How we created the service of private freight. From business plan to development
A brief summar of the previous article : the decision to make the service was made, the idea was found, and it was necessary to start working.
Today I will talk about how I analyzed the market on my knees, why it is important to maintain relations with former classmates and about other things that were useful to me in creating a freight transportation service smestanamesto.ru .
According to the plan, we had to start in a year and spend 300 thousand rubles on it. I must say: we have exceeded both. Why? Details under the cut.
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The fact that there is a freight market, and it is very large, was obvious from the very beginning, but whether it was about millions or billions, it was not so important for me. Therefore, all marketing research was carried out literally on the knee and was limited to studying the topic in search engines and discussions with familiar carriers.
The main thing that I learned from this analysis:
Therefore, the basis of the simplest business plan was based on figures based on my personal experience and competitors' indicators, which we managed to collect in open sources - attendance, number of requests placed, conversion of requests into transactions, the cost of attracting a single transport request through a particular channel.
I will tell a little about positioning. In a global sense, we are all the same as our competitors - customers place requests, carriers make their offers. And the customer chooses the best in terms of price / quality ratio. But something we still differ.
What is all this for? So that customers understand that carriers are real and guarantee quality service. If a rate is made on any request, this means that the carrier will transport everything that is described in the request, intact and in safety, and for the price that is indicated. And all this so that the carriers know: our requests for transportation are real orders and real money.
The monetization model is planned in the form of a commission for each transaction. Although after the previous article, one of Habr's users suggested a very interesting model - freemium. Its essence: you can make for free, for example, 50 rates per month. If you want more, you can purchase packages for 100, 500 or 1000 rates. This model seemed interesting to me, although its disadvantage is that for carriers it will not be very transparent, since no one knows in advance exactly how much it needs to make bets to get one real order. I would love to hear your opinions in the comments.
Tip: if you do not immediately attract investment, then the business plan can fit on A4 sheet, but it must be. It is important to immediately understand the cost of attracting one user and how much money he can bring. Development is just the beginning.
Since I was going to design the service myself, I needed a designer, a programmer, a layout designer, a copywriter, a tester, and a sysadmin. I will tell about how I chose the most important people in such a project - a designer and programmer.
Designer. From my work experience, it was obvious to me that the design and the interfaces in general is almost more important than the development itself. Therefore, I took to the team the coolest and most expensive designer, with whom I dealt with other projects. I work with him on a piece-by-piece basis, since after the development of the corporate identity and design, full-time loading was not required.
Programmer. Here came the difficulty. Firstly, I didn’t have such a big budget for the salary of a programmer, and secondly, my knowledge was not enough to evaluate those. level of candidates. Facilitated the task that I was looking for a remote developer.
I worked with a programmer in full time, but remotely. The office was not intended and not intended.
Tip: work remotely or in the office, but find supporters - people who will be really interested in your project. This is more important than the vast experience behind them.
I must say: no one helped me in management matters. In terms of management, I did everything myself. I benefited from previous experience in business ( see previous article ), a second higher education (economic faculty of St. Petersburg State University) and previous work experience. If something is missing, you have to fill your own bumps and gain experience in the process.
Of course, we did not avoid the classic difficulties of remoteness - in communication and performance evaluation. Here you just need to remember that miracles do not happen, you will need daily work, meetings, as in the office, points of control. Do not think that you lay a week at the iteration, and the work itself will be done as it should. I am sure that there are developers who do not need to "kick", call and ask: "Well, how is our task, which you had to close yesterday?". But they have not met me yet.
Tip: for effective remote work is much more important than for the office, to properly organize the process.
Even before searching for a team, I began to design interfaces and develop a fully interactive prototype. Why yourself? I had experience in designing interfaces, and to optimize the budget, of course. This turned out to be far from simple and took a total of six months in parallel with another job. When you start to delve into the details and think over the little things, they are very, very much. Some serious errors in the logic correct so far.
I made a prototype in Axure. As it was intended to test the prototype on users, it had to be completely clickable and interactive. Then it was not obvious to me that I had to start something working as soon as possible, and not to lick the prototype. It was not possible to carry out normal testing on the prototype, as I rather wanted to move on.
Already after the launch of the project, feedback was received from the first users and errors became clear, it became clear how and what should be so that it was really convenient. My opinion is that no testing can replace real users. Improving interfaces after launching is just beginning.
Tip: you can make a clickable prototype and test it, but most likely in reality, much will be different. Run as fast as possible.
After the prototype was ready and tested on friends and acquaintances, the design phase began. We spent a lot of time developing design and corporate identity, because again, we spent a lot of time on trifles. I still believe that the devil is in the details, and that they need to pay a lot of attention, but there must be a measure in everything. Then all the same it was necessary to sacrifice some trifles and speed up the process. Everybody knows this and is written in many books, but it was possible to understand and feel exactly where this golden mean is located, only in the process.
Development of design and corporate identity took about 6 months. At this stage, the first money was spent, and for me there was no way back. I started working many times faster, but everything depended not only on me.
