Founder's advice. Maxim Karakulov, co-founder of "Darudar"

The weekly Founder Councils are back in the ranks.

The current hero of the rubric is Maxim Karakulov, who, together with his brother Anton and one other friend, created the gift service , Daudar .

With this service, residents of hundreds of cities in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan every day give each other thousands of a variety of things and services, while completely free of charge. We have talked about how such a project has become possible and what kind of experience Maxim has acquired while working on it.

Is there already such an idea?

Any project begins with an idea that comes to us in different ways and captures our imagination. We immediately begin to look, but was it already implemented by someone? And here we are waited by two dangers, two illusions, faced with which, many still do not dare to go on to the next step, the embodiment of the idea. Some, having discovered that their idea has already been implemented by someone, for some reason think that they are “late”, while others, on the contrary, not finding anything like it, believe that they have invented something unviable and useless to no one. This is a paradox of human psychology: someone refuses because he is “not the first,” but someone, on the contrary, sees that he is “the first,” and that is why he refuses to realize his plan. And one, and the second, in my opinion, are deeply mistaken.
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Many, having discovered that they are not the first, immediately give up and believe that they have been ahead of them, that the project has already failed. To prevent this from happening, you need to know that the idea itself is only 5% of the success of the final business, it is much more difficult to implement it correctly, and even more difficult to be able to maintain and develop what has been created in the long run beyond your individual planning horizon.

Being engaged in various projects, gaining experience, you are going through the next transformation. At first it seems to you that there is nothing more valuable than an idea; an idea is the project itself. A little later, you begin to understand that the idea is only half the work, and the other half is its implementation. And finally, over time, you gradually realize that both the idea and the implementation are just the very beginning, and the most difficult is waiting for you further: this is the development and growth of the project, its expansion, monetization, and also many other things that make up life itself and the success of your business.

The same idea is very differently implemented depending on the person. If you have an idea and you see that someone already implements it, think about exactly how it has already been done, how beautiful and convenient it is, whether you personally achieve those goals, would you do the same? Perhaps you would be able to do everything much “better” and thus emerge as the winner of this imaginary (so far) rivalry? Ideas are often similar on the surface, in fact it turns out that the products are completely different.

So it was with us with Daudar: when the idea of ​​a gift service came to us, we looked around and did not find anything like it. It inspired us, and we set about implementing it immediately. After some time, just before the launch of the project, we unexpectedly discovered similar systems, and quite developed ones. In particular, in the USA it is the Yahoo-group “Freecycle”, and here we have the LiveJournal community “I will give it for nothing”.

At first we were afraid that we repeat what has already been done. But, digging deeper, we saw serious differences in our approaches. The main thing was that the systems we found worked as “bulletin boards”, and we wanted to offer people a community, a social network. They have people gave things on the principle of "who will call first - that and sneakers." No history of personal donation, no choice of the donated is supposed. At the same time, we, at “Darudar”, initially determined for ourselves that we want to create a service that would allow those relationships that are accepted between acquaintances and relatives, to make working between strangers. And without the history of relationships and social profile this is impossible to do.

A little later, we were even able to calculate the difference between our two types of interactions. We compared “Durudar” with the largest LiveJournal community “Give it up for free”. The intensity of donation was 10 times higher with a comparable amount of community.

Those who do not dare to do something first, most likely simply do not believe enough in themselves and their strength, do not like to take risks. Often, such people believe that everything new and viable cannot be created “at our place”, and only “at their place” can be created. But this is a separate topic for conversation.

Critics and advisers

Another problem that many people face, and which I have encountered, is a huge amount of criticism. In the first place, oddly enough, your closest friends and acquaintances will criticize you. Now we will not argue why this is happening, the main thing is to know what it is, to be ready for it, to believe in your own idea and the chosen way of its implementation. And you definitely shouldn’t start to implement your idea if you are not ready to defend it and attract critics to your side.

Moreover, after your project is launched - a wave of criticism only intensifies: not only your acquaintances and friends fall on you, but also people who are completely unfamiliar to you, who are beginning to use your product. People are seriously beginning to prove to you that you are a loser, your idea will not work, it was not worth wasting time at all.

In the end, the constant flow of “soviets” begins: some of them are “bad”, some of them are quite good. Here you need to have a clear idea of ​​what you want to achieve in a global perspective. This will help select really valuable tips. If there is no clear development perspective in your head, then you will inevitably begin to “grab” at everything and “wander”, slowly killing your project.

We still, with varying degrees of periodicity, hear opinions like: “Why do you make only donations, not exchanges and sales? In this way, you could cover all possibilities of human interaction with things, to attract many more people! ” Recently, I found old records, with the help of which I conducted an internal dialogue on this issue, but, as can be seen from the present state of “Daroudar”, we did not implement these proposals. And now there is no doubt that we acted very correctly, having listened deeply to our idea, having understood at once what dream we are following.

