Founder's advice. Alexander Bochkin, CrocoTime

The Founder Boards once again acquaint Megamind’s readers with the stars of the Russian IT market, the founders and managers of their own business.

Alexander Bochkin was born in Saransk in '83, graduating from Mordovia State University. Ogareva and three years later, having defended his Ph.D.
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CrocoTime is the third product of the company “Infomaximum”, which Alexander founded in 2008. The main purpose of using CrocoTime is to optimize the workload of employees when recording and analyzing working time, which further affects the use of resources of any company.

Grow on your own money (from sales or pre-orders), do not rely on investors or grants

Help, if it is not charity, is rarely gratuitous. Financial assistance imposes additional restrictions and conditions: you need to focus on the investor in matters on what and in what amount to spend the money; report, spend time approving plans. The grants are about the same: reporting, targeted expenditure of funds without a focus on changes in the company's development, market conditions, and so on.

I tried to develop a project for grant money and, frankly, more “composed reports” than I worked. Building a business with your own money may be slower, but, from the point of view of restrictions, it is much more convenient.

Focus on priorities

The Pareto principle: “20% of efforts give 80% of the result, and the remaining 80% of efforts - only 20% of the result” - has repeatedly proved its viability, including in business.
To set priorities and deal only with important matters - I consider one of the most important tasks of a manager. We all like to spend time analyzing e-mail, meetings, and other current affairs: it does not take a lot of effort, but it takes a long time. But a great result, alas, does not bring.

Spend on current, minor tasks strictly specific time and do not depart from the plan. After all, another well-known law says: “Work takes as much time as it is allocated for it” (Parkinson's law).

Pay special attention to the team

Your team is your support. Be attentive to the selection of candidates: even mine, not such a great experience, showed that without checking the candidate’s recommendations, his background, you can accumulate big problems.

Do not yet succumb to the popular stereotype about start-ups: a young, purposeful and fast-learning team works in a young company. A brilliant product can make either a genius or an experienced professional. And since there are not so many geniuses in statistics among us, I would rely on experience. There is another option: in the process of work, your young team will have that experience. But it will take a lot of time, and in the process will be filled with many cones.

Think of the promotion and do not hope for word of mouth

Cool product and hope for word of mouth - a combination that “shoots” very rarely. I support the opinion that industry PR should be started at the “there is a pilot version or a version for testing” stage. By the time of a full-scale market entry, you will have the interest of Central Asia, product feedback, data with which you can go to larger media. Further steps will depend on the industry in which the company develops.

Regulate and optimize business processes

The organization of work in a startup is different from a large organization with its regulations, memos and orders. A small company usually does not bother to make detailed and clear plans, describe and optimize internal processes. And because of this, when a company grows to a team of 10-20 people, time is lost, mistakes are made, non-priority tasks are performed.

I decided to make a difference by working on my last project. Finally, we described the company's processes, documented the work scripts (it is now easier to introduce new employees in the course of business), analyzed the working hours of all employees (using our own product) and found problems that slowed us down.

The result: the training of new employees is 2 times less than the time of existing specialists, we more accurately plan the time spent on tasks and, most importantly, on time, without any delay, release releases.

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