Creating Ivideon: From Idea to Successful Implementation 2.0

Since the creation of a successful global company has become a matter of my life, I have read many books and articles on other people's experience in this matter.
One of the tips that went through all the success or failure stories with a thin thread is a simple idea - do not rely on geeks when creating a mass product. Geeky are great guys, but the most capricious audience. They are easy to get into the users of your new product, as they are interested in all the newest, but they are difficult to keep. The needs of the geek almost always do not coincide with the requests of the mass user. Therefore, very soon they will begin to show dissatisfaction with the product, demanding more and more sophisticated functions that the ordinary user does not need. As a result, attempts to modify the product lead to the fact that it becomes too difficult for a simple user. This is one of the pitfalls that often fail startups.
We knew about this trap. Therefore, when two years ago we started a blog on Habré, a resource dedicated mostly to geeks (in the best sense of the word, after all, I and the geek), we expected that he would allow us to attract enthusiastic programmers to our team , but not users ...
But it turned out that Habr helped us significantly increase our customer base.

Several of our large corporate clients told us that they had read about Ivideon right here and began to work with us.
Others, honestly admitted that their employees are system administrators, after they learned about us at Habré, insisted on using Ivideon to organize video surveillance in the company when such a need arose. Surprisingly, our seemingly very simple product, with the installation of which even a child can handle - has become interesting for the Habrahabr audience.
The first article, “Creating Ivideon: From Idea to Successful Implementation,” which I wrote two years ago for our blog, was never completed. The last sentence ends with the phrase “to be continued ...”. I was often asked when the full version will appear? And I evasively pointed out the uncertain future, understanding that with the growth of the company, less and less time is left for such a pleasant occupation as writing an article to a blog and communicating with the most interesting audience with which I have so much in common.
Last week, the chief editor of the CPU and concurrently just a good man Konstantin Panfilov conducted an interview with me. And when it was published, I realized that it can be used as the very full version of my story that I began writing in 2012. With your permission, I give an interview here.
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Vladimir, why did you even begin to engage in video surveillance?

Education leaves a mark on the person. At school I studied in a strong humanitarian class, where there were more literature lessons than physics and mathematics. But, having learned the humanities, I precisely understood that I wanted to be an engineer. And he entered the Moscow State Technical University. Bauman. There, at the Faculty of Robotics, I became interested in programming.

In 2003, I was offered a very interesting job of a developer in a team creating software for professional video surveillance. Very expensive solutions for large objects, from Rosneft to the Historical Museum. In early 2004, I began to pay attention to smartphones. Then came the Nokia 6600 on Symbian S60 and Siemens SX1. I suggested to the management to take up this area - to teach our software to send notifications with photos to these devices. Surprisingly, at that time they were worth as much as four of my salary. And yet, I bought them and made it possible to realize the task that I myself invented. In fact, it happens quite rarely when the leadership goes to meet it. I remember this, so now in Ivideon I support our team if it has interesting ideas.

Is the trust justified?

For a couple of years I have developed this area so much that on smartphones you could watch videos and get access to the archive of records. The networks were then weak (GPRS), but we managed to show a stable picture in real time. In 2006 I was asked to consult one American project. As a result, this consultation resulted in the fact that I began to develop a mobile application for them in their spare time. The project lasted several months, but during the work on it I learned more than in the previous few years. I learned what the internet is.

Is the Internet so hard?

It may sound strange, but even now, in 2014, there is a whole layer of developers from the industry of video surveillance and security systems who still do not understand what it is and how to live with it. And, most importantly, how to use it for your projects. It was then that I had the idea of ​​creating a cloud-based video surveillance service. Replace expensive systems to which cameras are connected with a simple and user-friendly Internet service. Even then, I saw the development of IP video surveillance and understood that for a simple user the camera should become intelligent. Not a passive device that hangs and reports nothing until you connect to it, but an active one. This concept formed the basis of Ivideon.

I offered this project to my management. I was not interested in money or shares in the company. I was interested to make it. But the leadership, he seemed uninteresting. Like, why video surveillance of ordinary people? Then I began to develop separate modules for the implementation of my ideas on my own, in my spare time.

So you took the technical side of you? And the business itself?

In 2009, at the height of the crisis, I realized that most of the project was ready for a pilot launch. Yes, there have not yet been many of the functions that are now, but the basic features worked. At the end of 2009, I was fortunate enough to meet Andrei Yudnikov, who had a unique managerial experience at Procter & Gamble, and then in a small, but very strong bank - he was the head of the sales department.