On my way, I met several projects, developing in areas similar to “Durudar”, where the founders tried to grab everything at once, ultimately not getting anything. The lack of a clear idea of ​​what the user is offered to him, the absence of a clear idea that unites the community always works this way.

Also, many “advisers” seemed to have a very sensible idea of ​​giving the opportunity to place not only “gifts”, but also “wishes”, having turned the mechanics in both directions. Again, our practice, observation, and meditation have shown that this does not work. Seeing two identical opportunities, a person is always inclined to choose the most “simple”, in this case, desires, and our living community would risk turning into a dead “wishboard”, to which no one hurries to respond.

Only after we have achieved some impressive indicators, we decided to introduce these opportunities, and now it exists within the framework of “Daroudar” quite harmoniously, providing about 10% of interactions, and vice versa, requiring additional support and development in order to come out with “gifts” to the same level.

Stage incarnation

There is always the temptation to “do everything at once,” especially if you constantly have ideas in your head. You can design everything for 10 years ahead and rush to put it all into action immediately, many still live. In my opinion, this is wrong, and I will try to explain why.

You need to be able to move in small steps: introduced a feature - tested it. Works - left, not working - modifying or removing. There is always the possibility of a mistake, a wrong decision, and it is important to see it as soon as possible and not to go the wrong way. If the error is not tracked immediately, then you can spend a lot of effort, going in the wrong direction, in the end and did not understand, but where exactly did you turn in the wrong direction.

It often seems that if you implement a feature that already works successfully somewhere, then it will work just as well for you. This approach is often wrong, and this is why. “There” it worked, because there was still some imperceptible feature, without which the recognized successful feature would not work at all, but you simply did not notice it, or certain conditions were already created, a certain critical mass was accumulated, the core of the community was formed.

For example, for communities, a large role is played by self-organizing tools, by means of which content is filtered: these are different kinds of “likes” or “complaints”. Without a proper level of community culture, without a sufficient intensity of it, these things either will not work at all or will lead to opposite results.

Nor should we forget that different solutions work differently on different scales. There are solutions specifically for the “small ones”, and there are solutions for the “big ones”. And they are not interchangeable: things that work on a small scale will slow you down if you are already “big” and vice versa.

The simplest example is the message flow categorizer. As long as you have few messages, it is important for you to output them in a single stream, so that users can see the activity of others and be inspired by it. But when the stream becomes quite strong, users begin to suffer from its noise, it is time to divide it into headings so that everyone can see only what is interesting to him. If the rubricator is done right away, seeing how it works successfully on large projects, then you can never launch your project at all, users will not see a useful level of activity.

Be able to see your achievements

It is important to be able to direct your forces not only towards the achievement of a “distant goal”, which, if embodied, then in a year or even more. But it is even more important to get satisfaction from the intermediate result at each step. To be able to explain to both ourselves and others that even a small achievement is also an achievement.

Launching "Daudar", we agreed that, despite our "universal" ambitions, we will be satisfied even if only our friends and acquaintances will use it. We are lucky, we quickly overcome this moment. But understanding that a small result will please us gave us a lot of strength at the start.

We thought that we could very quickly spread the service around the world, made the translation of the interface into several languages, but practice showed that it would not be so easy. Instead of constantly getting upset about this, we once realized that it is possible to rejoice in the result that we have already managed to achieve in Russia: there is still no such service and scale of giving in any other country.

A good intermediate result on the way to achieving a global goal can be your personal achievements. For example, doing your own business, you learn to use Google Analytics, or you master a modern framework, or you get acquainted with interesting books on management, sociology, philosophy. You should never forget about such small personal successes, moving towards your goal, it gives you strength that is always lacking.

Often, implementing some idea, you get not exactly the result you expected. There is nothing terrible in it; from this one can and must learn to gain. You must be able to take into account and notice the positive side effects. These are the same intermediate results that lead you to your goal, even if they are, at first glance, not in the wake of your movement.

So, “Daroudar” gives us a lot of statistical data on sociology. No matter what level of development we are in, we can always count some interesting parameters related to the “gift economy”. Even among modern scientists there is no such data. “Durudar” is a sociologist to himself, on his data you can identify a huge number of patterns that explain not only the dependencies within our project itself, but also various other communities and societies.

On investments and monetary relations

Our project is very different from the "mainstream". If we thought the way that various mentors, investors and other businessmen demand from us, I am afraid that we would have failed. We should have closed the project 5 years ago. We still do not have the proper monetization model, we still do not earn the necessary funds to support a small team that provides the project with constant growth.

