Founder's advice. Artem Subbotin, CEO Simkomat

Our weekly “Founder Boards” column continues to delight readers of Megamind with interesting thoughts from a wide variety of founders, directors and co-founders of Russian (and not only) IT projects.

This time we talked to Simkomat CEO Artem Subbotin. A few years ago, his team got involved in a big and dangerous game called: “Create your own rules in the existing market”. From the moment Artyom admits, they are trying, often successfully, to implement in Russia a project with remote identification and contracting, for example, with telecom operators.

This spring, the Ministry of Communications provided a written agreement that people can be served and identified remotely, which I consider a small, but a victory. This opened the door to another of our brainchild: CheckU - a remote identification system that can be embedded in third-party services.

Keep going It's not about zeal or assertiveness, just try it one last time.

Often there were such moments when it seemed that you just need to stop. Stop beating your head against this wall, calm down, turn around, and go home. And as soon as such thoughts began to swarm in the head, it was a sure sign that a couple more strokes and the wall would collapse. Practice has shown that all fatal failures occur at the top of success, and breakthrough moments in the last breath.

Team. Only after going through 20 businesses, I realized that I was doing everything wrong.

The idea may come to mind even the most distant person. Likely, brilliant ideas, like a meteor shower, bomb everyone who can be on this planet. When ideas came to my head, I broke down and ran to implement them, it seemed to me that the idea was primary, and those who would implement it were secondary. I took to my team the same "man-fire", just like me, so that it was more fun. A year or two later, the business was falling apart or being sold, because it turned out that the two ignitors could not do anything except search for the necessary contacts for launch and the first orders for earnings. In the current draft, even before the launch, I took a piece of paper and wrote out all my weaknesses. This list formed the basis of the description of the “team of my dreams,” which I have almost collected.

Understanding. The first time communicating with investors, I used the dictionary

At one very strange event for startups, where I was invited to give a lecture, the following story happened: I mixed up a minibus for everyone with a minibus for VIPs. I jumped into it and found myself either close to Bob Dorf, or to Steve Blank, who was generally about 55 years old. He asked me: “How are you?” To which I shared my feelings with him I don’t understand a damn thing about these pitches, bones, rhubarb, and thermchits. The answer to me was: “calm down, professional slang was created by people eager for isolation. Feel free to ask for clarification, and you will be surprised how often the questioner does not know the synonym or definition of the word. ” Then one of the organizers came into the car and asked me to leave.
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But this phrase, either from Bob Dorf, or from Steve Blanca, stuck in my head, and I stopped straining from the slang of investors and some startupers.

Dream it. And if you do not have a technical education, then in general do not limit yourself to anything ...

By education I am a psychologist and I have the most indirect relation to technology - I dream about them or think about them. Yes, I am a “baseless dreamer”; I can afford to dream of technologies that cannot be implemented at this level of human development. I'm a psychologist.

When we designed the first version of the Simcomat, we couldn’t even imagine how many legal or technical nuances weren’t complied with. We just wanted to quickly make a “piece of hardware” that can automatically sell SIM cards. We did not consult with telecom operators, lawyers, engineers, and programmers, and we did a simcomat day and night. When finished, they took him to the exhibition of terminals in Moscow.

Every second of those who came to our booth, said that he was thinking about such a thing, but did not know how to solve the issue with this or that nuance. Telecom operators came up to us, who unanimously asserted that it was illegal to sell SIM cards through our “unit”. And then we began to ask everyone what was needed to make it “legal”, and turned to engineers, lawyers and programmers. And at first there was only a dream ...

Editorial note: if you have a desire to participate in the “Founder’s Tips” section, write to us at editor (at) megamozg.ru