Twitter, Bobuk, Bitcoin

It so happened that thanks to Yandex and the TolstoyStartup Camp organized by it we became a full-fledged company, with its product, development strategy, positioning in the market, in one word - serious entrepreneurs. Therefore, we will often return to our experience at the camp and tell you how it affected us.

This time we would like to share a funny story that happened to us at the camp. As is clear from the title, Twitter, bobuk (Grigory Bakunov) and Bitcoin are mixed up in it.

During the first meeting with Grisha at the camp, everyone without exception had to pass the first serious test of his idea. It went something like this: you go out in front of an audience, for a minute you tell the essence of your idea, after which you listen to a barrage of criticism from Bobuk (at this moment the language did not turn to call him Grisha). You need to understand that a person has this talent. He, like no one else, knows how to find weak points in any idea and criticize as hard as you can imagine. After everyone went under the “press,” there was something like a question and answer. They asked about a lot of things and different things: how did Yandex start, education, broadcast, etc. But one question had a direct bearing on our story: “How much is one advertising tweet on your behalf?” To which Grisha replied that he usually didn’t practice it, but would have done it in one bitcoin. At that time, the rate was around $ 800 for bitcoin.
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Each subsequent meeting with Grisha turned around for us a decline of enthusiasm and awareness that we would be better at home and would not waste Yandex’s resources and Grisha’s personal time. In his usual manner, he poked us every time into the fact that we have no market, technology, and in general we do not correctly present the project. In short, every meeting with him was for our team a cold shower.
Despite all the criticism of Grishin, other mentors were normal with our project and each time we successfully passed through control points.

To validate the idea, we launched the first landing page, where we checked whether our application would be interesting to users. In 3 or 4 days after launching, traffic fell on the page. It was completely incomprehensible what kind of traffic, from where and what to do with all this. I even had a slight panic attack: I began to worry about the fact that users flooded, and we have not yet released the product. In general, I was afraid that disappointed users would never return to us.

When they started to figure out where the traffic came from, they stumbled upon it



The panic intensified when it became clear from the discussion of the tweet that Twitter blocked the link to our site, as it considered it malicious. In short, I almost became a smoker that day.

When the traffic was asleep and we came to our senses, we thought that it would be nice to somehow thank Grisha for this tweet. Here we remembered the question about the advertising tweet given during the first lecture. Obviously, we did not have that kind of money back then. After a small brainstorming, it was decided to give him an “option” on the very Bitcoin, in the form of a souvenir coin :



The moral of this story is simple: it often happens that those who curse you the most, actually believe in you, and curse to show where you could become better .

www.avoapp.com