Is it time to stop or still continue to invest in the project? Personal experience
Not so long ago, the partner had a question: how well is our project developing and the current performance - is it failure, success or something in between? And the question is, in fact, quite ambiguous, considering that the open beta test lasts only a month and we have no paid clients. Therefore, I decided to analyze the current affairs of the project and make a conclusion about whether it is time to stop spending $? 90 500 rubles invested so far. Further, my thoughts on this matter.
')
Do you know the story of the dead horse? Its meaning is that if your horse is dead, then it makes no sense to try to spur it (tight deadlines and KPI), give more oats (money) or carry on yourself. It is necessary to bury her with dignity and transfer to a new one. But if an entrepreneur is stubborn and does not give up (and there are most of them), then it is easy for years to reanimate a patient who is already one.
On the other hand, without patience, perseverance and perseverance, not a single business was built. That Thomas Edison with his 10,000 light bulb experiments, that Colonel Sanders with his recipe and 1000 refusals are all examples of success, dedication and faith. And here comes the most interesting question: where is the line between stubbornness and stupidity? When you need to drop everything and move on, and when to bite the bullet and continue? Let's look at our example of our project .
There are those rare cases where growth is immediately visible and it does not require any tremendous effort. About 6-7 years ago I had one service for Vkontakte users. I started it and a week later went on vacation. Some, as it is now fashionable to say, Growth hacks did not apply - a bit of context and SEO. But every month the traffic doubled and the project grew by leaps and bounds. It was just luck.
Unfortunately, such cases are more like exceptions to the rules. Usually, everything is much more complicated and slower. Studying the stories of successful Western startups, one can see how they somehow managed to make ends meet for 1-2 years and only then did they shoot. Below is an example of the growth of Airbnb. It can be seen that it took quite a long time to adapt the product, find growth points, etc.:
Link to the full image
In our project for the last month there were 265 registrations. Is it a lot or a little? Here the situation with “flooded so flooded” is not exactly observed, but demand is clearly visible. I compared these indicators with the statistics of another project that was launched in 2010 and they are almost 3 times higher. If we consider that the team spent 0 rubles on promotion (with the exception of 6000 rubles for the context for the idea test ) - this is normal. For example, last week we received about 60 registrations, while there was no mailing or publications.
For comparison, we spent about 100,000 rubles and 3 months of a full time marketer’s work on promoting another e-commerce service. The results were comparable in the number of registrations. For myself, I concluded that it’s too early to draw conclusions =) There is interest and demand, how to massively learn how to convert it into customers is the task of another stage of the company's development.
Communicating with the guys still noticed a significant difference in the speed of testing hypotheses and growth in b2c and b2b start-ups. Having received these first two hundred registrations and several active users there were doubts in the numbers, as the guys were counting on much larger numbers. But here it is important to understand what to compare with. If you used to work with b2c, where traffic volumes are orders of magnitude higher and the speed of making a purchase / action decision is much shorter, then the results will disappoint.
For b2c services, the scheme works: I bought traffic for 1000 rubles, I poured on the product, got sales / contacts. If everything is OK - poured another 100,000 rubles. and increased turnover. For b2b software everything is different. It takes trust, it takes time to test and make a decision. Finally, sufficient maturity of the product and functionality are required. And the traffic volumes are completely different.
Look at the development of other popular SaaS services (below is statistics from wordstat.yandex.ru, which to some extent reflects the growth of popularity):
Bitrix24
Callbackhunter
AmoCRM
There is no stick or explosive growth. There is a planned gradual growth, daily work and development.
Once upon a time I was engaged in promoting my own projects and their monetization on contextual advertising. For a whole year I developed a portal dedicated to antivirus programs: I wrote content, posted links, searched for and published news. It took the whole year for the site to take up a good position in the search engines and gain enough traffic to be placed on the Yandex Advertising Network. At the time of sale, he brought about 40,000 rubles per month with an average salary in those early times in Bryansk about 12,000 - 15,000 rubles per month.
If there is no entrepreneurial experience and knowledge of the subject area, then it may take 3 years to understand the real situation, to get bumps and to realize the mistakes. So in my current project, I only 3-3.5 years later really figured out what was happening. More experienced comrades may require 6 months.
For Timdesk, even before launch, we prepared a calendar plan and a financial model, according to which we go to the goal of 1,000,000 rubles in small steps:
Its essence is not to make high expectations and to control the process, to check the planned indicators and draw conclusions. This helps to look at the situation soberly (we grow faster, according to plan or are lagging behind) and prevent a situation with a dead horse.
More than 300 users and 265 companies, less than two dozen active accounts and many requests for functionality. Talk about success or failure is too early. We are going exactly according to the schedule, and we will check the expectations by numbers in the next couple of months. Therefore, unequivocally the financing and development of the project continues and the pace increases.
I do not believe in quick success and easy money. Business is always a marathon. But if you look at your life philosophically, then the entrepreneur has a maximum of 5-7 chances to try to make his dream come true. And if you spend your time on “dead” horses, you can simply not have time to do something really worthwhile.
