Founder's advice. Oleg Balbekov, director of Evrone and founder of Vexor.io

On the "Megamind" once again "Founder's Tips" .

The conversation with Oleg Balbekov, the general director of Evrone and the co-founder of the Vexor.io service , turned out to be interesting and lengthy. Partly because Oleg and his team have really extensive and deep experience in the development of products and projects in the network, partly because we have already intersected in the framework of various conferences held in Moscow and not only.

Any custom development company “dreams” one day to start making its own products. We have everything quite thematically, that is, we do projects using the basic technology (for us, this is “Ruby” and “Ruby On Rails”), we hold a conference dedicated to this technology (“RailsClub”), and we make products for programmers, which we “suffered”.

At a certain point, we simply realized that we have a huge amount of internal projects that help us in software development, some of which are gradually starting to “bud off” and form into full-fledged products. We have several such products: the first attempt at writing was within the framework of the projects “Thinkwith.me” (drawing system of tickets for task managers) and Pulse.guru (monitoring system of progress in development), after we launched three projects in parallel: Vexor .io, on which we now spend a lot of time and effort, giving him the maximum possible attention, track2win.ru (service gamification development processes), and another product that we are about to release to the market: Teatro.io (cloud test server for developers).

This is our concept: we create software, we make products that help us in creating this software, and we support conferences that help us to “pump” and develop not only our own development, but also the development community as a whole

Vexor.io started out as an open source project, and it became a product and a commercial product in the first place when it was transformed into a SaaS solution. Any of them requires investment of time and effort, that is, payment of those resources that were spent on its creation. And since this is a Continuous Integration service, it cannot become free, since every test loads our servers, which cost money.
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Vexor.io is good in the first place because it does not limit the user by the allocated resources and is able to give them quickly and in the required amount with payment per minute.

Indeed, the intensity of development varies from project to project. There are projects with a huge number of tests, there are projects with a small number of tests. There are projects with a huge number of tests and which need a lot of resources for testing, but these projects are no longer being actively developed, and these resources are needed only 2 times a month, when bugfixes are added to the project.

Imagine that every Friday evening, about 3 hours before the end of the working day, a huge stream of testing begins. Everyone wants to lay out their features and go to rest.

Vexor was just created for such tasks, when you need to allocate resources for testing right now, a lot and exactly 10 minutes.

And, on the other hand, you do not test at night and on Sunday (for obvious reasons) and you do not have to pay for unused capacity.

Startups are good and interesting, but at this stage we are not abandoning customized development, since this is primarily clear and predictable money. Own products, especially at the start, are unpredictable. And you have to live ...

In Evrone, in 2012–2013, it “happened” that an average of a “startup” was released from under our fingers once every 3 months. The guys just made products because they liked it. At the weekend, in fact, for fun. It is cool to take and “gash” in a quick SAAS-product, which even turns out to be useful within the company. Such products we have accumulated a good ten for the entire existence of Evrone.

At some point I stopped it. First of all, because it is a waste of time, nerves and resources. For a long time, I was skeptical or humorous about all lean-startup ideologies, testing ideas, validating them, prototyping a product, validating the market, pre-testing business concepts, and so on. We did not fully understand and did and did products in the first place because we can. Why check out ideas? “This is probably necessary for those who cannot write code,” we thought. Thus, start-ups with a smoothie in coworkings, who only know what to write prezentashki in Keynote.

At some point we grew up and realized that the more we can not do so and we will not. We really started to test products before we create them. Stop experimenting for yourself, you need to experiment in the market. With an understanding of the idea, its validation, then prototyping, checking conversions, trying first sales, and so on. And indeed, in the modern market without all this it is simply impossible to make a successful product. Waste of money for coding for pleasure - stopped.

By the way, after visiting the IIDF, we saw a huge number of people with absolutely similar problems. People make a product, but they have no understanding of the domestic economy, which should “converge”, they have no understanding of the consumer and why he wants to pay money for it, etc. Moreover, all the guys are talented, with straight arms and good programming skills. This is a good experience, as a result of which you will never again motivate yourself by just “it's fun.”

All these years there has been much controversy: what is better? PHP or Ruby, languages ​​/ platforms / solutions and so on. Now the market has changed and everyone understands that it is better “that” that “better” fits this particular task and allows it to be fulfilled.

I, for example, can no longer be persuaded and forced to take a different view on the fact that Ruby On Rails is an ideal tool for creating web-oriented projects, and first of all MVP, where it is sometimes necessary to change development directions without serious consequences, etc.

At the same time, I agree that Ruby is not good for everything. Functional programming languages ​​are now even more interested in us and me personally, which is why we are organizing a new conference fpconf.ru

Such practical functional languages ​​as Erlang, Scala, Clojure are well known and widely used. The once academic Haskell is rapidly gaining popularity. Critical components of high-loaded systems are written in these languages, everything that should work reliably, in parallel and quickly. One word - effectively.

