How I put together a team for my startup
Hello! My name is Valeria Makarova, I am the head of the Rocket Callback . Today I would like to share my experience on how I assembled a team for my project, and at the same time present you our small and simple fraternity.
I myself come from Buryatia, the glorious city of Ulan-Ude. I have already described how things are going with IT, briefly recall that, despite certain difficulties, IT is developing in Buryatia and the number of specialists or local companies is growing every year. As the number of online stores and people who prefer to buy there, and not on the market. In general, I really love my land, so I can be a bit biased.
Turning to the point. By education I am a philologist, graduated from the graduate school of the Buryat State Faculty. She never noticed her interest in IT until 2012, when all her acquaintances began to saw their own start-ups around. Plus, a little later, I got a job at HR in one IT company, which also affected my further fate.
')
In 2014, I worked in one of the Buryat companies in the field of knitwear. At that time, callback services began to appear, and I, as a marketer (with HR was finished), also recommended management take a closer look at this idea. Our programmer Igor said that the topic is cool, the service is cool, there are prospects, only now you can make everything better and more convenient, plus then with time add various chips.
The idea to cut down something of their own has long been entrenched in my mind. At first I thought about an application for ordering a car wash, then about a portal for assessing the activities of State Duma deputies. Then I got an idea with a callback-service. By the way, Igor, he is now our team leader:
So I decided to get down to business. Attracted another of our friend, Mitya. By the way, Mitya and Igor are also part-time leaders of the digital workshop Appatbox . Here Mitya, he is now engaged in the overall development of the product:
So two stern bearded men and I, a girl who had just defended her Ph.D. degree, created a widget, which later became the Rocket Callback.
Choosing Rocket, we wanted to show that we connect the manager and the client as fast as the rocket flies. Well, plus the themes of space are always in trend, evoking associations with something advanced, new and unexplored.
At the end of the summer, we attracted 300,000 rubles of investments for a 10% stake in the project. All from the same friend associated with knitwear. It was here that the question arose of what to do and where to look for employees, since they themselves could no longer cope.
First of all, we needed a person who was well versed in VoIP, familiar with SRTP and LCR, MGCP and H.323. I searched for a long time on HeadHantera, until we finally found Cyril. Here it is, by the way:
Then we needed a designer who is on “you” with Photoshop and Illustrator, knows how to work with both raster and vector, ready to try himself in Flash. For this, I took Kate - the soul and heart of our team:
After the next step was the need to find a person who will write texts. First of all, the script for the video, the content for the site, then blogging and promoting us in every possible way. So we found Timurmalika:
Here is Roman, he is responsible for marketing and sales, search and communication with customers. Without it, our Rocket would simply not be sold, as we are managers, journalists, geeks, but never marketers and in general we do not know how to sell:
We set our sights on the USA at the very beginning, when there was still no widget. Anna, the man fully responsible for entering Rocket into the international arena:
At various stages there were a few more people with us, but we had to part with them by mutual consent. Despite this, we are grateful for their contribution to the development of the project. Only part of the team is represented here. Here is Alexey, our investor and ideological mastermind of Rocket:
At the interviews, I was so tempted to ask about the manhole covers from the sewers, but Mitya and Igor were upsetting me. Seriously, the situations were funny, when a severe programmer comes to an interview, sees Mitya and Igor, starts communicating with them, and I mainly ask questions. Probably we were lucky, and we were able, through the same Head Hunter, to find everyone we needed.
I think the times when there were few girls in IT are gradually passing away. We have 3 girls in our team, and we feel quite comfortable in the company of cheerful bearded men. True, more or less techie from this small company is just me, maybe that's the point. We also had 2 girls, the first of which specialized in Bitrix, and the second helped Igor with Machine Learning and algorithms on R, today they both went elsewhere.
At the very beginning of work, we took a few salespeople for cold calls. It didn’t lead to anything good - there were sales, but not enough to continue using this channel - now it’s not there.
In December, we attracted another 4,000,000 rubles, and then the sales went. Anyway, we now have about 600 clients. They threw all their forces on the English version - Katya has already drawn layouts, Anna has prepared content in English, Igor has almost finished the site, Kirill has studied VoIP in the USA, Roman is talking to potential American clients, Mitya is planning to enter the market, Timurmalik is preparing information channels for the US Media, I do general management, well, and advertising. So far everything is going well, we hope that in the future it will be only better.