')
Do you know the story of the dead horse? Its meaning is that if your horse is dead, then it makes no sense to try to spur it (tight deadlines and KPI), give more oats (money) or carry on yourself. It is necessary to bury her with dignity and transfer to a new one. But if an entrepreneur is stubborn and does not give up (and there are most of them), then it is easy for years to reanimate a patient who is already one.
On the other hand, without patience, perseverance and perseverance, not a single business was built. That Thomas Edison with his 10,000 light bulb experiments, that Colonel Sanders with his recipe and 1000 refusals are all examples of success, dedication and faith. And here comes the most interesting question: where is the line between stubbornness and stupidity? When you need to drop everything and move on, and when to bite the bullet and continue? Let's look at our example of our project .
1. If rushing, it is understandable immediately
There are those rare cases where growth is immediately visible and it does not require any tremendous effort. About 6-7 years ago I had one service for Vkontakte users. I started it and a week later went on vacation. Some, as it is now fashionable to say, Growth hacks did not apply - a bit of context and SEO. But every month the traffic doubled and the project grew by leaps and bounds. It was just luck.
Unfortunately, such cases are more like exceptions to the rules. Usually, everything is much more complicated and slower. Studying the stories of successful Western startups, one can see how they somehow managed to make ends meet for 1-2 years and only then did they shoot. Below is an example of the growth of Airbnb. It can be seen that it took quite a long time to adapt the product, find growth points, etc.:
Link to the full image
In our project for the last month there were 265 registrations. Is it a lot or a little? Here the situation with “flooded so flooded” is not exactly observed, but demand is clearly visible. I compared these indicators with the statistics of another project that was launched in 2010 and they are almost 3 times higher. If we consider that the team spent 0 rubles on promotion (with the exception of 6000 rubles for the context for the idea test ) - this is normal. For example, last week we received about 60 registrations, while there was no mailing or publications.
For comparison, we spent about 100,000 rubles and 3 months of a full time marketer’s work on promoting another e-commerce service. The results were comparable in the number of registrations. For myself, I concluded that it’s too early to draw conclusions =) There is interest and demand, how to massively learn how to convert it into customers is the task of another stage of the company's development.
2. Difference between b2c and b2b
Communicating with the guys still noticed a significant difference in the speed of testing hypotheses and growth in b2c and b2b start-ups. Having received these first two hundred registrations and several active users there were doubts in the numbers, as the guys were counting on much larger numbers. But here it is important to understand what to compare with. If you used to work with b2c, where traffic volumes are orders of magnitude higher and the speed of making a purchase / action decision is much shorter, then the results will disappoint.
For b2c services, the scheme works: I bought traffic for 1000 rubles, I poured on the product, got sales / contacts. If everything is OK - poured another 100,000 rubles. and increased turnover. For b2b software everything is different. It takes trust, it takes time to test and make a decision. Finally, sufficient maturity of the product and functionality are required. And the traffic volumes are completely different.
Look at the development of other popular SaaS services (below is statistics from wordstat.yandex.ru, which to some extent reflects the growth of popularity):
Bitrix24
Callbackhunter
AmoCRM
There is no stick or explosive growth. There is a planned gradual growth, daily work and development.
3. Sometimes it just takes time.
"Even 9 pregnant women will not be able to have a baby in 1 month" ©
Once upon a time I was engaged in promoting my own projects and their monetization on contextual advertising. For a whole year I developed a portal dedicated to antivirus programs: I wrote content, posted links, searched for and published news. It took the whole year for the site to take up a good position in the search engines and gain enough traffic to be placed on the Yandex Advertising Network. At the time of sale, he brought about 40,000 rubles per month with an average salary in those early times in Bryansk about 12,000 - 15,000 rubles per month.
If there is no entrepreneurial experience and knowledge of the subject area, then it may take 3 years to understand the real situation, to get bumps and to realize the mistakes. So in my current project, I only 3-3.5 years later really figured out what was happening. More experienced comrades may require 6 months.
For Timdesk, even before launch, we prepared a calendar plan and a financial model, according to which we go to the goal of 1,000,000 rubles in small steps:
- Develop the first version and launch an open beta - until March 31, 2015.
- Get Product / Market fit - until April 30, 2015.
- Start sales and get the first paid customers - until May 31, 2015.
- Optimize the funnel / tariffs / product for the growth of MRR and reduce Churn - until July 31, 2015.
- We test various marketing channels and scale sales - until November 30, 2015.
Its essence is not to make high expectations and to control the process, to check the planned indicators and draw conclusions. This helps to look at the situation soberly (we grow faster, according to plan or are lagging behind) and prevent a situation with a dead horse.
What do we have for today in the project?
More than 300 users and 265 companies, less than two dozen active accounts and many requests for functionality. Talk about success or failure is too early. We are going exactly according to the schedule, and we will check the expectations by numbers in the next couple of months. Therefore, unequivocally the financing and development of the project continues and the pace increases.
I do not believe in quick success and easy money. Business is always a marathon. But if you look at your life philosophically, then the entrepreneur has a maximum of 5-7 chances to try to make his dream come true. And if you spend your time on “dead” horses, you can simply not have time to do something really worthwhile.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/289280/
All Articles