Sometimes it seems that today every self-respecting hipster-programmer or humanities ’inventor should have his own startup. Preferably several. Otherwise, the lads will not understand. Without the co-founder, co-executive, co-creator, you are nobody. It is better not to have an apartment than not to have a startup. A bum who does not have his own corner, but he has his own business - everyone will understand and forgive. More and enroll in students. But to be, like 5-10 years ago, it is already impossible - you are known as a conservative, who is content with little. Boy, where are your dreams? Where are your abbreviations CTO and CEO?

The word “start-up”, which harmoniously became on a par with such pearls as “smoothie”, “solution”, “cupcake” and “co-working”, however, acquired the same unclear and fuzzy form as “God” and “ Love ”- everyone puts something into this word. And when two ignorant people meet and start discussing start-ups, their delusion only multiplies. So let's start with the definition that the wiki gives:

Startup (from the English. Start-up run) - a company with a short history of operating activities. As a rule, such companies have been established recently and are in the stage of development or research of promising markets.

This definition is worth printing in a thicker pack and always carry with you. When the next homegrown CTO or CEO says the word “startup” in the next cafe or coworking, you can safely come up to him and brush off this pack on the brazen red beard. Because a startup is first of all a company. Even if it is unprofitable.

In our country, this word is used wherever possible. About and without. Like a nervous tic.
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A question that doesn’t give rest to many: why is every second hipster in Kiev a start-up, but he lives with his parents and feeds on shawarma? The definition of the word “startup” from the English-language wiki will help shed light on this riddle:

A startup company or a startup is a business

Go ahead:

A business that is involved in the organization of goods, services, or both to consumers

That is, a startup is a business that must make a profit, otherwise why is it needed at all? Considering the fact that the total majority of Ukrainian startups have a very vague idea of ​​profit - “well, we will make money on advertising” and “we will try to sell as soon as possible” - it is not surprising that few of them even go to zero.

A startup that is not built around profitability is the same oxymoron as a non-profit business. So, maybe you should call a spade a spade?
- Oh, you have a startup?
- No, the volunteer project.
- Startup!
- No, I'm just indulging.

Above, I mentioned the sale of a startup. For more than 10 years, as many Ukrainian start-ups have created products and services for the sole purpose - to have time to sell. Desirable at the peak. Otherwise, you may not have time and the flimsy construction on crutches will fall apart right in the hands of the buyer.

I once had a friend who was making his startup when it was not yet mainstream in Ukraine. Back in 2005, of course, he did not think about the business itself or about profit. Not. The main thing was to "sound" and quickly sell. It is desirable for a million.

Useless startups

If you want to put the Ukrainian start-up in a dead end, ask him to name three world-famous Ukrainian startups .

Most likely, it will be named Petcube , which recently attracted $ 1.1 million investment. This seems to be all. But a friend suggests that he uses something like a useful Presentain that helps create interactive presentations (but you haven't heard anything about him, have you?). Another project with an inadequate business model: the application can not be bought, you can only subscribe to a certain number of presentations, slide shows and polls.

A couple of pieces scraped. But two is not enough. We dive!
Review of the year-old AIN "10 most promising Ukrainian startups" :

1. PetCube - Pet Warden Robot
2. CheckiO - game for programmers
3. Coppertino Player for Mac OS
4. Hashtago - a platform for working with hashtags
5. Pics.io - Google Docs for photos
6. EnableTalk - smart gloves that let you talk
7. iBlazr - flash for smartphones
8. Jeapie Mobile Marketing Solution
9. Pure - mobile dating app
10. uGift - certificate sales service

A cursory review of this list suggests that start-ups in Ukraine are visible to everyone, but in fact the exhaust is zero.

As far as these projects can be called innovative?

Not without a stretch, perhaps Petcube, which in 2014 won the Europas start-up competition, EnableTalk smart gloves and a flash for iBlazr smartphones, can be called such. Everything else is either trash (like, for example, a game for programmers or hashtags), or approximate versions of what has already happened - social networks and file storage.

We often call projects innovative, although they are not. Take the same "Restaurant of the Future" by Dmitry Kostik, which for some reason is called a "revolutionary project." Where is the revolution, if interactive tables exist around the world for more than five years? For example, in London .