And the community now understands that one programming language will not be full. That is, you will be full, but the task is not solved. There is a suitable solution for each individual task. Therefore, FPconf today collects and attracts even more attention, as the audience and its professionalism grows.

In my opinion, if you are a company that deals with a product and earns money using some kind of technology, such as Ruby On Rails, then you must give back a portion of your income and energy to the development of this technology and community.

These are the “basics” with which we live in Evrone - so we make conferences, invest in OpenSource projects, help thematic resources and podcasts. By the way, we are very grateful to companies that think in a similar way. During the existence of RailsClub, we have a lot of regular sponsors and partners who help us in organizing the event. It's nice to know that in Russia there are companies that care about the development of the community.

The current platform, CloudPayments.ru , with which we work for financial transactions, had to change our own infrastructure and work model so that we could work together (for example, for a recurrent charge-free debit of credit cards)

It seemed to make an international startup from Russia - suicide. But now we with Vexor do not feel any problems that prevent us from developing. There are not even any “reputation risks” associated with our country of origin. A tool is a tool, and if the client is satisfied with the level of quality and service, then he will be calm and not worry. Yes, we do not shout that we are from Moscow, which is in Russia, but we also do not hide this fact.

Whenever I communicate with friends on professional topics, they turn at their heads and say: “Why should you build a business in Russia, open an offshore and do not worry,” “Go down to Europe, you have nothing to do here,” “You have no place in this country. "

In fact, I do not have any principled position, they say, I want only in Russia, not at all. We are not at all afraid of “getting on the tractor” and dumping. At the moment, building a business in Russia is first and foremost our curiosity in finding an answer to the question: “Is it possible to make a successful international company here, with us, or not?”. And faced with a huge number of rather “strange” problems, such as Russian accountants who refuse to work with invoices, and continuing with Russian payment systems that do not work with sites in English, we understand that this is not so easy.

In general, I think that it will take a maximum of a month for me to “become a European”, register some offshore and stop having problems with the Russian reality. But now we are really just curious, and we took ourselves a couple of months to figure out and understand in detail whether it is possible to build an international IT business "in this country" or it's time to blame.

During acceleration in IIDF, we mainly tested various techniques and approaches to the development of our service, various hypotheses. Now, of course, we already understand what we want and are actively moving towards our own goals.

When you have a business in which you earn well and are in a comfort zone, but you also have projects that concern you, but are in a state of uncertain prospects - you can spend 3 months in full concentration on this idea (or product ) and later it is time to understand whether it “takes off” or not. FRIA helps to do it first of all - to focus on the product.

IIDF gave us knowledge, investment and “acceleration”. Vexor.io and I really closed the white spots in our own knowledge, and looked at everything differently.

One of the coolest tools of DIDF is “public censure”, when once a week I had to report my own success to my colleagues. Which, unlike the general public, it is difficult to "deceive" or "mislead", even with such a goal. Anyway, when you talk about what you have been doing for the whole week, you don’t want to look like an idiot who has been banging. And the numbers do not lie at all. Therefore, the option to get into the IIDF and loaf - no.

The programmer should not be a manager and should not be an analyst. But it should not be completely closed and should be able to talk with colleagues or a client.

During my work in the industry, I realized that there are two types of “rubists”, but perhaps this applies to all developers as a whole. They are either fixated on themselves and their own inner world, or not. There are even entire companies and teams of such, looped, developers. At the same time, people do not go out, do not read, do not open-source, and do not go to conferences at all. There have been several episodes in my life when, for example, an employee comes to you, who has stayed in one position in a bank, let’s say, years 5. We’ll specify a Ruby developer. And he is offended at you for not taking him to work: “I have 5 years of experience!” He says. But it turns out that the man of the rules of the form was picking RedMine, did not hear about three new versions of the language, etc. This is very sad and very bad. It is necessary to look around, it is necessary to participate in OpenSource - this teaches you to write the “right” code.

Between “hiring long” and “firing quickly,” I choose something in between. In fact, for myself, I have long determined the period that I need in order to establish that an unsuitable person is 1 year. This period results from practice and, perhaps, this is a long time for such a small structure as ours, but since we are not hiring quickly, a year is the maximum term. For a year, you can find out anything, on how lazy a person is, how he is in communication, and so on. Thank God, we have the opportunity to hire only adequate people, since we know approximately in advance who and what it is. Primarily thanks to our conferences and community knowledge.

At interviews, I always ask: "How do you know that you are writing code correctly?". Having spent 5 years in a bank, not participating in open source projects, not attending conferences and not communicating with colleagues - you will not be able to answer this question

A person who reads a lot, communicates a lot, participates in opensource development and looks around, one day he will be able to create a product that will blow up the world.

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