I will try to tell about what technologies we used, and about other details in the next article. The development itself took us 4 months, and another 2 months was spent on testing and fixing bugs.
These past 2 months have been the most difficult for me. After the main functionality was ready, and we started testing, I thought that this is it, now let's start and finally get the first real user. I tested the service, everything worked more or less. We got out small bugs, which we quickly fixed. But then I asked my friends to connect to the test. They began to write and call me and say that they could not even register or place a request. That is, the main functionality did not work. It turned out that they did it differently, in a way that even I couldn’t do in my thoughts.
We repaired something, but after a week other people again could not do anything. And then I realized that I needed a professional tester. Two months passed before the project really began to work. In early May, we launched a beta, and since June 1st, the service has fully earned.
Tip: for testing, you need to lay 20-30% of the time from the development itself.
The development and launch of the first version took about 18 months. The estimate has increased to half a million rubles.
We did a good job and got the result. We finally got started, received the first users and the first real shipping request. It was like a breath of fresh air, as the forces were already running out, and at least some results were needed. It was a very pleasant moment.
But then came, perhaps, the most important and difficult stage - marketing. We needed to recruit a sufficient number of first users to make it all work. To customers posted daily requests and received 3-4 rates.
By the way, now we are at the very beginning of the journey, we are just picking up traffic, just trying different channels to attract users, so I will be very happy with the advice in the comments on how to do it better. We are also in search of a competent marketer in order to reach the next level and increase the scale of activity by several times and finally reach the break-even point.
Today I will talk about how I analyzed the market on my knees, why it is important to maintain relations with former classmates and about other things that were useful to me in creating a freight transportation service smestanamesto.ru .
According to the plan, we had to start in a year and spend 300 thousand rubles on it. I must say: we have exceeded both. Why? Details under the cut.
')
Part 1. Business plan and positioning.
The fact that there is a freight market, and it is very large, was obvious from the very beginning, but whether it was about millions or billions, it was not so important for me. Therefore, all marketing research was carried out literally on the knee and was limited to studying the topic in search engines and discussions with familiar carriers.
The main thing that I learned from this analysis:
- As customers, we will focus on ordinary people with their everyday problems. Many people need to move, carry sofas or just some personal belongings to the country.
- As performers, we will attract private carriers and small transport companies.
Therefore, the basis of the simplest business plan was based on figures based on my personal experience and competitors' indicators, which we managed to collect in open sources - attendance, number of requests placed, conversion of requests into transactions, the cost of attracting a single transport request through a particular channel.
I will tell a little about positioning. In a global sense, we are all the same as our competitors - customers place requests, carriers make their offers. And the customer chooses the best in terms of price / quality ratio. But something we still differ.
- We do not attract empty requests and do not offer customers to start an auction to find out the cost of transportation. On the contrary, when placing a request for customers, a “Maximum price” field is required. Due to this, we have a higher percentage of conversion from placed orders into real deals. Now it fluctuates at the level of 30%, and we plan to increase it to 40%. This reduces the cost of attracting a single real transaction.
- We carry to the masses the idea that the service was created not only and not so much in order to get the cheapest transportation. With the help of the service, the customer will not receive the cat in the bag. To do this, there are reviews, and soon there will be a general rating of carriers, which will take into account a lot of parameters. We pay a lot of attention to the development of the rating, it will be as objective as possible.
- We constantly work with carriers - we train them to work with the site, so that profiles are filled, there are photos of cars and other important information. Now we are altering the profile and registration process of carriers, we will request even more information, up to machine numbers and document loading.
What is all this for? So that customers understand that carriers are real and guarantee quality service. If a rate is made on any request, this means that the carrier will transport everything that is described in the request, intact and in safety, and for the price that is indicated. And all this so that the carriers know: our requests for transportation are real orders and real money.
The monetization model is planned in the form of a commission for each transaction. Although after the previous article, one of Habr's users suggested a very interesting model - freemium. Its essence: you can make for free, for example, 50 rates per month. If you want more, you can purchase packages for 100, 500 or 1000 rates. This model seemed interesting to me, although its disadvantage is that for carriers it will not be very transparent, since no one knows in advance exactly how much it needs to make bets to get one real order. I would love to hear your opinions in the comments.
Tip: if you do not immediately attract investment, then the business plan can fit on A4 sheet, but it must be. It is important to immediately understand the cost of attracting one user and how much money he can bring. Development is just the beginning.
Part 2. Search team
Since I was going to design the service myself, I needed a designer, a programmer, a layout designer, a copywriter, a tester, and a sysadmin. I will tell about how I chose the most important people in such a project - a designer and programmer.
Designer. From my work experience, it was obvious to me that the design and the interfaces in general is almost more important than the development itself. Therefore, I took to the team the coolest and most expensive designer, with whom I dealt with other projects. I work with him on a piece-by-piece basis, since after the development of the corporate identity and design, full-time loading was not required.
Programmer. Here came the difficulty. Firstly, I didn’t have such a big budget for the salary of a programmer, and secondly, my knowledge was not enough to evaluate those. level of candidates. Facilitated the task that I was looking for a remote developer.
