Entrepreneurship Lessons: Why Madrobots Failed at Mega

I once worked at a large Panasonic corporation and at lunch I liked to discuss ideas with various business projects with my colleagues. Among clerks, this is a common disease - to come up with ideas. It's so nice to imagine yourself a new genius of innovation.

Sometimes it seems that if you managed to come up with something at dinner and discuss it with feeling, you have already lived a day for nothing. You can pay for a business lunch and return to the office - to the performance of their official duties and the execution of approved KPI.
')
This life is a thing of the past for me. Now I'm building Madrobots. Fortunately (or unfortunately, this is how you look), you have to not only fantasize, but also put your ideas into practice.

Recently I told that we are opening a new retail point of sale in the Mega Belaya Dacha Mall. On December 16, we posted a post about the dramatic process of opening a store and what difficulties (first of all technical) we were waiting for along the way.
From the very beginning it was clear that we were going on a risky experiment. And now I must admit: the experiment failed. We opened in late August. Over the next month, I became convinced that the “island” was unprofitable and should be closed.

Easily create super successful businesses in your own dreams. Real life often presents unpleasant surprises. And you yourself make mistakes, which, of course, you could easily have avoided in your fantasies.


Bill dimmick

Everybody is falling, are we growing?

We already have a shop on "Gorbushka". But it is important to us as a pick-up point - this is part of the online business infrastructure. The island in "Mega" was supposed to be a self-sufficient profitable project. And he did not.

I thought that the point in "Mega" could bring from 700 thousand to 1 million rubles of revenue per month. In fact, she gave no more than 300-400 thousand.

We have invested about a million rubles in the project. Now we will lose several hundred thousand. But the time spent and the effort invested in the project is even more expensive.



This fall in Russia, the economy entered its peak (well, you know, probably). Next year will be harsh for everyone. And retail felt it before everyone else: customer traffic is noticeably thinned.

At the same time, the market is designed in such a way that rental rates are not automatically reduced, but only several months after the start of a recession. If at all reduced. There is no need to be an economic genius to guess: this winter more than a dozen companies will go bankrupt.

And on the general background, retail electronics in the most unpleasant position. "White wind" went bankrupt - even before everything became bad with the dollar. Yes, and many other competitors are not doing well.

But I convinced the partners that we can grow against the backdrop of a general recession. After all, we did not need wild indicators and huge turnover.
It was necessary to simply bring in a small point, which would sell our cool gadgets on the huge stream of Mega Belaya Dacha, one of the most successful shopping centers in Moscow.

But in our calculations and the implementation of this plan we ourselves made a lot of mistakes.

Crisis of faith

Michiel S

A few months ago, I didn’t even realize that my desire to go at retail was strongly spurred by the fact that we had a person to whom I could entrust this project.

Sasha - a former illusionist magician, worked in companies that organize holidays and various corporate events. And he just worked perfectly on our robot ball. I think Sasha is the best seller of all whom I saw, he intuitively felt how to build a conversation so that no one would leave without buying. However, the Ball ended, and I had to either find him a new task, or part.

As you know, ideas are nothing, execution is everything, or rather, performers. Therefore, in business it is far from uncommon, when some promising direction opens up under a person. However, if you make strategic decisions, driving them under the people, soon there can be nothing left of the strategy. And people from this will not become more effective.

After all, a good seller and a good organizer are two different options. In words, we agreed with Mega that we would get a discount for the first couple of months. But Sasha signed the document without looking. Of course, no grace period was there. Out of the blue we worsened the project's economy.

Even worse, after a couple of weeks, he began to complain that he was tired, that everything was wrong with us. And I already knew: if a person aches, it means that he has no motivation, it means that he has no faith. And faith is the most important thing.



Sasha eventually left, and he did not have time or could not create a sales team that could replace him.

Random people

When we went to Megu, I explained why the choice fell on this huge mall: local buyers were actively checking in at Foursquare .
"So, in the general consumer flow, a high percentage of our target audience is geeks and people who are just keen on non-standard gadgets," I decided then. This hypothesis was wrong.

“Mega” is still not the Ball of Robots. In fact, there, as elsewhere, buyers are the most ordinary. Insane tehnogikov in the general flow was not noticeable, but my assumption is not justified.

Selected under the geeks range was sold poorly. For example, I expected that the 3Doodler three-dimensional pen would be selling us, but for the first month of the store’s operation we didn’t sell a single piece.

Our Russian invention, “Master of Posture,” was popular (the gadget starts to vibrate if a person deviates from a direct position by more than 15 degrees). Over time, they began to actively buy 3D pens and Wi-Fi light bulbs (but in the volumes that I drew in my head, preparing a sales plan). The little things sold watches and fitness bracelets.


