Restarting LitTime or a small story of 2 years of startup slip

2.5 years ago we started a startup with Habr. Now - 1.5 months have passed since the restart, I did not know for a long time in what format to write a post. Well, let's tell an instructive story of failure, which I hope will be useful.

Idea, partner search, first launch trial

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I always lacked a service in which I would find out about the release of books of different genres. Part of the idea for this product came from the Mastersland.com site. There were and / or there are specific services that cover one or more related genres. But after all, interests can reach beyond the boundaries of "genre ghettos." Hence the thought of creating a news feed about books from all genres of fiction and a little non-fiction literature that came out in various publishing houses.



By education and knowledge - I am more a marketer than a programmer. Therefore, I decided to focus on content and promotion. I needed a technical “director” in the project ... I described my experience in detail here . There were 3 partners (2 per share, the other - combined with the main work for piecework). From the first two options did not work out, from the last - the first version of LitTime appeared, with which we went to Habr and the first round of PR. In short, finding a good partner in a startup is as difficult as finding your soul mate in love . A little later, I found another way out for business, but everything is in order.







With the prototype from the 3rd partner, we started. I think we took Bill Gates’s words that we should go out with a raw product too seriously. The site at that time, of course, performed the main functions (tape, filter by genre, list “I will read”). But the rest was done damp. Of course, there was a post on Habr . And PR in VK groups. By the way, then he was completely giving himself up for free, today - he has turned from PR into advertising, and of dubious quality. In detail with a small statistic compared here . But it quickly became clear that the conversion of visitors into regular ones was very small. After a week of "silence" it was about 30 unique per day. Although with such volumes the site showed that it can be monetized! This gave hope.



Taking advantage of the moment I want to express my sincere thanks to the user k12th for help and advice, as well as to all the other habravchanam who wrote comments, as well as practice showed us holes in the site.

Fail and exit search

The development did not stop. Just about expected the emergence of a block of bibliographies. But then there was a force majeure programmer - he was offered a wonderful job. Which, alas, was incompatible with the continued development of the site. Here I’ll note that no one thinks badly that I understand the decision of the partner, we keep in touch with him, and I am sincerely glad that he was all right.

Although my LitTime turned out to be on the verge of failure - there was a raw site left at the crossing (when expanding the functionality).



I think you can imagine the moral state. At first I started out looking for another freelance programmer out of habit, but rather soon abandoned this idea.

Here I want to make a small remark - the option to “hire a programmer” was impossible, because there is no kinship with the Rockefellers, and all capital is money set aside from a relatively small provincial s / n.

Not wanting to go bankrupt with a partner again, I decided to check out the studios' offers. I was probably lucky, but on the advice of a colleague I met one company. And for relatively little money made our site the way it is now.

Hence another startups advice: a very good alternative to a partnership is a trip to a web studio. Check, perhaps the prototype of your project can be done without losing a stake on the partner . Yes, there are a number of drawbacks - you need to find one that you do qualitatively, showing a good approach to development, a question of price, etc. ... But I personally got the project developed as soon as possible (the studio does it faster than the partner programmer), a guarantee that the work will be completed and confidence that, if necessary, the development of the site can be continued by another studio or by our hired programmers.



With them, LitTime was finally launched - no longer so raw, with great functionality. And since we did not stop the work of the old site engine, we also accumulated a good amount of content.

I hope the story will help someone. So that you don’t think that 2 years have been wasted, I’ll say that besides the content, we did get the first users, worked out the concept of the site, got experience in this field of activity.

LitTime today

I hope the story was not boring and useful. So how can we be of help at the moment:



Tape of the leading publishing books



Here we tell about all the updates of the largest Russian publishing houses. The tape contains all genres of fiction, as well as non-fiction: philosophy, journalism, biographies, documentary and non-fiction. One of our main ideas is that the person reading is not obliged to be limited to any genre, but can enjoy the pleasure of books of almost the entire spectrum of books.



There is also a button for buying these books in partner stores (both paper and electronic; in the case of copyright free classics, the digital versions of the books are free).



Functional "I will read"



Allows registered users to save to a special list of books of interest.



Bibliography



A relatively young section on our site, but already a good content base. Bibliographies will help you navigate better when searching for a book: what is better to read from the author, in what order.



Reviews and ratings



You can rate and write reviews of works that are stored in your personal account and will be visible to friends.



Communication

Users can subscribe to each other to see the actions of friends: added to the reading of the book, set ratings, reviews. We are also starting to test messaging.



Literary news

Here we tell visitors about the most interesting and relevant literary events. With one of the news, we got to the 1st place of search results in Yandex !

Future of the site

Guessing, announcing the future functionality and the timing of its input is a thankless task. I can only say that the development is ongoing.

Site attendance is gradually increasing, monetization has so far discouraged hosting, but we expect more.

We will be glad if LitTime will be useful and interesting for you.

Thank you for your attention. I will be glad to hear your opinion about the site and its technical implementation.