The best rake of Russian IT startups

1. Shoot hardcore
This is not a mistake, but a very typical situation for the IT sector. While other startups do not have a product, but they send out releases with screenshots, drink smoothies, speak at conferences and exhibitions, IT specialists write code. When the prototype is assembled and it comes to finding an investor, it becomes clear that PR was also needed. But I had to start it about two months ago.

2. “Fool himself”
The big problem is the reluctance to listen to the opinions of others. When half of the project is ready and suddenly it becomes clear that the project is not viable, there are two options: change drastically or collapse. Do you know what IT start-ups often do? They stop listening to people outside, turn the team into a sect and stubbornly finish the product. Because half the work has already been done.
')
3. Do not know the competitors
Awesome autistic approach - take and make a prototype without studying the market. Ignorance of a direct competitor, an indirect competitor, and Western product analogues is not a good idea. It is necessary to look who already worked in this direction and, the main thing, what problems faced. Because these problems will come to you. Still useful to measure the performance of competitors and compare with their own. If there are no competitors, this is a reason to be wary. Perhaps your product is not needed by anyone.


4. Do not control the timing
There was an example with one geolocation service where it was necessary to assemble a prototype in a month and a half. The team got together, decided to start and went to write code. A month later, it turned out that the second programmer did not do anything at all, because they did not resemble. Another example: lit up with the idea and for two months they said “right now, right now we will begin.” Never started. Keep in mind, by the way - the initial timing estimate is always wrong!

5. We are a gang, and did not think that someone would leave
Anyone in the project can leave at any time. Someone does not believe in a distant earnings, someone finds a good job, someone just dumps in India for six months and does not get in touch. Sometimes it makes the head. Often this creates legal difficulties. We must think about this in advance.

6. The main thing - to register a legal entity
If you got an idea and registered an LLC, this does not mean that the work has been done. Actually, this does not mean anything at all for the project, except that you have a minimal idea of ​​the shares. And the word "friends" is replaced by "co-founders." By the way, you need to evaluate the share immediately. How to do it? There is an opinion: one part - the leader, one - the one who attracted money, one for the idea, one for sales, another for creating the product. Please note that as a result, the developer, if he has not done anything except the code, will receive a maximum of 20% of the share. And not 50%, as is often the case.

7. At first we will patent, and then we will make
A patent is useful, but implementation is everything. With poor implementation, you can not even enter the market. A patent is not an end in itself. Entire stacks of evidence are rotting without cause simply because the implementation of the idea was weak or no one heard about it. First - the buyers, then - the patent.

8. “We left for Tye. It's cheaper there, fly in! ”
One well-known project had such a problem. They were able to emerge from the crisis. Everything was superimposed there: loss of time control, separation from feedback and many other typical misfortunes.

9. We will add a bunch of features.
... And at the same time we will bury the coolest in the project under the implementation of whistles and whist with courtesans. First - experience, then - the project, and not vice versa. Experience helps to focus on what is really important. Pay attention to the development of Instagram and Facebook - they now have difficult interfaces, but they gradually began to complicate them only when they gained a critical mass of users. And not immediately after launch.

10. Written in a couple of funds, but we do not take
Funds - hundreds. If you yourself believe in the project, you need to write further. And investment is a slow process. The term from the application to receive the first money - six months or more. Although, I must say, now there are also tools for fast financing, including crowdsourcing. From September, for example, it will become possible by law to create investor syndicates.

11. Gosdendi is evil
In general, you do not care where the money comes from, if the one who issued them does not prevent you from working. Grant alone doesn't smell. We do not urge you to run up against the sanctions of the United States & the European Union, but it’s also foolish to refuse from grants only for the “gosprinine”.

12. Leader must be one
Founders can be any number! But we believe Dave McClure that the most stable and successful teams should include three: hustler, hacker and designer (hustler, hacker & designer), each of whom has the right to make the final decision in his field. Rarely, a business is democratic - it is solid totalitarianism. This concerns startups in the first place - there should be three tyrants in them!

13. A lot of geeks are cool!
The marketing vision of many projects ends with “well, we will write an article on TechCrunch, in Kommersant and post on Habr.” This, of course, will give you a good audience, but it will only give you once. And this audience will consist of geeks. At the beginning, such a share of geeks is extremely contraindicated for mass consumer products. After all, you yourself know them: they will come, they will zagnobit, they will demand no one but their own, unnecessary features, then they will say “not a cake” and leave. And you have already rolled out your lip on ROI and are showing off to the investor.