Andrey Yudnikov and Vladimir Yeremeyev

As a developer, I was well aware of the flaws that I had at the time. I did not know how to sell, I had no experience in managing the company, and it was very interesting for me to concentrate solely on development. When I told Andrew about my idea, he instantly caught fire. He was so interested that he decided to quit his current job and start a company with me, as well as help him find the first investment. In early 2010, we both quit and started building Ivideon.

Where does the money for all this come from?

The first two years, the pilot project was developed by me from and to. I did it in my free time and on weekends. We already had something to show the investor. When we quit, we had a small stock of money and an understanding that an investor was about to enter our project. The fact is that Andrew is an extremely interesting and very sociable person. He, even when dismissing someone, makes the dismissed person smile and rejoice at this fact. After all, he was not thrown out of work - they helped him to understand that his potential is not at all here, that we do not want to restrain him, and we believe that here and there big victories are waiting for him.

So, having such abilities and working in a bank, he very quickly met and found a common language with people who had large financial assets. We had several meetings, and everyone we spoke with expressed an interest. With one person, we agreed that we go to a deal.

It looks as if everything is very simple.

If. We immediately removed the office - a small but very convenient. It was very inexpensive, but there was no normal repair. We began to do it at our own expense, knowing that after the transaction we are compensated for everything. But at the last moment, the person with whom we agreed had problems in business, and he was unable to fulfill his obligations. It was very sad, especially considering the crisis. But we believed in the project so much that we were ready to finance it ourselves. At first I sold the car, then Andrey did the same.

At that time I was fond of parachuting (although now I look at the sky with nostalgia). It is a pity that investors have asked not to jump out of a flying plane anymore. In general, the second victim of Ivideon was my friend, who saved my life more than 100 times - my parachute.



I had an apartment in the suburbs, and Andrew - in Kaliningrad. They became our last property, turned into an investment in Ivideon. We hired developers, paid for the company's expenses and, without discouraging, negotiated with investors. At the end of 2010, we found a strong partner who had successful experience in building an IT business. He agreed to be our first investor. With all this, we were still limited in money. Unlike our American competitor Dropcam, which could concentrate on building a mass camera, we also had to think about getting money into the company. We participated in various B2B projects. Such an idea of ​​Arkady Moreynis about the "dark side" began to pursue us long before he came up with it and voiced it - the company must earn.

You just want to compare with Dropcam, which Google recently acquired for $ 555 million. Why could they concentrate on the mass camera, but you couldn’t?

It's simple. Money. In the USA, the venture industry is very developed - when a company is highly valued, not based on its current cash flow, which is now, but from the potential of this company to give a substantial cash flow in the future. In Russia, they are actively looking at revenue. Therefore, at a time when our revenues were virtually absent (there were no paid tariffs), we could not be given $ 6 million and $ 12 million, which Dropcam received at the very beginning.

We understood that our development requires much more money than we have attracted. We also understood that we would not earn much in the first two years on mass service. Accordingly, in order for the company to have money, we had to be distracted by the integration of B2B projects that had little in common with the direction of B2C.

Therefore, concentrated on the platform.

Dropcam once decided on Apple’s strategy of producing its own camera and its own software. Ivideon chose the path of Android. We decided that we would make the best cloud for video surveillance in the world and we will provide it to camera manufacturers. Our main victory is that we succeeded. As you know, Philips cameras, on which the Ivideon logo proudly flaunts, are now sold in Apple stores. These cameras are fully working on our cloud, and no other way. Samsung launches cloud cameras with Ivideon support.



But the biggest victory is still to come. The Dropcam camera uses the Ambarella chip as its heart. These are the guys who technically gave life to a project like GoPro. So, at the end of last year, we became Ambarella partners. I even went to their headquarters in Silicon Valley to meet with their CEO. For me it was a very significant event. In general, they saw the success of Dropcam. Saw the growth of camera sales. But they understood that they needed to sell more chips. Well-known companies are knocking on their door who want to make a camera, the same as Dropcam, and sell under their own brand. Here are just a good cloud they do not have. And then Ivideon appears.

In the spring of 2014, at the Hong Kong Sourcing Fair, Ivideon, together with Ambarella, presented a hardware and software platform that allows you to produce an already running cloud camera with minimal investment and as quickly as possible using any case design and, of course, any brand. In terms of quality, such a camera will not yield to Dropcam, since at the heart of the Dropcam is the same Ambarella chip, and the quality of the Ivideon cloud speaks for itself. For example, the rating of the Dropcam application on Google Play is 4.2 based on 1200 reviews. In Ivideon, this figure is higher - 4.6, and over 4200 users left their reviews.

Besides Philips and Samsung, has someone else come to you?