But back to our sheep.

Why goat bayan?

PetCube is, in fact, another useless gadget. What if a person appreciates the private life of a cat more than his own peace of mind? Is it really necessary laser pointer with a camera, if in the evening you still see your pet? And if you leave for a few days or weeks, you still give it to your friend. PetCube tray will not take out and Whiskas will not unpack. In fact, this is another expensive swell ($ 199), which is useful unless the blonde, who does not need to work, but who wants, sitting on a manicure, to play with your cat in a laser. Is it worth saying that such lispies will only spoil him more?

iBlazr - why does the phone need a separate flash? Self-respecting photographers are shooting on a professional photo equipment, where everything is there. At the very least, there is a flash in the same phone. But let's say I do not understand something and this gadget to be. How often do we use flash? When do we go to the club? “Honey, please take iBlazr so that the club photos will be brighter.” Yes, an important thing.

EnableTalk is probably the only attention worthy of a start-up, because it (surprise!) Is trying to solve a real, and not contrived, problem “there is no one to play with the cat”, “without flash, my photos on Instagram are not the same”. No wonder he won first place at the Microsoft Imagine Cup. That's just one problem - it was already in 2012, but there is no funding. For some reason, no one wants to invest in the development of gloves that could be useful to people with disabilities.

Information trash

There is such a category of startups, which you would not call anything other than spam. A striking example is TshirtAbout.Me , a service that allows you to order a T-shirt with a picture of your Facebook profile. We will not even talk about the idea of ​​a T-shirt that “allows you to instantly present yourself to your interlocutor,” completely sucked from the finger. It's obvious. Another thing is interesting: the startup planned to sell 10 thousand T-shirts in the first 6 months. And for 2 years - 1 million T-shirts on the global market. That is, even if we imagine that there would be at least 1 $ of profit from one T-shirt, the author of the idea expected at least 1 million dollars of income. And although for two years now the FB-stratich of a startup has not been updated, the hope of pushing it for at least 30 thousand dollars has remained.

TshirtAbout.Me planned to produce 1369 T-shirts a day, while the company is more impressive, but more modest - United Pixelworkers, talking about their know-how in T-shirt printing, considered printing and sending 1000 T-shirts a month a good achievement. Whereas TshirtAbout.Me for all the time of their existence sold no more than a thousand T-shirts. The difference is obvious.

These very successful guys, who, nevertheless, were closed after a few years, managed to share the bitter truth that “you’re not going to get rich selling t-shirts. This is a labor of love. ”

All these startups leave Internet junk behind them, which is stored on various websites and search engines in a cache, confusing those people who are looking for real startups, and not a parody of them.

Speaking of parodies, a rare example of an honest starter:

Thousands of them!

According to Yevgeny Sysoyev, managing partner of AVentures Capital, at the moment there are about 2,000 Ukrainian startups. The same figure confirms the head of the supervisory board of the Association of International Investors (UVCA) Andrei Kolodyuk.

On Y Combinator every tenth startup becomes successful. Of the 10,000 applicants, about 500 are in competition, and about 50 projects are already firing. Thousands of startups have already passed through our Microsoft BizSpark. And where is it all? At least one percent, at least someone, at least statistically there should have been something to shoot. Zero. One gets the impression that most startups are being sawn to light up, to add a line in Linkedin, to flatter vanity, but no more.

Honey spoon

There are more or less useful startups that solve real problems. For example Preply , which allows you to search for tutors. But so far he doesn’t close as loudly as Duolingo or Chinesepod , which was written in CNN, NBC, The Economist, NY Times, Financial Times, The Guardian. And it is unlikely to happen.

Or LUN - real estate search service. But, again, there is nothing fundamentally new and innovative in it. There are dozens of such sites for real estate search. On the international market, too, can not speak.

Perhaps Tinkov was right when he determined the main problem: “Startupers drink smoothies, poke into tablets and do not think about profits . ”

Thousands of unknown Ukrainian startups bend a couple of months after launch. On the one hand, it is certainly better than nothing. On the other hand, what is the meaning of this endless attack on a rake? When the success of a startup is not determined by its profitability or real benefits, but by the original name, stylish design and “unusual” presentation.

