How we created the service of private freight. Prehistory
Hello!
My name is Anton. As part of the startup support program, I want to tell you how I came up with the idea of creating my own business on the Internet and what preceded the appearance of our service of profitable shipments smestanamesto.ru.
For reference, the essence of the service: a person places a request for the transportation of any kind of cargo - from the sofa to the yacht. Carriers compete for an order in an auction format, and the customer chooses the best for the price and reviews. As a result, goods are transported cheaply and efficiently, and carriers' cars do not stand idle without work.
')
In the first article I will talk about what led me to this startup. If it is interesting, then I will write how we did the service itself, attracted the first investor and what is happening with the project at the moment.
Once upon a time I wanted to be a programmer. I graduated from SPbGPU with a degree in Metal Physics and Computer Technologies in Materials Science. As usual, after graduation, the question arose of where and by whom to work. I dismissed the work in my specialty at once, because it is a direct road to some scientific research institute, and I definitely did not want to be a scientist. What to do at that moment was completely incomprehensible.
I tried many different places of work, but quickly realized that it was not mine. First, I immediately get tired of the uniformity - it is not interesting to repeat the same thing every day. Secondly, I like to freely express my opinion, and this few can properly evaluate. Thirdly, I need to clearly know why I am doing this or that work. And most bosses are not very eager to explain the essence of their instructions. Therefore, I began to think about my business.
Despite the fact that I did not become a programmer, I always liked programming (since the days of University Pascal). The Internet as a sphere also attracted me a lot. Therefore, I decided that I would do the service, but not entertaining, but useful, related to offline.
There were a lot of ideas, but then I stopped comparing prices in chain grocery supermarkets. Already at the stage of collecting price lists from stores, I encountered the most severe resistance - networkers stubbornly did not want to publish their prices, although in the West they have been doing this for a long time. I even planned to collect data manually, went shopping and rewrote all prices in a notebook, but it all ended, and did not have time to start. Without cooperation with shops to implement this idea was unreal.
It also became obvious that without starting money you could hardly even start a business, even on the Internet.
Here came to the aid of the state. I decided to try to get a state grant to create my own business - 300 thousand rubles. I even wrote a business plan. But when it was time for the program to start, it turned out that they would give money for tangible assets. And what about the Internet project, where the main expenses are salaries and marketing, most likely, they will not give money. At that moment I was so eager to make my own business, that I decided to think of something new quickly, it doesn't matter anymore, just to get money and start.
My sister came to the rescue: she offered to jointly do business for the delivery of Chinese food in boxes. At that time in St. Petersburg (it was the end of 2008), this was not the case at all! It was very cool to be the first, as I thought then. There are no competitors, the theme is working and very popular in the West, which means that if you make a tasty product, everything will fly away. Time has shown that everything is not so simple.
We quickly wrote a new business plan and managed to apply for a grant. Moreover, our application was approved, and we received 300 thousand rubles so necessary for us free of charge. They added as many more of their own, purchased equipment for the kitchen and plunged headlong into the wisdom of the catering.
This was my first entrepreneurial experience that lasted a year and a half. There was a lot of things - hellish work, mistakes, nerves and other "charms" of work for yourself. Here I will not describe the details of our first business, since the article is not about that. But in any case, it was a very good experience.
In the end, I came to the conclusion that catering in any of its manifestations is not mine, and we must return to the Internet, but act differently. I went out of business. We even managed to sell it and exit without loss, although the investments were very modest.
I still wanted to do my business, but now I knew exactly how. It was a huge plus. I knew for sure that I want to work on the Internet and that it is very hard to do business without experience. Therefore, I began to look for ways to “enter” the web.
I sent my CV to project project vacancies at all places. I was invited to an interview a couple of times. So 4 months have passed. Money was running out, thoughts began to appear to quit this Internet and get any job, just to work. Here I was very helped by the support of my girlfriend Christina (now wife), thanks to which I continued tohammer the wall to persistently send out a resume.
One day, I was invited to an interview at a St. Petersburg web studio. The interview went well. During my first business, I was already a bit pumped up in management, but I had a very superficial idea about the development of sites and their promotion. I was promised to call back and did not call back.
A couple of weeks later I wrote a letter to the studio. The director replied that they liked me, but they took another person. I began to act decisively and began to write letters there once a week with persuasion to still try to take me. He promised that I would try very hard. And it turned out that the person they had taken left after 3 days of work.
Decisive was my last letter in which I wrote that I was even ready to work for a month for free, so long as they took me (well, I really wanted to go there). And it worked. So I began my journey in a new area.
In this studio I worked for a year and a half, we made different websites - from “business cards” to online stores, but still it was a conveyor outsourcing. I got a good experience, for which I am very grateful to the people who worked with me. In parallel, I studied a lot and read a lot of books. After about a year and a half, I began to realize that I was getting bored, that at this level I already knew everything and that I needed to move on. I wanted big cool projects and a real serious development. And I quit from there.
