A startup alone: the story of a SourceTalk project from hackathon to release
Generally speaking, this post would be worth starting with the words "do not try to repeat it at home." But since I am satisfied with the end result, maybe this story will help someone who, like me, decided to create a startup alone.
2 years of life, $ 10k spent out of pocket, about a thousand man-hours. And the result that was worth all this: http://sourcetalk.net
This story began exactly two years ago at the hackathon HackDay in Nizhny Novgorod. I already had the idea at this point: a service for discussing source codes in real time, integrated with various IDEs and GitHubs, something like Campfire or HipChat for developers. A team of three people was able to be assembled fairly quickly, the hackathon was extremely productive (by the way, a special thank you to the organizers), and after two days we had a working prototype. In the same place, Evgenia Smorodnikova, a person in the Russian start-up community, was notorious for our project, and spent some time as his mentor (for which I am extremely grateful to her). However, the idyll did not last long, rather soon the original team collapsed, as often happens. I was left alone with an unfinished project in my hands and a great desire to finish the job.
')
What is first necessary to understand if you find yourself in a similar position: it will be much harder than you expect. It will take either a huge resource of free time, or more than a serious financial, or some intermediate option (my case). And most importantly: no one will push or push you. So the temptation to abandon everything will be huge, and you will have to constantly motivate yourself. Believe the word, it's all very hard.
It is absolutely impossible to calculate in advance the real costs: everything will take more time and money than you lay in your most pessimistic forecasts. If you are a programmer, you probably don’t need to explain it, every programmer already knows that. But if before that you worked only in a team, then you got used to the distribution of roles and responsibilities: the programmer tries to explain to the manager why he didn’t manage to implement this or that feature on time, the manager pulls his hair, scolds the programmer for dead dates and swears to the customer it’s not a very long time, the customer melancholically signs the account that has grown to indecency (well, or swears with the manager if the deadlines are broken more than he expected), investors are skeptical about the next schedule that he draws customer, and cautiously wondered when the same release.
Now imagine that in this picture you are a programmer, a manager, a customer, and an investor. In any broken period, in any bug that has passed in production, in any unrealized or crookedly implemented feature, in the absence of money or time to continue working - only you will be to blame for all this.
Basically, you can try (re) to put together a team and find an investor. However, I was already convinced of the unreliability of the team that works on enthusiasm, and did not want to attract investments for many reasons, which would be too long to be written here.
What is important to understand when you find yourself in this position: a finished, working project is never the result of just one type of activity (in our case, programming). It is always a huge number of interdependent tasks: design, copywriting, interaction with the media, finding customers, solving legal issues, etc. Moreover, the share of the “profile” activities in this process is no more than half.
Write out for yourself on a piece of paper a list of tasks that need to be solved in order to release a working product. Now mark those activities that you can, in principle, do yourself at an acceptable level. If you are a programmer, then it is clear that this will be programming. It is also possible server administration, blogging, customer search and something else on the little things. Now look at what is left: for example, design, development of user agreements, production of a promotional video. You have to spend money from your own pocket for these tasks, you have no other options. In my case, I did most of the development, blogging, copywriting for the site and solving various one-time tasks (for example, screencast recording, but - only video, the voice acting had to be ordered so as not to embarrass the English-speaking public with bad diction and accent). The outsourcing involved: design, layout, development of legal documents, partly development and the mentioned voice screencast.
Always minimize costs, especially recurring (for example, subscriptions to services, hosting, etc.). If you more or less estimate the cost of a one-time job, how much time you will have to pay for hosting before at least it pays off - you cannot know in advance. Therefore, if possible, repeat payments avoid at all: use free tariff plans where it is possible, look for cheaper alternatives to services without which you can not do, etc. For example, until now, the content of SourceTalk, the infrastructure of which managed to grow to 4 servers (in the near future we plan to connect 2 more) and 6 third-party services, costs me about 30 dollars something per year (not counting the payment of the closed repository on GitHub - I had a paid subscription to it before). It certainly has a downside - in the form of additional inconvenience in the work, and sometimes the quality of service for users. But the main thing is that it gives: confidence that the next bill for $ 100 for quality hosting will not come to you when you have every penny in your account. This means that the opportunity not to abandon the project only because you can no longer contain it: no matter how difficult the situation with money and time is right now, you will have the opportunity to return to the project later when the situation improves. Moreover, with this approach, as soon as you have the first paying customers, the project for you will be released on the operating profit immediately.
Periodically try to gather some team at least for a while. This is important psychologically, as teamwork stimulates you to take more active actions. All the most productive periods of working on a project for me are connected precisely with teamwork: first it was a hackathon, then I assembled several times at my own expense a team of freelancers, with whom I solved some current tasks, after which I dismissed it, mainly no money to continue.
Where is the story actually promised in the title? Do you know such a bearded anecdote about an essay about a cowboy, most of which is occupied by “tygydyn-tygdydyn-tygdydyn -...”? That's about the way it was. It began with the hackathon and ended with a release that happened two years later. And between them there was a solid “tygydyn-tygydyn”: work on weekends, holidays and vacations, gathering and dissolving teams, hands dropping from the amount of work to be done, ripped off imaginable and inconceivable deadlines and the belief that I do all this for good reason. Faith by the way at some point supported by the appearance of a competitor. If for 2013, when the project was just beginning, there was nothing like this on the market, then in 2014 SourceTalk had the first direct competitor: Gitter , which essentially solves the same problem, but a little differently. I took this moment only positively: competition is always good, and the presence of competitors shows that there is a market for such products.
I honestly intended to write a story here, but in the process I realized how boring and monotonous it would be. Therefore, in the end it turned out rather a set of tips for those who, like me, are going to create a startup alone. I hope he will help someone.