The reasons for the failure of Ukrainian startups

1) 70 years of a scoop, with all its "charms" like genocides, famines and dispossession of the hard-working, intelligent, enterprising population. Slave mentality, fear, the habit of working carelessly - all this does not pass without a trace.

2) Full life and unwillingness to risk. A developer who receives 10 times more than a mere mortal is not interested in launching a profitable startup. What for? 1-2k greens will not make the weather. That is, there is no incentive. Now, if, as it happens in developed countries like the UK, a programmer received as much as a policeman (in our 3k hryvnia), then the conversation would have been different. Then there would be an incentive. To date, the main motive of the Ukrainian start-up is vanity and / or interest. When profit is in second place, a person has no need to take risks.

3) Professional features. Developers are mostly closed lonely silencers who prefer to while away the evening at the computer. While entrepreneurship requires advanced communication skills with non-programmers, business acumen, the ability to spin. Speaking of grip, she was among both the talented programmer Bill Gates and the non-programmer Steve Jobs. And Larry Ellison, like Zuckerberg, although he was not a programming giant, but he had something that our startups lacked. Entrepreneurial vein?

4) Pseudo status. When a startup is created not to solve real problems, but in order for the next startup to the left of the last name, the prefix CEO, CTO or variations “co-” will appear. They say that the co-buttons can even be given for a birthday. “Dear Zina! On this momentous day, I pledge you the title of the co-founder of my project! ”

One gets the impression that most Ukrainian startups are sharpened into three types of activities:

Clone

My foreign teacher, a former KGB officer, loved to say "Whoever lives by the labor of others, he lives by the mind of others." Looking at the hundreds of clones of Western startups, I begin to understand the meaning of this phrase. But “living” is strongly said, because even a completely inclined start-up shoots a gun like a gun hanging on a wall once a year. We laughed together at the Chinese, who copy everything from clothes to telephones, but for some reason we don’t laugh at domestic clones of groups and bulletin boards. How are we better than the Chinese?

Quickly push up

Tinkov said this well: “They routed investors, pissed off the money, raised a new round - and so on to infinity . ” Imagine a mother who, immediately after the nursery, is trying to fuse her child into another family. What do we think about her? And yet, almost every Ukrainian start-up is trying to fuse him even before the beta launch of his project. But if the project is so beautiful and profitable, why not keep it for yourself? Smacks of razvodnjakom in the style of a rich man, who rose, writing a book "How to get rich." Created a profitable startup to sell it; gave birth to a child to give it away.

So, until we change the mentality and start looking at a startup as a business that solves real problems, and not as fun for pumping CSW, our country will be famous only for outsourcing. Do we need the glory of India?

Knock off

Let's say our investors found noname-startups. Once they wrote about their project, after which the project was sent to someone. Everything. About these people nothing more is heard. This is a feature of Ukrainian startups. In the west, otherwise. Take the same Dropbox - its creator Drew Houston and after five years continues to work on it. Or take, for example, Evan Williams, who stood at the origins of Twitter. When in 2010 he decided to leave his post as CEO, he said that he was staying with the company in order to “be completely focused on the production strategy.” That is, even knocked down, he stayed. Because they do not abandon their favorite children.

If the parent abandons his child, as was the case with Instagram creator Kevin Sistrom, then he pays for it by observing the fivefold growth of his project in a strange family. On the other hand, he at least profitably sold his brainchild of Facebook, which is not the case with our shortcomings.

How to get out of the situation

First, you should stop calling everything a startup. Secondly, if you really want to make a startup, you should learn entrepreneurship first. For example, sell a cat or put a tent on the market. Third, you should reflash in your head the definition of the word "startup". No, this is not a website written on my knees that magically brings a million. This is primarily a business whose task is to make a profit and scale, or at least bring benefits. Fourth, it's time to stop looking at peers with co-, CEO and CTO. If you really want some title, then there is always a CFO (Chief Fun Officer).

Perhaps after such a “flashing” our startups will start moving from smoothies to fruits, from tablets to computers and from form to content.