Almost immediately after that, I found a new job - I got a job as a project manager remotely at one Moscow agency. And there I saw how the internet business is done with big customers. We did not make sites using the conveyor method, but took on only complex and interesting projects. I managed to work with such customers as Megaphone and Johnson & Johnson. All this time in my head I was nurturing an idea for my project. And gradually I realized what I wanted to do.
What was my main thought? I understood that I wanted to do first of all the necessary service, and secondly - an understandable business, with an understandable monetization model. So that users themselves want to pay. I did not want to convince people that the service they need, it should have been implied by itself.
The Internet originally appeared to facilitate the search for information. That is, that some people easily find others - no matter for what purpose: to talk with a kindergarten friend or find a nanny for a child. My idea was to make the service just for meeting those who seek services and those who provide them. This is pretty obvious, but I didn’t strive for something innovative. I didn’t want to make another contact list board. Therefore, I was looking for a service that is easy to formalize and evaluate according to the description.
And then came the insight - it's the same freight. This topic went perfectly under my selection criteria:
It is very easy to estimate the cost of transportation by the description of the cargo and the route.
The obvious utility of the service for both customers and carriers.
Carriers willing to pay for information about orders, just a huge amount - in this business is very low entry threshold.
The volume of the freight market is quite large.
At first I was thinking about big b2b trucking on wagons. Searching the Internet, I quickly stumbled upon the well-known ati.su and realized that it was pointless to fight it.
A couple of months of constant deliberation has passed - what else can be done in transportation, so as not to compete directly with ATI, but so that the market is still large and promising. As a result, I came across an American site uship.com . And I realized that this is exactly what is needed - the service organizes transportation for ordinary people and works according to the auction model. That is, carriers openly place bets right on the site and see each other's bets.
The decision was made, a start was made. This is how our service smestanamesto.ru originated .
If you are interested in how the service was planned and developed, how the team was recruited and how we stuffed the first bumps, write in the comments, I will tell you more in the following articles.
PS And of course, I would be very grateful to you for the feedback and constructive criticism in the comments.
My name is Anton. As part of the startup support program, I want to tell you how I came up with the idea of creating my own business on the Internet and what preceded the appearance of our service of profitable shipments smestanamesto.ru.
For reference, the essence of the service: a person places a request for the transportation of any kind of cargo - from the sofa to the yacht. Carriers compete for an order in an auction format, and the customer chooses the best for the price and reviews. As a result, goods are transported cheaply and efficiently, and carriers' cars do not stand idle without work.
')
In the first article I will talk about what led me to this startup. If it is interesting, then I will write how we did the service itself, attracted the first investor and what is happening with the project at the moment.
Step one: Work after high school.
Once upon a time I wanted to be a programmer. I graduated from SPbGPU with a degree in Metal Physics and Computer Technologies in Materials Science. As usual, after graduation, the question arose of where and by whom to work. I dismissed the work in my specialty at once, because it is a direct road to some scientific research institute, and I definitely did not want to be a scientist. What to do at that moment was completely incomprehensible.
I tried many different places of work, but quickly realized that it was not mine. First, I immediately get tired of the uniformity - it is not interesting to repeat the same thing every day. Secondly, I like to freely express my opinion, and this few can properly evaluate. Thirdly, I need to clearly know why I am doing this or that work. And most bosses are not very eager to explain the essence of their instructions. Therefore, I began to think about my business.
Step Two: First ideas for your business.
Despite the fact that I did not become a programmer, I always liked programming (since the days of University Pascal). The Internet as a sphere also attracted me a lot. Therefore, I decided that I would do the service, but not entertaining, but useful, related to offline.
There were a lot of ideas, but then I stopped comparing prices in chain grocery supermarkets. Already at the stage of collecting price lists from stores, I encountered the most severe resistance - networkers stubbornly did not want to publish their prices, although in the West they have been doing this for a long time. I even planned to collect data manually, went shopping and rewrote all prices in a notebook, but it all ended, and did not have time to start. Without cooperation with shops to implement this idea was unreal.
It also became obvious that without starting money you could hardly even start a business, even on the Internet.
Here came to the aid of the state. I decided to try to get a state grant to create my own business - 300 thousand rubles. I even wrote a business plan. But when it was time for the program to start, it turned out that they would give money for tangible assets. And what about the Internet project, where the main expenses are salaries and marketing, most likely, they will not give money. At that moment I was so eager to make my own business, that I decided to think of something new quickly, it doesn't matter anymore, just to get money and start.
Step Three: Deliver Chinese Food in Boxes
My sister came to the rescue: she offered to jointly do business for the delivery of Chinese food in boxes. At that time in St. Petersburg (it was the end of 2008), this was not the case at all! It was very cool to be the first, as I thought then. There are no competitors, the theme is working and very popular in the West, which means that if you make a tasty product, everything will fly away. Time has shown that everything is not so simple.
