Founder's advice. Anton Gladkoborodov, CEO Coub

The project must run on their own money.

You need to eat, rent an apartment, hangs a loan for a car and you need to somehow have fun. You need at least 100 thousand to at least somehow drag a miserable existence. You want to find an investor for your idea, because you have to live on something while you start a project.

If you do not know what you will live for a year or two while you start and take the first steps with your project, then you are not the kind of person who can be an entrepreneur. There are two options - either you have your money, or you can live without money. Get out the way you want - work on the project in the evenings, weekends, freelance, do whatever you want, but start by yourself. Looking for an investment so that someone can pay for your life while you make your dream come true - infantile. If you are not willing to risk a “car loan”, then it’s better not to start, and you don’t have to put these risks on someone else.

All projects can be successful.

I am sure that if the team is stubborn, then it will find how to make the project work or be able to turn 180 ° and find something that will work.

We worked on Kob for more than a year and we hardly had any traction. The mood is terrible, hands are falling, but in the end we found how to reverse this situation. The founders of Instagram did some other project and as a result were able to expand the idea of ​​the project in a completely different direction. More difficulties and problems than the founders of Airbnb at an early stage of their project are hard to come up with, but they are now a billion-dollar company. If you look closely, almost no one has easy success, most take obstinacy. All the beautiful success stories are most often small insignificant components of the team’s titanic efforts. There is a stupid saying: "If you suffer for a long time, something will work out." Yes, the stubborn team will be able to find a way to make a successful project.

All is bad

We look at successful projects and we think that everything is good for them, and everything is bad for us. No growth, running out of money, Google launched something similar to your project - a lot of problems and depressive.

Do not worry, for those who have “everything is fine”, everything is also bad. They also run out of money, problems with growth and Google launched something similar. It may be even worse for them, because their level of responsibility and expenses is much higher. So if everything is bad for you, then it’s at least the same as everyone’s, and you shouldn’t think that you are really special. So get up in the morning, radiate confidence and solve your problems with money and growth. If you do not go away from the problems, then they will definitely decide one way or another.

Solve problems as they arrive.

When you start a project, you do not have to solve the load problem, waiting for the influx of users. If you have millions of users tomorrow, this is a great problem, somehow you will understand, Twitter could. Do what is important now, and not what will be important tomorrow. At an early stage, you do not have the resources to solve problems that may not happen at all. Most likely, the problems will be completely different and you just spend time doing things that you don’t need.

All projects are cool

I meet a lot of skepticism about almost all new projects. Somewhere there are specialists who claim that this will not work, the idea is stupid, or the project will not be able to earn. Worst of all, this skepticism is met before the project is launched. When Sergey and Larry launched Google - it was the most stupid idea. The market was full (yahoo, altavista, go.com and so on), it was impossible to earn money on a search engine, then there was no contextual advertising. The maximum that could be counted on is to sell / license technology to someone. Snapchat - what could be dumber. Why go far when the idea of ​​Koba came to me, then almost everyone I told her thought that this was at least a “strange” idea.

Whatever we are experts, we can not predict by 100% what will fire and what will not. But even if the project does not shoot and closes, the team will gain experience and the next project will be successful. The more unsuccessful projects a person has - the greater the chance that the next project will shoot him. It is necessary to support everyone who does at least something. Even if it seems to us that this will not work.