How we went to the project [#tceh] for 5 years and what, apart from the brain, is not enough for Russian IT startups

It so happened that no business education would help launch a brilliant project . First you need to fill the cones, smell the powder and understand how real life works. The theoretical model will help only when you plunge into the business with his head.

The problem is that no one teaches this. The good news is that you can create an ecosystem where the development of such a science will be extremely painful for vanity, but at the same time it is effective in terms of savings, cars and apartments.
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Right now the times are ending when many people made shaped bullshit to get easy money by analogy to the dot-com boom. And they said that "we will start when we find an investor." The model was simple: an idea was taken from the ceiling, nothing was done on it, but there was an investor. Whenever possible - the sucker, not really understanding in IT. The money received was invested in a prototype and a lot of PR, then the investor of the second round was sought. Further standard: "when vodka is drunk, it turns out that the jeep is broken ...". And the project ended.

Now, many are collecting rake pens with their own forehead. Our team has been watching this for the last few years and all the time trying to help with knowledge. Free of charge .

Now more and more people are ready to start at their own expense, which is commendable. As a rule, these are specialists who are very good at their work and understand that it is necessary to make a product that they would need in their work. First, it is done in the evenings, then it starts - and now the former head of a department of a large company becomes the CEO of a startup.

Children's shoals

The first series of problems is what appears when there is a banal lack of experience both in running your own business and simply in relations with the outside world. In general, they are described here in the census of the rake . Briefly - wrong relationships with fellow co-founders at the start, unreasonable expenses and attempts to run ahead of a locomotive (starting not with testing hypotheses, but behavior in the “well, we will be big once”), inaccurate goals, criticism rejection and the inclusion of “stealth -mode ”, when an already launched and finished project is not being promoted, but finished in the manic perfectionism of hardcore IT.

Russia is characterized by the problem of relations between the founders - if they begin to take shape at the moment of receiving money from an investor, people who started a project for friendship may suddenly turn out to be greedy and unprincipled freaks for each other. Because everyone was counting on more, but this was not fixed from the very beginning - and preferably not by verbal agreement, but by something more provable.

First AAA project

When reality puts you in a knockdown a couple of times, you realize that rainbow dreams are a little different from how it usually happens, and the second stage begins. Someone goes to work in a large company and returns to the market in 3-4 years with a great product (since caution after the first mistakes helped), someone suddenly realizes that the minor side direction of a big unsuccessful startup can bring a lot of money. The rest try again and again and again.

At some point, you get an AAA project. That is, the finished product, in the development of which there were no mistakes, fatal for the company, and which already has a well warmed up market waiting for you. Such a niche is usually different in that it is “developed” by 3-5 startups at once. And the one who comes to the finish line second, receives a few percent of the share of the first.

The most common mistake is misunderstanding the importance of social connections. Surprise, but there is no “average client”, each of your clients is a person with a name, a name, his own tasks and his own business. And you need to find it personally and also personally.

And it’s good if you understand that it’s worth getting out somewhere, at least in order to listen to what your competitors are saying. It hurts to sit with a bang, hurray, the presentation of a rival project, but where else can you legally gather insights about what your opponent is planning to do?

Example: today, the App in the Air team says that conference organizers and journalists from the tourism industry for them have begun to actively notice them. The project receives attention, among other things, because the guys, in their own words, before that (in 2012-13, this was not yet the AAA-project) worked perfectly both on the issue with technological events and publishing in the IT media.

The result - you have to find your most important clients personally and occupy the market thanks to close contact with them. There is such a good rule: in the morning - run around customers, in the evening - drink a product. So you do not lose anything - incl. 90% of future profits.

B-class: personal connections are also essential.

It is clear that not all projects immediately go to the A-level. Category B projects are what seem to be useful, but there is no customer queue yet. About half of all startups on the market. Here typical things are important: hypothesis testing, sales, finance and investment, as well as streamlined processes within the company. And here, too, IT-startups are often very wrong, underestimating communication.

You need industry knowledge. You need people who really work in the companies for which you are doing a project. You need those who are willing to buy it and who are willing to discuss it with you. You need those who would have long ago implemented such a project within their company, if there were resources.

The point here rests on several closely intertwined factors. The choice of metrics, sales plan - all this is tied to the exact definition of the target audience, and many simply do not have it. And here it is useful (and sometimes mandatory) to take and sit over a detailed portrait of a buyer: describe a particular person, his habits and needs, his problem - and compare it with your decision. By the way, it is good to overestimate your market after such an exercise.

Here is the story of one of the projects we are working with:

“Investors have a“ 2x2 ”rule: the sales plan declared by the project should be divided in two, the stated payback period should be multiplied in two. In our case, this rule, as it turned out, looked like 10x10.

In addition to the specifics of sales channels (for example, in practice it turned out that the sale of one grandmother in the salon per month is the norm) we faced the peculiarities of the buyers mentality ...

There was only one thing left: to experiment, to search for one’s buyer and the way to his heart. But for starters, we found a way to the heart of our investors to support these experiments. ”

As you can see, the first bright idea after getting real sales data was a little bit worse.

Where to get such knowledge?

Again, you need to go to the people in the community, and even better to form this community.

A simple option is hackathons. In addition to the fun time, in some cases it is just an ideal option for many - to combine the obvious benefits for the product and the team with the inclusion in the expert and technological get-together. It's not bad when one of the key people in the development of PayPal recognizes you, right?

