, I took apache lucene to search, and gravatar for avatars.
Nothing unusual, the task was quite simple, but an endless stream of ideas and parallel refactoring, with uncontrolled deadlines, had a very sad effect on the result. Time flew by, and I trampled on the spot, picking things that were invisible to the user.
After half a year, it was decided to finish these sluggishings of what is, otherwise the result will never be.
Another acute problem was design. First, it was not; secondly, I did not know what I wanted, and as a bonus, I did not really learn how to impose. It took 3-4 months to finish and eliminate the errors.

Hooray! run.

Standard PHP hosting suited me perfectly, to begin with and with the site deployment there were no problems.

We return to the skeptical forums for the first feedback. The bulk was divided into 2 camps:

• Clear: “Everything is fine, cool, it's time!”
• And stubborn: “You are crazy! fishing, and so there is no place to make a mess, and you are showing “such” places. ”

Everything is clear with the first ones - these are our clients, but the second ones have remained the same impenetrable. Arguments that places can specify the visibility (only for themselves, friends, registered users, everyone) and that they themselves describe the same places in public forums with screenshots of Yandex cards have not been perceived in any way. There were also individuals who kept paper notebooks with records of “their” fishing spots.
In general, I did not receive constructive criticism from them.

Little marketing

1000r was spent on the SAP advertising network and a coupon for the same amount in Google adWords. All this led the first audience to 4000 views per month, but it could not gain a critical mass, so that users began to write reports, share thoughts, etc.
Of course everyone here is interested in monetization. But she was not there. One could try different, targeted advertising, owners of fish farms, bases, etc. for a penny allocate your places on the map or even use your markers, for example, give them the opportunity to customize the page of their place. But for this all you need to have users, probably a lot.