14. We definitely need to “bomb” on critical hit
It happens that the publication for geeks brings a wave of downloads, the application gets into the top Appstor, it is noticed by the major media and writes about your project already specifically for the consumer audience. You are in the ladies. But practice shows that you should not count on it - the theory (and practice) of probability plays against you.

15. Marketing is about advertising, not customers
The main type of receiving a new audience for you is a good industry PR. From the very beginning, you need to work with your audience, perhaps even to keep real customers in the beta. At the start of the project, you need to understand how you will develop and recruit people (perhaps this will change the whole course of development). “We will not be users of our product, but we like the idea” is a bad plan.

16. There is a task about the plane ...
The guys did the service: got the money, there was a prototype. It remained to optimize the code, fasten a couple of features. But here the head of the development had one “pocket” project, which is typical - not monetized. But interesting to him personally in terms of complex tasks that needed to be solved in code. Guess what he did in the evenings? In the end, as they poetically put it, "sucked" the whole team.

17. @ Echo off
There was one great monitoring service, unique to 2005. They made it and started selling it in “stealth mode”, hoping that word of mouth and recommendations will immediately work. When the main functionality was ready, it was already necessary to go to conferences and in the industry media, but instead the team decided to grind the UX. And then a competitor with good PR pulled up. As a result, you have all heard about Wobot, but you probably read about Brandoscope in this post for the first time.

How do we know all this?

We, the GreenfieldProject team, gathered in 2009 by several entrepreneurs who had seen what was being done for startups in the Valley and launched a project aimed at creating the “right vibes” in the market. Old-timers remember that at that moment, for those who start, there were only the now defunct StartupPoint and the now healthy business incubator of the Higher School of Economics. During these five years, we have helped several dozens of startups to rise - in the sense, it is to run up to the “stably working” stage, and not to get easy money from investors. And just let through a few hundred.

In 2012, when the market was overheated and every young man with a burning eye dreamed of making his own startup, we rethought our mission, turning towards “creating tools for the industry”. This is how RussianStartupRating was born - a start-up evaluation service, the methodology used by market players (from the recent HSE incubator used it for selection), OhMyMentor is a search service for mentors and several others. Actually, a sample of a couple of thousand RSR projects and an analysis of this sample allows us to draw those conclusions about which are written above.

Then, in 2012, we realized that in order to scale up what we are doing, and to work more closely with projects, we lack two basic things: a partner who would systematically absorb what we grow up with, and also infrastructure — spaces where people could get together and work together, find each other, communicate tightly with investors and experts. In the end, it is from such a Brownian movement, permeated by industry links, that what is called an “ecosystem” is formed.

findings

As you can see, on the basis of typical mistakes one can not only understand what is bad, but also do something to help projects. Actually, this is our goal. The main points where the easiest and quickest to remedy the situation are:

• Industry specific knowledge is vital at the start. This applies to all projects, not just IT startups. Accordingly, you need to have a tool that simply and quickly allows you to find the right person. Since a large social graph is not the most frequent phenomenon for CTO, this is especially important.
• We need a methodology that helps to avoid common mistakes. Most likely, this is a combination of business education and step-by-step instructions that insure against problems (for example: today we need to formalize the relationship between the founders, tomorrow - start accounting in this format, and so on). In fact, you get something like a checklist and TRIZ-mechanic. It is also quite simple to implement, if you have accumulated a knowledge base on successful and, more importantly, unsuccessful projects.
• Constant feedback directly affects success. However, its surplus also interferes with the project. We need an ecosystem where feedback will be constructive and useful.
• It is important to constantly communicate in order to receive new social connections. We know several startups who do not need money as much as the right external business partners to implement their solutions, test and develop the product.

As a result, the idea of ​​an ecosystem project emerged, a platform for which was helped to create the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), which financed the first year of work for a hundred startups, and in the next three is planning to invest in 400+. The whole ecosystem launched in Moscow on Kurskaya is called #tceh . Now this is coworking, which works on the SaaS model, and later becomes the platform for the development of a community of smart and effective startups.

Actually, you may have recognized yourself or your friends in the errors described above. Is there something else that is common to projects that you know? If you help add to the list of cases from practice, it will be very useful.