UPD : the description of functionality of SourceTalk at the time of release can be read in my article on Habré
2 years of life, $ 10k spent out of pocket, about a thousand man-hours. And the result that was worth all this: http://sourcetalk.netThis story began exactly two years ago at the hackathon HackDay in Nizhny Novgorod. I already had the idea at this point: a service for discussing source codes in real time, integrated with various IDEs and GitHubs, something like Campfire or HipChat for developers. A team of three people was able to be assembled fairly quickly, the hackathon was extremely productive (by the way, a special thank you to the organizers), and after two days we had a working prototype. In the same place, Evgenia Smorodnikova, a person in the Russian start-up community, was notorious for our project, and spent some time as his mentor (for which I am extremely grateful to her). However, the idyll did not last long, rather soon the original team collapsed, as often happens. I was left alone with an unfinished project in my hands and a great desire to finish the job.
')
Who is guilty
What is first necessary to understand if you find yourself in a similar position: it will be much harder than you expect. It will take either a huge resource of free time, or more than a serious financial, or some intermediate option (my case). And most importantly: no one will push or push you. So the temptation to abandon everything will be huge, and you will have to constantly motivate yourself. Believe the word, it's all very hard.
It is absolutely impossible to calculate in advance the real costs: everything will take more time and money than you lay in your most pessimistic forecasts. If you are a programmer, you probably don’t need to explain it, every programmer already knows that. But if before that you worked only in a team, then you got used to the distribution of roles and responsibilities: the programmer tries to explain to the manager why he didn’t manage to implement this or that feature on time, the manager pulls his hair, scolds the programmer for dead dates and swears to the customer it’s not a very long time, the customer melancholically signs the account that has grown to indecency (well, or swears with the manager if the deadlines are broken more than he expected), investors are skeptical about the next schedule that he draws customer, and cautiously wondered when the same release.
Now imagine that in this picture you are a programmer, a manager, a customer, and an investor. In any broken period, in any bug that has passed in production, in any unrealized or crookedly implemented feature, in the absence of money or time to continue working - only you will be to blame for all this.
What to do
Basically, you can try (re) to put together a team and find an investor. However, I was already convinced of the unreliability of the team that works on enthusiasm, and did not want to attract investments for many reasons, which would be too long to be written here.
What is important to understand when you find yourself in this position: a finished, working project is never the result of just one type of activity (in our case, programming). It is always a huge number of interdependent tasks: design, copywriting, interaction with the media, finding customers, solving legal issues, etc. Moreover, the share of the “profile” activities in this process is no more than half.
Write out for yourself on a piece of paper a list of tasks that need to be solved in order to release a working product. Now mark those activities that you can, in principle, do yourself at an acceptable level. If you are a programmer, then it is clear that this will be programming. It is also possible server administration, blogging, customer search and something else on the little things. Now look at what is left: for example, design, development of user agreements, production of a promotional video. You have to spend money from your own pocket for these tasks, you have no other options. In my case, I did most of the development, blogging, copywriting for the site and solving various one-time tasks (for example, screencast recording, but - only video, the voice acting had to be ordered so as not to embarrass the English-speaking public with bad diction and accent). The outsourcing involved: design, layout, development of legal documents, partly development and the mentioned voice screencast.
Always minimize costs, especially recurring (for example, subscriptions to services, hosting, etc.). If you more or less estimate the cost of a one-time job, how much time you will have to pay for hosting before at least it pays off - you cannot know in advance. Therefore, if possible, repeat payments avoid at all: use free tariff plans where it is possible, look for cheaper alternatives to services without which you can not do, etc. For example, until now, the content of SourceTalk, the infrastructure of which managed to grow to 4 servers (in the near future we plan to connect 2 more) and 6 third-party services, costs me about 30 dollars something per year (not counting the payment of the closed repository on GitHub - I had a paid subscription to it before). It certainly has a downside - in the form of additional inconvenience in the work, and sometimes the quality of service for users. But the main thing is that it gives: confidence that the next bill for $ 100 for quality hosting will not come to you when you have every penny in your account. This means that the opportunity not to abandon the project only because you can no longer contain it: no matter how difficult the situation with money and time is right now, you will have the opportunity to return to the project later when the situation improves. Moreover, with this approach, as soon as you have the first paying customers, the project for you will be released on the operating profit immediately.
Periodically try to gather some team at least for a while. This is important psychologically, as teamwork stimulates you to take more active actions. All the most productive periods of working on a project for me are connected precisely with teamwork: first it was a hackathon, then I assembled several times at my own expense a team of freelancers, with whom I solved some current tasks, after which I dismissed it, mainly no money to continue.
How it was
Where is the story actually promised in the title? Do you know such a bearded anecdote about an essay about a cowboy, most of which is occupied by “tygydyn-tygdydyn-tygdydyn -...”? That's about the way it was. It began with the hackathon and ended with a release that happened two years later. And between them there was a solid “tygydyn-tygydyn”: work on weekends, holidays and vacations, gathering and dissolving teams, hands dropping from the amount of work to be done, ripped off imaginable and inconceivable deadlines and the belief that I do all this for good reason. Faith by the way at some point supported by the appearance of a competitor. If for 2013, when the project was just beginning, there was nothing like this on the market, then in 2014 SourceTalk had the first direct competitor: Gitter , which essentially solves the same problem, but a little differently. I took this moment only positively: competition is always good, and the presence of competitors shows that there is a market for such products.
I honestly intended to write a story here, but in the process I realized how boring and monotonous it would be. Therefore, in the end it turned out rather a set of tips for those who, like me, are going to create a startup alone. I hope he will help someone.
UPD : the description of functionality of SourceTalk at the time of release can be read in my article on Habré
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290194/
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