If you are not exactly a techie or you want to go beyond the code, then there are a bit more universal formats. There are a lot of things to consider in a startup - analytics, marketing, processes, logistics, sales, negotiations, etc. Special guys who do all this for you in a large company may not be very, very long in a startup.

In order to catch all this in the express mode and get practical tools and startup startup skills, the format of working days off was invented long ago: we make Harvest from this, but there are other options.

And there are quite “humanitarian” ways: for example, teaching. There are more and more sites and programs where you can share experiences and meet useful people from the industry, and not only in Moscow. There is no need to be a world guru with a wall of certificates: one of the most popular educational projects for Internet specialists, the General Assembly, does not base its work on some well-known names. Among their instructors, for example, there is a guy who does the dating application only for New York. If you know something well and perfectly understand your field, you will be very happy.

Making decisions

As the project progresses, critical choices are constantly arising in which direction to dig. They often become fatal: a typical example is either a desire to please everyone at once, or an adjustment to a particular first large customer with specific requests.

There is a very important point here, which we consider one of the main ones in our methodology. Clearly articulated understanding is the first step to a solution. Each project must have a vector to which each process submits.

Practice

To come to this idea, it took us three years of trial. We started with the line of events - # poSEEDel, mini-thematic meetings where you can voice the idea, Harvest (three days to work on it) and Feedback - the evening of feedback gathering, when you already have something to show.

We expected that such a “funnel”, as we called it, would become the basis for regular work with projects - from idea to prototype and sales.


Sales funnel

But the “funnel” was not all, and Harvest - the most intense format with the presence of experts - was quickly visited by those who had already gone quite far from the idea stage.

So we figured out the first really important need of working teams - to understand where to find useful specialists and sit down with them one on one (at least for half an hour, as we did). People who know exactly the required special area (lawyers, economists, cool developers and entrepreneurs, employees of large potential clients, investors, and so on) are the most important for the success of the project in the early stages.

We were the team that ran the InCube incubator. Working with residents on a daily basis taught us to identify and close the requests of those who began to develop their project. And this education (starting with the notorious "English for startups"), consultations on request, sometimes - even the need to pull people out of their shells. In terms of screening experts, we also learned something.

In parallel, we began to organize startups driving equipment. This gave the experience of working with large players, including corporations (Cisco, for example), and understanding of their requests to the market. We are still proud that the path of Ilya Gelfenbein and his SpeakToIt, which everyone recently congratulated on a new round of investments, began with iPrize 2011.

About 4.5 thousand projects have gone through the online and offline activities of GreenfieldProject, starting with the idea stage and up to fully working and even well-known (say, Penxy, Scade, Budist, SportFort), as well as about half a thousand experts.

For Founder Institute, just for example, it’s more than a thousand projects and up to 3 thousand experts, but spread over 61 countries (according to information from fi.co).

As a result, it became clear to us that we need to create an ecosystem where you can freely share knowledge, where chances of non-industry errors (like incorrect bookkeeping or a curve of share registration) are excluded, as well as where you can find the right people immediately and quickly. And where will be the motivation at the expense of the community, in which there are the same "crazy" around.

The result is an ecosystem for the IT business at the beta stage - #tceh

The idea is to hold regular meetings to help identify the main “tardiness” in the project and outline steps to eliminate them. A mentor in such an ecosystem is always there. And if you still combine it with coworking, then it will turn out quite well: an expert in the right field went to drink tea in the same kitchen where you are.

Our #tceh is coworking , the main value of which is completely not indoors, or even in infrastructure, but in the way we develop an ecosystem around it.

For example, problems “from ignorance” can be solved by “office hours”. We were inspired by the experience of the office hours format in Y Combinator - consultations with invited experts, including investors, experienced entrepreneurs, and professionals in specific areas.

How often is someone with you who has access to the right people and relevant experience, but you don't know about it? It's a hell of a shame. The lack of dialogue between the projects we decide to involve the participants in informal activities, among which will be the real stars of the new war on laser swords. Swords we have already ordered.

Problems of recognition in the IT-sphere is another big difficulty. We definitely need additional communication with the community and exchange of experience - conferences, hackathons and other events that we will bring to the next conference room.

The main thing is, you want - you work, you want - just step into the accessibility center of all the necessary resources. You can not get out of your code at all, but you can run “your universities” in parallel with the work on the project.

So why do we need such an ecosystem at all?

It is clear that there are talents capable of developing truly large projects (we bow to Igor Sysoev and Nginx), and the number of methods and tools aimed at the result and at least minimal but easing the hard work of an IT entrepreneur is growing all over the world.

The general trend is like with websites: you can write from scratch and dig into the code, or you can take a set of fairly ready-made solutions and take up the development of the project. We want to develop it as a kind of SaaS for startups based on methodology. The scientific approach works here.

So let's do it again

1. The problem is that IT start-up teams are well versed in IT, but badly in business and public relations.
2. There is not enough industry knowledge to accurately understand who needs what.
3. We need social connections and communication.
4. Need motivation at every stage and real feedback.
5. You need to see your customers every day.
6. Isolation is evil. There must always be someone who saves you from schizophrenia. And you - his.
7. Any methodology without practice is dead.

From these bricks and formed #tceh. Coworking was added to the existing methodology, where there is a lot of practice and knowledge. Then I will talk about the methodology itself, as well as about the history of project failures, as well as about what we are doing here.

And now a question for you. Surely you have a project that you would like to start. What three things you do not have enough to be sure of success? What prevents to start?