Thank you for reading us!
Subscribe to our blog .
I myself come from Buryatia, the glorious city of Ulan-Ude. I have already described how things are going with IT, briefly recall that, despite certain difficulties, IT is developing in Buryatia and the number of specialists or local companies is growing every year. As the number of online stores and people who prefer to buy there, and not on the market. In general, I really love my land, so I can be a bit biased.
Turning to the point. By education I am a philologist, graduated from the graduate school of the Buryat State Faculty. She never noticed her interest in IT until 2012, when all her acquaintances began to saw their own start-ups around. Plus, a little later, I got a job at HR in one IT company, which also affected my further fate.
')
In 2014, I worked in one of the Buryat companies in the field of knitwear. At that time, callback services began to appear, and I, as a marketer (with HR was finished), also recommended management take a closer look at this idea. Our programmer Igor said that the topic is cool, the service is cool, there are prospects, only now you can make everything better and more convenient, plus then with time add various chips.
The idea to cut down something of their own has long been entrenched in my mind. At first I thought about an application for ordering a car wash, then about a portal for assessing the activities of State Duma deputies. Then I got an idea with a callback-service. By the way, Igor, he is now our team leader:
So I decided to get down to business. Attracted another of our friend, Mitya. By the way, Mitya and Igor are also part-time leaders of the digital workshop Appatbox . Here Mitya, he is now engaged in the overall development of the product:
So two stern bearded men and I, a girl who had just defended her Ph.D. degree, created a widget, which later became the Rocket Callback.
Choosing Rocket, we wanted to show that we connect the manager and the client as fast as the rocket flies. Well, plus the themes of space are always in trend, evoking associations with something advanced, new and unexplored.
At the end of the summer, we attracted 300,000 rubles of investments for a 10% stake in the project. All from the same friend associated with knitwear. It was here that the question arose of what to do and where to look for employees, since they themselves could no longer cope.
First of all, we needed a person who was well versed in VoIP, familiar with SRTP and LCR, MGCP and H.323. I searched for a long time on HeadHantera, until we finally found Cyril. Here it is, by the way:
Then we needed a designer who is on “you” with Photoshop and Illustrator, knows how to work with both raster and vector, ready to try himself in Flash. For this, I took Kate - the soul and heart of our team:
After the next step was the need to find a person who will write texts. First of all, the script for the video, the content for the site, then blogging and promoting us in every possible way. So we found Timurmalika:
Here is Roman, he is responsible for marketing and sales, search and communication with customers. Without it, our Rocket would simply not be sold, as we are managers, journalists, geeks, but never marketers and in general we do not know how to sell:
We set our sights on the USA at the very beginning, when there was still no widget. Anna, the man fully responsible for entering Rocket into the international arena:
At various stages there were a few more people with us, but we had to part with them by mutual consent. Despite this, we are grateful for their contribution to the development of the project. Only part of the team is represented here. Here is Alexey, our investor and ideological mastermind of Rocket:
At the interviews, I was so tempted to ask about the manhole covers from the sewers, but Mitya and Igor were upsetting me. Seriously, the situations were funny, when a severe programmer comes to an interview, sees Mitya and Igor, starts communicating with them, and I mainly ask questions. Probably we were lucky, and we were able, through the same Head Hunter, to find everyone we needed.
I think the times when there were few girls in IT are gradually passing away. We have 3 girls in our team, and we feel quite comfortable in the company of cheerful bearded men. True, more or less techie from this small company is just me, maybe that's the point. We also had 2 girls, the first of which specialized in Bitrix, and the second helped Igor with Machine Learning and algorithms on R, today they both went elsewhere.
At the very beginning of work, we took a few salespeople for cold calls. It didn’t lead to anything good - there were sales, but not enough to continue using this channel - now it’s not there.
In December, we attracted another 4,000,000 rubles, and then the sales went. Anyway, we now have about 600 clients. They threw all their forces on the English version - Katya has already drawn layouts, Anna has prepared content in English, Igor has almost finished the site, Kirill has studied VoIP in the USA, Roman is talking to potential American clients, Mitya is planning to enter the market, Timurmalik is preparing information channels for the US Media, I do general management, well, and advertising. So far everything is going well, we hope that in the future it will be only better.
Thank you for reading us!
Subscribe to our blog .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290422/
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