Master of Posture

We expected to attract attention by conducting workshops and demonstrating the capabilities of our robots. For example, launching a copter to the ceiling or rolling a Sphero robot ball around the window and floor. But the idle public did not make any particular impression.

I noticed that young pregnant women and married couples often view our shop window. Began to introduce into the range more radio-controlled toys, video monitors, products for young parents.



And, as it turned out, we were moving in this direction not alone.

"Bazooka"

I got so carried away with the idea of ​​a retail experiment that I didn’t even really study the market.

It seems that it is unthinkable: how can you start something without knowing, did you not try to do something like that? But talk with practical entrepreneurs: in fact, in a real business, this is quite typical. Quite often, they swim in the water without knowing the ford, partly because of self-confidence, partly because of a lack of resources.

We simultaneously organized distribution, developed an online store, promoted the Internet of things market, organized a techno show, participated in exhibitions ... There was simply no time left for painstaking business planning.

But this is all, of course, not a great excuse. We had to carry out reconnaissance on the spot — and by all means study the Bazooka project. And I saw him after he opened his own point.


Bazuka is a joint project of Atrium and the Inventive Retail Group (which owns such networks as re: Store, Samsung, Lego, etc.).



Their assortment is similar to ours, but everything looks, no matter how bitter it is to admit, much more attractive. Because it is in fact - not an island.

Storefronts are located in the form of letters G, deployed to each other. The display is open. You can go inside and feel like in a real store. Managers of the Inventive Retail Group said that they would replicate this format throughout the country. However, a year has passed, and they still have one “Bazooka”.

It can be assumed that due to the participation of Atrium in this project, their rental rates are much more profitable than those received by entrepreneurs from the street. But, obviously, without these benefits, Bazuka is not very profitable. And this is an occasion to think about anyone who wants to do unusual gadgets offline.

My universities

Ian burt

But you know what. All this, of course, is nonsense.

The history of entrepreneurship is filled with examples of how people created something new in spite of trends, analysts' forecasts and the first failures. We could continue to experiment with the range and animation. Could come up with interesting promotions. Could modernize the format to fit better into the market.

At the same time (autumn), at the GadgetFair exhibition, I met the guys from the Dadzhet company and Rostislav Poleshko, the vice-president of Dadzhet / Masterkit (in the past, by the way, the general director of Le Futur) explained how the retail market works and what Shopping centers, like MEGA, go when there is already a federal brand and every second iron in the country knows about the company.



My automatic time tracking system (I use the Rescuetime service), spent at the computer, allows me to estimate that I killed 200-300 hours of my time for the island project at Mega.

But after all, every hour, directed by me not to side projects, but to improve the Madrobots online store, would bring us much more tactical profits and strategic sustainability. My task is to focus on the main thing, on what brings money and what I also understand much better than in offline retail - on online sales.

From the beginning of autumn I was preparing the company for the crisis. Trimmed costs Madrobots. Got rid of one of the offices. Translated engineers for piecework. Improved our marketing technologies ... Why cling to the store in "Mega"?

It is better to fix the losses and move on. Today, my task is to turn Madrobots into a stable business machine as quickly as possible in a crisis.

I have not given up on the idea of ​​developing my business offline. But I realized that the time had not come yet. The mass audience is not ripe for wifi-controlled light bulbs and 3d-pens. We need to wait - I think another year or two.

We failed, but, strangely enough, I do not consider the discovery in Mega to be a mistake. It was an experiment that had to be done. I got a new experience and better understood how my business and the market in which we operate.

If you create a business in your fantasies, it is easy to succeed. In reality, it is often impossible to know whether an idea will work until you try to put it into practice.

This is an expensive education. But it is worth it.

I continue to try to make a modern and interesting hardware store.
You will be in Sokolniki Park in Moscow, visit Roboelka , take a look at our range in person and maybe give a couple of valuable tips. I can be found there until December 25th.

If we are too lazy or far away, we put a video camera there (it works from 10 to 21 Moscow time):

This is one of the first cameras, created with the direct participation of Ivideon engineers and camera manufacturers, which at the hardware level supported the main features of the service called Oco . With this camera, ivideon entered the American market. We will write about their history. In February, we will bring these cameras to Russia.

We also launched a small special project - we are playing out 500 packs of Seeberger nuts among those who share the page madrobots.ru/new_year with their friends. Come in, choose presents, read interesting facts about nuts and share a page.

A post about how we decided to open a store in the MEGA shopping center:
habrahabr.ru/company/madrobots/blog/233625

A post about how we opened a store in the shopping center MEGA:
habrahabr.ru/company/madrobots/blog/239049