What I've done:
- Interviewed familiar programmers and did not find proper interest. Everyone liked the project, but everyone already had a major job.
- Placed a vacancy on Khantyma (then he was) with a salary of 50,000 rubles. There were about 30 responses.
- Conducted an interview. I conducted interviews in two stages. At first, I assessed the overall adequacy and personal qualities of the applicants. At the second stage, my
coolclassmate Oleg Maximov, acool developer, who miraculously appeared in my life at that time, helped me. He already asked all sorts of tricky questions on the topic. After school we didn’t communicate with him for 5 years. Together we chose the right candidate, for which I am very grateful to him. Without him, I'm afraid it would be completely different.
I worked with a programmer in full time, but remotely. The office was not intended and not intended.
Tip: work remotely or in the office, but find supporters - people who will be really interested in your project. This is more important than the vast experience behind them.
Part 3. Management and organization of work
I must say: no one helped me in management matters. In terms of management, I did everything myself. I benefited from previous experience in business ( see previous article ), a second higher education (economic faculty of St. Petersburg State University) and previous work experience. If something is missing, you have to fill your own bumps and gain experience in the process.
What we use for remote work:
- For communication - corporate chat Slack. For work, it is much more convenient than Skype. It can be integrated with other services - Jira, Github, Google Docs. Also there is excellent synchronization between the computer and mobile devices and file hosting. You can switch between teams. All this allows you to keep abreast.
- For iterative development - Jira with the Agile add-in.
- For documents - Google Docs.
- Repository in Github.
Of course, we did not avoid the classic difficulties of remoteness - in communication and performance evaluation. Here you just need to remember that miracles do not happen, you will need daily work, meetings, as in the office, points of control. Do not think that you lay a week at the iteration, and the work itself will be done as it should. I am sure that there are developers who do not need to "kick", call and ask: "Well, how is our task, which you had to close yesterday?". But they have not met me yet.
Tip: for effective remote work is much more important than for the office, to properly organize the process.
Part 4. Interface Design
Even before searching for a team, I began to design interfaces and develop a fully interactive prototype. Why yourself? I had experience in designing interfaces, and to optimize the budget, of course. This turned out to be far from simple and took a total of six months in parallel with another job. When you start to delve into the details and think over the little things, they are very, very much. Some serious errors in the logic correct so far.
I made a prototype in Axure. As it was intended to test the prototype on users, it had to be completely clickable and interactive. Then it was not obvious to me that I had to start something working as soon as possible, and not to lick the prototype. It was not possible to carry out normal testing on the prototype, as I rather wanted to move on.
Already after the launch of the project, feedback was received from the first users and errors became clear, it became clear how and what should be so that it was really convenient. My opinion is that no testing can replace real users. Improving interfaces after launching is just beginning.
Tip: you can make a clickable prototype and test it, but most likely in reality, much will be different. Run as fast as possible.
Part 5. Design
After the prototype was ready and tested on friends and acquaintances, the design phase began. We spent a lot of time developing design and corporate identity, because again, we spent a lot of time on trifles. I still believe that the devil is in the details, and that they need to pay a lot of attention, but there must be a measure in everything. Then all the same it was necessary to sacrifice some trifles and speed up the process. Everybody knows this and is written in many books, but it was possible to understand and feel exactly where this golden mean is located, only in the process.
Development of design and corporate identity took about 6 months. At this stage, the first money was spent, and for me there was no way back. I started working many times faster, but everything depended not only on me.
Part 6. A little about the development.
I will try to tell about what technologies we used, and about other details in the next article. The development itself took us 4 months, and another 2 months was spent on testing and fixing bugs.
These past 2 months have been the most difficult for me. After the main functionality was ready, and we started testing, I thought that this is it, now let's start and finally get the first real user. I tested the service, everything worked more or less. We got out small bugs, which we quickly fixed. But then I asked my friends to connect to the test. They began to write and call me and say that they could not even register or place a request. That is, the main functionality did not work. It turned out that they did it differently, in a way that even I couldn’t do in my thoughts.
We repaired something, but after a week other people again could not do anything. And then I realized that I needed a professional tester. Two months passed before the project really began to work. In early May, we launched a beta, and since June 1st, the service has fully earned.
Tip: for testing, you need to lay 20-30% of the time from the development itself.
Results
The development and launch of the first version took about 18 months. The estimate has increased to half a million rubles.
We did a good job and got the result. We finally got started, received the first users and the first real shipping request. It was like a breath of fresh air, as the forces were already running out, and at least some results were needed. It was a very pleasant moment.
But then came, perhaps, the most important and difficult stage - marketing. We needed to recruit a sufficient number of first users to make it all work. To customers posted daily requests and received 3-4 rates.
By the way, now we are at the very beginning of the journey, we are just picking up traffic, just trying different channels to attract users, so I will be very happy with the advice in the comments on how to do it better. We are also in search of a competent marketer in order to reach the next level and increase the scale of activity by several times and finally reach the break-even point.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/238687/
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