Now we are working with several companies from the top 100 global brands that are ready to launch cameras with us. Be sure to tell about it, as we are ready. But we try not to forget our market. Here we have signed partnership agreements with Lexand and Texet (well-known manufacturers of video recorders in Russia) that by the beginning of autumn they will produce and put on the market affordable and high-quality cloud cameras with Ivideon.

Acquisition of competitors by the largest technology company somehow affects your business?

This is a landmark event for Ivideon for several reasons. First, Ivideon is a member of the Apple MFI (Manufactured for iPhone) program and expects to become a cloud provider as part of the recently announced Apple HomeKit platform. Dropcam is a very strong competitor who could also claim this role. After buying by Google, which can be considered a competitor to Apple, the road, in fact, was freed. Secondly, when Ivideon was founded, it had no competitors, so many foundations considered this direction not to be promising. Having a $ 555 million exit from our competitor proved that we are on the right track. Thirdly, the fact that Google has become involved in cloud video surveillance is a signal for the IT giants Apple and Microsoft to pay attention to this area - and we are already here.

I heard about you about almost the only Russian guys who managed to get into the Apple store. What is meant by this, if you do not produce "iron"?

We are talking about our joint project with Philips. The camera is called Philips Monitor with Ivideon technology. It works exclusively with our cloud and is very easy to use. It does not require a computer, and it is easily configured from an application for iOS or Android.



I understand that you can connect any camera to your cloud. Then what is the meaning of such co-branding?

Any But there are two connection options. Plain IP camera, webcam or DVR. These are passive devices. They themselves will not tell you anything. If you are not connected to them, then you will not even know that they stopped showing. In order to “endow them with intelligence”, we connect them to the cloud using the Ivideon Server application, which is installed on the computer. But this solution is either for business or for professionals or geeks.

For a home user, we have a different solution. We make the camera "smart" without any computer, like Philips. She has our software on board, which itself communicates with our cloud and transmits information about alarms, motion detection, sound, or its shutdown. All the firmware of this camera is designed by our team.

The camera itself with the help of Ivideon tells you about the problems. And you can always come back, for example, a month ago, to see what was there. You are mobile. Communication with the camera is carried out using our applications for your smartphone. But you can also access it from a browser or a classic desktop application.

How exactly did you manage to bother with Philips? A large office.


Probably, it sounds jaded, but we just made a cool product. Before working with Ivideon, Philips tried to implement the cloud camera independently and with other partners. But after being released to the market, they began to return this camera, and the rating of applications in iTunes and Google Play barely reached two. It was a failure. But Philips did not give up. They refused this cloud provider and began to look for new options. Their search and work with new cloud providers has been going on for eight months already, when a Philips employee found us in the App Store. He simply could not understand how we manage to work so well and get such a high rating of applications - 4.6. In the summer of 2013, he gets in touch with us and offers a joint project.

Andrei and I fly to their headquarters in Hong Kong and find out that in three weeks there will be a demonstration at Apple, and during this time we need to do what the four previous cloud providers failed to do in eight months. And we do it. Apple appreciates what we have done. By the way, this was the reason why Ambarella CEO Fermi Wang invited us to a meeting in Silicon Valley and offered further cooperation. He then said: “We at Ambarella are generally the most famous experts on the video section in the Valley. Especially after the success of GoPro. If you need my recommendation, here is my phone, you can give it to the fund from which you want to attract investments. I'll explain everything to them. ” Not yet taken advantage of this offer. But the business card remained.

It is interesting from the technical side to see how difficult it is to develop such a system? How were you looking for people? What difficulties did you encounter? Know how?

We did it the first time. They built a company. We made a lot of mistakes. As a rule, in managing and setting priorities. But we are very proud of the team that we managed to create. Of course, the Ivideon project is very interesting in itself. We do not sell slippers over the Internet - we are building a world-class cloud service. And it is very motivating developers. They are very interested in such tasks. Therefore, we are pleased that despite the abundance of major players, such as Yandex or Mail.ru, who take a large number of programmers from the market, strong developers continue to come to us. And of those who were with us from the very beginning, not one left. It says a lot.

The main difficulty, in my opinion, if we talk about development, is the construction of the team itself. We have very strong guys. In a sense, even geniuses in their field. And several geniuses in one project are not always easy to work together. At the very beginning, Andrei and I put a lot of effort so that they could work together effectively. We did our best to make our eyes burn not only with us, but with the whole team. It seems to me that we did it. In the beginning, I recruited several of my friends from previous projects to the team. Then they recommended their friends. That is, taken on the recommendations. We started using HeadHunter and other tools relatively recently.

With technology is clear, but sales and marketing? Looking for "stars" or sold themselves?


The suit is exclusively an attribute of business trips.

