5 lessons that we learned at Tolstoy Startup Camp

Two weeks ago, our stay at the Yandex accelerator - Tolstoy Startup Camp. It's a pity.

I was always amazed at the property of time in different places to flow in different ways. All the most memorable moments of life remain in the past, new ones appear and again remain in the past, and the more interesting the moment, the faster the river of life drowns it in its waters. If we talk about the part of our life spent in the walls of Yandex, then we can say that time was especially unfair to it. Fortunately, the memory of a person is greater than that of an aquarium fish, and in this short article I will try to strain my own to tell you about the most important, in my opinion, discoveries made in this unusual place.

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1. Tolstoy Startup Camp - this is definitely not what you expected.

Perhaps I do not have too much experience, but I have not yet met a single professional event with such an unusual warm and friendly atmosphere. I never guessed where this atmosphere comes from, but it is so subordinating to everyone who enters there, that even when someone to the devil carries your project, which you have been doing for years, you don’t want to show any negative emotions, moreover, You sincerely thank this person for a useful comment, even if this person carries unprecedented nonsense. The critic himself carries this nonsense solely out of noble motives. I do not know how they achieve this, probably, they put something in the cookies. :) It works easily and quickly, there are many friends and acquaintances.

2. err quickly

I won’t be original if I recall one well-known fact that of all the great start-up initiatives, no more than two percent of projects survive to an adequate type, and only a few businesses that can feed anyone except you and your cat. Starting in Russia is one of the easiest ways to kill time and get nothing for it. Simple statistics say that a shawarma stall, located in a good place, with a probability of 9 out of 10 will bring more money than your high-tech initiative. Therefore, the first thought that is driven into the heads of novice startups during the acceleration period is that if you cannot be flexible and flexible, then most likely your project is already a corpse.

I liked one expression that most fully conveys this thought: “Make a mistake faster,” that is, if there are only 2 successful out of a hundred roads that you can take, then you will probably have to make all 98 times wrong, and the sooner you do it - the sooner you will succeed. During the camp, we created dozens of hypotheses and sent them to the dump by bags.

3. Do not code! Just do not code!

To start programming without receiving confirmation of the viability of the idea is how to marry a girl after the first night together. Do not rush to marry your idea, she may turn out to be that bitch again, and being patient, falling in love will not work here. This greedy creature can leave you penniless, take away your best years of life and eventually go to your competitors by slamming the door. Therefore, forget about writing code at the beginning of work - it is a pleasure to leave for later. Instead, it’s better to create a beautiful landing page, make a presentation and learn how to communicate with people.

4. Communicate with people

I can't help remembering one of the lectures by Ilya Krasinsky, at the beginning of which he simply stated that we all sit in the hall, most likely, “Zadrots” and something else: “Normal people live outside the window and they don’t care about your ideas and technology".

It made me think, I never considered myself in this context. However, when I counted the number of my weekends over the past two years and the number of educational institutions in which I studied, I was pierced with a cold sweat “yes, I am a real epic zadrot”. This awareness was monstrous, so you live for yourself and do not know that the rest of the world lives completely on another planet. I advise everyone who reads this article to immediately engage in the same introspection. Most likely, you too will feel like an alien, I can even argue with that. After all, if it were different, you probably would not have read the article to this point. :)



So, the idea that I want to convey is simple - if you are going to do business on this planet, and not on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, you need to learn how to speak the same language as the two-legs. To do this, there is a technology that was created specifically for people like us, and it is called Customer Development. This technique is one of the most useful knowledge that we acquired in the Yandex accelerator. Unfortunately, I will not be able to reveal its essence in its entirety in this article, but I promise to write one of the following articles about this. Let me just say that it is mostly devoted to hypothesis building and testing, and its main goal is to penetrate the thoughts of your client as fully as possible, learn to speak the same language and, most importantly, find “pain” - a problem that It does not give people peace of mind so much that they are willing to pay money for its solution.

5. Analytics - that's all.

Every person who has ever had the opportunity to analyze the market of a product in Russia can confirm that this is hell. There is practically no information, most of the available data is either a common delusion or a delusion written with secret intent. You can spend months and hundreds of thousands of rubles on a serious analyst, what a pity that an ordinary start-up can not afford it. Therefore, when we began to draw beautiful graphs and analyze furiously, having spent two whole days on it, one of the methodologists almost turned off our heads.



Understand correctly, no one says that there is no need to conduct analytics, the fact is that by conducting it thoroughly at the initial stage, you are in fact just spending a lot of time testing one of the hypotheses and nothing more, since it is likely that after a few turns your product and market will be completely different.

The main thing is to keep the right balance between accuracy and speed and, by the way, advice from personal experience - if you cannot find any intelligible market indicators in one day, it means that there is most likely no market or it is small and you need to experiment further, only I beg you - do not hang. To be able to count and think quickly is the most necessary skill of a start-uper, because without quick analytics and a sound economy you are blind kittens on the edge of a cliff.

As a conclusion

I hope that the discoveries described in this article will help one of you to become smarter and more cautious, or at least serve as food for thought. And we thank Yandex for everything that he has done for us, and for the wonderful two months.

Best regards, Generate.club project team.

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