We quickly wrote a new business plan and managed to apply for a grant. Moreover, our application was approved, and we received 300 thousand rubles so necessary for us free of charge. They added as many more of their own, purchased equipment for the kitchen and plunged headlong into the wisdom of the catering.
This was my first entrepreneurial experience that lasted a year and a half. There was a lot of things - hellish work, mistakes, nerves and other "charms" of work for yourself. Here I will not describe the details of our first business, since the article is not about that. But in any case, it was a very good experience.
What conclusions did I draw?
- Sam will never fly anything, no matter how cool the product is. Without marketing nowhere.
- If there are no direct competitors in any field, this is not always good. It takes a lot of effort and money to create a market that did not exist.
- Very, very careful approach to the choice of partners. Work with partners only if you can’t handle it yourself.
- You need to do only what you like or know, no matter how trite it may sound. They write about it in all books, but I stepped on this rake.
In the end, I came to the conclusion that catering in any of its manifestations is not mine, and we must return to the Internet, but act differently. I went out of business. We even managed to sell it and exit without loss, although the investments were very modest.
Step Four: Hi, Internet!
I still wanted to do my business, but now I knew exactly how. It was a huge plus. I knew for sure that I want to work on the Internet and that it is very hard to do business without experience. Therefore, I began to look for ways to “enter” the web.
I sent my CV to project project vacancies at all places. I was invited to an interview a couple of times. So 4 months have passed. Money was running out, thoughts began to appear to quit this Internet and get any job, just to work. Here I was very helped by the support of my girlfriend Christina (now wife), thanks to which I continued to
Petersburg studio
One day, I was invited to an interview at a St. Petersburg web studio. The interview went well. During my first business, I was already a bit pumped up in management, but I had a very superficial idea about the development of sites and their promotion. I was promised to call back and did not call back.
A couple of weeks later I wrote a letter to the studio. The director replied that they liked me, but they took another person. I began to act decisively and began to write letters there once a week with persuasion to still try to take me. He promised that I would try very hard. And it turned out that the person they had taken left after 3 days of work.
Decisive was my last letter in which I wrote that I was even ready to work for a month for free, so long as they took me (well, I really wanted to go there). And it worked. So I began my journey in a new area.
In this studio I worked for a year and a half, we made different websites - from “business cards” to online stores, but still it was a conveyor outsourcing. I got a good experience, for which I am very grateful to the people who worked with me. In parallel, I studied a lot and read a lot of books. After about a year and a half, I began to realize that I was getting bored, that at this level I already knew everything and that I needed to move on. I wanted big cool projects and a real serious development. And I quit from there.
Moscow Agency
Almost immediately after that, I found a new job - I got a job as a project manager remotely at one Moscow agency. And there I saw how the internet business is done with big customers. We did not make sites using the conveyor method, but took on only complex and interesting projects. I managed to work with such customers as Megaphone and Johnson & Johnson. All this time in my head I was nurturing an idea for my project. And gradually I realized what I wanted to do.
Findings:
- It is necessary for you to clearly define in which area you want to develop and go in this direction in any way. Make an informed choice and do not collapse.
- Nothing is impossible, you just need to really want to and go hard to the goal. And it is not just words.
Step Five: How to choose an idea?
What was my main thought? I understood that I wanted to do first of all the necessary service, and secondly - an understandable business, with an understandable monetization model. So that users themselves want to pay. I did not want to convince people that the service they need, it should have been implied by itself.
How did I reason?
The Internet originally appeared to facilitate the search for information. That is, that some people easily find others - no matter for what purpose: to talk with a kindergarten friend or find a nanny for a child. My idea was to make the service just for meeting those who seek services and those who provide them. This is pretty obvious, but I didn’t strive for something innovative. I didn’t want to make another contact list board. Therefore, I was looking for a service that is easy to formalize and evaluate according to the description.
And then came the insight - it's the same freight. This topic went perfectly under my selection criteria:
It is very easy to estimate the cost of transportation by the description of the cargo and the route.
The obvious utility of the service for both customers and carriers.
Carriers willing to pay for information about orders, just a huge amount - in this business is very low entry threshold.
The volume of the freight market is quite large.
At first I was thinking about big b2b trucking on wagons. Searching the Internet, I quickly stumbled upon the well-known ati.su and realized that it was pointless to fight it.
A couple of months of constant deliberation has passed - what else can be done in transportation, so as not to compete directly with ATI, but so that the market is still large and promising. As a result, I came across an American site uship.com . And I realized that this is exactly what is needed - the service organizes transportation for ordinary people and works according to the auction model. That is, carriers openly place bets right on the site and see each other's bets.
The decision was made, a start was made. This is how our service smestanamesto.ru originated .
If you are interested in how the service was planned and developed, how the team was recruited and how we stuffed the first bumps, write in the comments, I will tell you more in the following articles.
PS And of course, I would be very grateful to you for the feedback and constructive criticism in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/235425/
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