Everything was done by ourselves. And the more Andrei and I do this, the more we understand that there is no cool magic uncle who comes and does everything. You want marketing, you want sales. Perhaps it works in B2G, if we recruit a former deputy minister. But in B2C, the product is at the head of everything. Our traffic and user base growth has always been organic. Several articles in our blog on "Habré" and other resources. After people found Ivideon and used it, they immediately recommended it to friends and acquaintances. And now we have cameras in general, for the sale of which and the distribution of our service, our partners are happy to undertake.

We now have a team of 70 people. But I still periodically look at the appeals of users, participate in the formation and release of the product. Often I do this between flights. This year has already circled around the Earth several times. It's hard.But I like it a lot. This is a drive.

I already anticipate how our readers will find such colorful descriptions suspicious - they are interested in the pulp. Have a story to tell about money? Do you pay off?

From the first day we were very attentive to the resources that we had. We did not have a goal to build another Internet bubble. In terms of financial performance, our cloud is very efficient and profitable. We can say that this is a machine for making money. Another issue is that more than 500 thousand users by the standards of the Internet - this is not much. We are now operational payback. We did not attract investments from funds. But those partners who are now queuing for integration with our cloud show that we now need to strengthen the development team and not make them wait. And we are ready to do it. Also very important is the opening of a physical office in the United States. In this case, we can temporarily go into a minus.

500 thousand users is a lot. Especially for the video. How do you manage to cope with such loads? Is there a life hack?

There are several life hacks. Video surveillance is a thing in which traffic is very asymmetric. Users view no more than 1-2% of the records, but they write very large volumes. Accordingly, the Amazon cloud storage model, which was created more for the web, is poorly suited. Amazon can easily burn a single file and distribute it to many users. In the case of video surveillance, you need to record a lot of unique information, and read only a small part of it.

We have created our own platform, which was developed exclusively for video surveillance. By the way, Dropcam uses Amazon. And due to the limitations of Amazon, Dropcam has a pre-set bitrate on the camera in the region of 512 Kbps, our platform allows you to use any quality. On the one hand, we are renting servers in large volumes, and this gives us a discount. On the other hand, we are trying to enter into partnerships with providers.

Many providers today provide cloud-based video surveillance for their subscribers under their own brand. In terms of technology, Ivideon stands behind them. We easily integrate with their billing and adapt a personal account under the provider. That their user could pay both for the Internet, and for video surveillance in one place. Working with providers, we get very good conditions for server capacity.

People do not complain that the FSB or the NSA are watching you through them?

This question has two aspects. There are people who do not quite understand what the Internet is and the technologies that they use. The same mobile phone already has a camera, a microphone for a long time, and you have no idea what it is transmitting to or where. The same goes for laptops with integrated cameras. Email and social networks. We all store a huge amount of data on foreign servers. Today it is the norm.

We accept this because we get a lot of advantages. On the other hand, the lack of a phone, camera or other technologies will not protect against the FSB and the NSA if you fall into the sphere of their interests, but it will make life much less convenient.

The second aspect suggests that there is a category of people who need remote access to cameras to solve their own problems, but they do not want to use the cloud, as the NSA will keep an eye on them. Again, they also do not understand the structure of the Internet. Even if they follow the old-fashioned way to connect to the camera directly without our service, the data will still go through the same public channels, because we use the shared Internet. That's only in the case of Ivideon, they will be encrypted, and the user will receive many truly convenient options that are not available when the camera plays the role of a passive device.

The interview published on the CPU is available at this link .

Instead of conclusion

Reading success stories, describing someone's way, in no case should we assume that it can be repeated. Often we simply underestimate the role of chance in our lives, considering that we controlled our every step ourselves. The only thing that can be learned from such stories is that one should not be afraid of failing and just keep going forward. Do not be afraid of failures, and if you are not allowed into the door - look for a window.
But the most important thing that I learned for all the time I was working on Ivideon is nothing more important than a product. It would seem a truism. But it is so easy on the road to success to stumble over the misconception that the most important thing is the available resources for marketing. With a good product, you can achieve excellent results even without money for promotion. Whereas with a bad product, any advertising budgets will simply be lowered to nowhere.

Surely I was not able to touch on many topics that might be of interest to you. I am pleased to answer questions in the comments.
By the way, in spite of all our successes, we still have a difficult and at the same time exciting work on the creation of Ivideon, which we see in the future. And, of course, we will be very happy to see new like-minded people among us who like our idea and who are ready to work with us on it. Highload, UX, C ++, Python, Java Script, Product management, iOS / Android development - we have a lot of interesting tasks for each of these areas! Bored, of course, too. As without it? We will be glad to see you as part of our team! Welcome!