But at the same time, in my opinion, all these 6 years we exist quite successfully for ourselves. I allow myself to make such a conclusion, if only because during the same period of time dozens of projects with similar concepts, good and bright ideas were born and died. But with a different way of embedding it in this world.

Almost everyone is inclined to believe that investment is good. And this is indeed the case: they allow you to quickly form a team, actively develop and dynamically achieve goals. But, on the other hand, there are quite a few dangers. After receiving once other people's money, you immediately tune in to their spending. In the event that it is impossible or difficult to raise the second round, and you do not have time - most likely, you will be forced to close the project. Because you will not be able to shrink back into a state in which you can grow without third-party means, with the help of which you are used to buying “labor” and motivating employees. You yourself (and the people around you) get used to working in this way and no other way.

In my eyes, this happened with two projects that are close to us in spirit: “Friend to a Friend” and “Take Darya”. Both had initial investments, development teams, they developed rapidly and showed results. But then these projects could not raise the second round of investments, since they did not show the results that investors demanded from them. And, unfortunately, they were forced to close.

Considering that the investment market in Russia is not particularly developed, the search for an investor often turns into a banal waste of time, effort and money. I haven’t been looking for money in the West yet, but I have heard more than once how everything is arranged there. First of all, there is a large “investment gap” in our country: we have almost no “medium” investors, and there are either seed or large funds entering before a “general exit”, such as an IPO. Many projects are launched, and if they do not shoot quickly, then they have no chance to hold out the time that is needed for sufficient development to get a big investment already.

Plus, the lack of a speculative secondary market also plays a role: many successful projects in the West exist without bringing any profit, while constantly increasing their “market” capitalization. This is due to the fact that “secondary investors” involved in trading in “closed”, that is, not auctioned shares of the company, constantly resell them to each other at an ever-increasing cost, which allows the project to raise new funds for development. In our country, investors still do not perceive this and are counting on “dividends” in any situation, and not on the growth of the value of the asset in the long run.

Economy of gift

We were forced to follow the path of slow non-investment development, but this helped us learn how to work on other principles. At Durudar, we build an alternative gift economy, in which people exchange resources at no cost. We try to apply the same principles for the development of our project. Gradually, we stopped being afraid to ask for something “free of charge” as a gift, and we were surprised to find that there are a huge number of people ready for such a model of interaction and work. There is nothing to be ashamed of, practice shows that people are arranged differently. In addition, if you get something from someone for free, you undertake to give someone else what you have in the same way.

For example, we did a newsletter in our community asking for help with the layout, we did not initially offer or promise anything. So, a third of those who responded asked how much we were willing to pay, another third said that they were ready to help only with interesting tasks, and the last third was ready to help us for free.

Not only people, but also companies are willing to help. When we started to experience problems with paying for servers that cost a lot of money, for two years Scalaxy, in which our friend worked, provided us with a server for free, and then we received a grant from Microsoft Azure , with which we pay for the infrastructure we need. Another great company is Copiny : it also donated to us its solution, with which we significantly reduced the burden on our support service. And, of course, “Habrahabr” , which is always open to us and helps in every way, for which we are very grateful to him.

When you have money - you can buy a lot, when there is no money - you have to “pay” people to everything else that you have: attention, care, communication, understanding. Therefore, every day each of us should give all the best. Plus, it should be remembered that “emotional” relationships are still shorter than “monetary” ones. It is important to take into account always, since it greatly shortens the planning horizon, limits the possibilities for the introduction of technologically complex new opportunities.

Long-term relationships are also possible, but this is a more rare story related to the acquisition of true like-minded people, in this case, in fact, we are already talking about the formation of a “family”. Generally, if you manage to form a team of like-minded people, this is a very big achievement! Fatigue, employment, confusion: you feel a huge relief when there is someone who is ready in such a situation to take on your responsibilities. In addition, such a safety net allows the project to not stand idle for a long time, constantly going forward. In our team of three people this happens all the time - we take the lead role in turn.

Finally, you must always be ready to do all the work and develop the missing skills. Management, marketing, sales - all these skills are historically poorly developed in our country, people do not want “hierarchies”, managers do not always show enough leadership qualities, no one likes to “sell” and “enter”. I am not an exception, and therefore constantly engaged in the development of these own qualities, I believe that it will be useful for me and for my work. By the way, sometimes it is good to go to work for another company to “upgrade” your skills.

And further. Try to always be as open as possible to the world and constantly look for new opportunities in your business. A lot will not happen, a lot will not work, but the result will definitely be. This, I think, helped us recently, in conjunction with the Government of Moscow, to launch the Good Deed charity project; we did not even think about such an opportunity!