Startup as an exit from the decree: Inby
My wonderful wife brings to light her own startup, Inby . Being a direct participant in this story, I want to share its experience with the community. To do this, publish Katina the author's article for Habr (and let there be a UFO to me favorably):
Hi, my name is Katerina, 32 years old, previously engaged in journalism, marketing and project management, and now it's already 1 year in IT, in her own startup. It is about this fascinating year that I want to tell some interesting stories that I hope will be of interest to the community.
It all started with the fact that 2.5 years ago I met my IT-husband, left the yacht business in Montenegro, moved to Kharkov and soon gathered on a decree. In August 2014, I had a son, Vova, and, like many young mothers, I began to spend all my time on family and child. Of course, such a pastime was a bit difficult for me, a choleric person, because I listened with special attention to the stories of her husband about his work, projects, ideas and all that. The IT industry was completely incomprehensible to me (I am a humanist - journalism, marketing), but more and more interesting.
')
In October 2014, I met Mikhail Fridshtand and his Kharkov team, which just launched the Yomapic project in Lebanon . The project was made more “funny”, without specific ideas of monetization and promotion. I was also interested in the very model of displaying geo-attached messages on the map and the ability to work with them. Viewing photos of instagram girls on the map is fun, of course - but it was clear that with this idea you can do something more useful and profitable. By this time, I already got used to the role of a desperate housewife and with might and main used the product and group, subscribed to a number of shops on Facebook and VKontakte and actively used discounts and promotions to manage the family budget. Therefore, the idea was born instantly - that would be a clear way to show discounts, promotions and news from all the objects that surround us on the map! The question was in the correct implementation of geo-binding messages. In Facebook, for example, there is a geo-location function for a message, but “not only everyone” (c) uses it.
At the same time, the clear majority of the businesses of interest to us, which are already writing messages on social networks, use couponers and generally actively promote the Internet, and are registered on Google or Yandex cards. The idea to make a 3-step cracking belongs to Michael, and I believe that it is almost brilliant in its simplicity (although it is very difficult in technical implementation, as our practice has shown):
An outline of the “3-step crawling” solution was completed in a month. And the decision was made - we will make a mobile application and enter the market! But first - you need to get quality content.
We have collected objects in all cities of the CIS. Data turned out a little more than a lot. One of the first problems was the cut-off of B2B businesses that are not interesting to the end users of the future application. For this, we had to implement “category mapping” - bring the list of categories from Google Maps, Facebook, Vkontakte to a single view of “our categories” and insert a number of exceptions for B2B filtering.
The second problem was that the overwhelming majority of messages (more than 90%) that businesses write on their pages on social networks are essentially “advertising noise” and the work of non-professional SMMs. And the remaining less than 10% of messages that will be of interest to the user, divided into categories: discounts, promotions, news and events, vacancies. Next, we actually needed rocket science, as I believe: a neural network with initial manual training. The recruitment of people to the “message classifier” position (58 people, mainly from the Central Asian application), the organization of remote work of the whole group, moderation of the work results and updating of the documentation - all this is worthy of a separate tragedy comedy. More than 200,000 messages were manually sorted. And we still got it!
Development of mobile applications, website, testing and debugging, preparation of the concept of RK, test on the focus group - and finally, hurray! On October 22, we went live with the first version of our wonderful Inby application for iOS and Android. We have 132 cities in the system (88 in Russia, 43 in Ukraine and 1 in Belarus). For them, there are 2 million POI, which generate from 500 thousand to 1 million messages per day. Only from 20 to 25 thousand messages pass the selection and get to the users.
All this is just the beginning. There are additional sources of objects and messages, such as Yandex.Maps (which change the API with such a frequency that we don’t have time for them), Instagram (here we need to make our own classification mechanism, because the text is very small and our neuron does not cope well). , for now), API Edadil and other similar systems, possibly aggregation from couponers. And the next big step will be the dashboard for business, which will allow us to write messages directly to us in Inby.
For 10 months of working on the project, I actually mastered the new software industry, the product manager's profession, I lost 17 kg and finally made friends with people who only 3 years ago seemed strange “nerds out of this world” to me.
During this time, I made a number of observations and analogies that may be interesting for girls and young mothers who decide to get involved in a similar story:
I hope my story will be interesting, but for someone, it may serve as a magic pendel to get involved in an interesting startup. A big request to habrajiteli - do not hesitate to criticize and express your wishes and suggestions! We are already in the stores . And we will be very grateful for any advice on the development of our service.
At the end of the article I want to say a special thank you to my husband, Vladimir Kuzmenko, for wise advice and calm long explanations of complex things in simple words.
PS: We are not going to make the world better. We just help people optimize costs and make life more interesting!
And then we build the Death Star and capture the entire galaxy.
Hi, my name is Katerina, 32 years old, previously engaged in journalism, marketing and project management, and now it's already 1 year in IT, in her own startup. It is about this fascinating year that I want to tell some interesting stories that I hope will be of interest to the community.
It all started with the fact that 2.5 years ago I met my IT-husband, left the yacht business in Montenegro, moved to Kharkov and soon gathered on a decree. In August 2014, I had a son, Vova, and, like many young mothers, I began to spend all my time on family and child. Of course, such a pastime was a bit difficult for me, a choleric person, because I listened with special attention to the stories of her husband about his work, projects, ideas and all that. The IT industry was completely incomprehensible to me (I am a humanist - journalism, marketing), but more and more interesting.
')
In October 2014, I met Mikhail Fridshtand and his Kharkov team, which just launched the Yomapic project in Lebanon . The project was made more “funny”, without specific ideas of monetization and promotion. I was also interested in the very model of displaying geo-attached messages on the map and the ability to work with them. Viewing photos of instagram girls on the map is fun, of course - but it was clear that with this idea you can do something more useful and profitable. By this time, I already got used to the role of a desperate housewife and with might and main used the product and group, subscribed to a number of shops on Facebook and VKontakte and actively used discounts and promotions to manage the family budget. Therefore, the idea was born instantly - that would be a clear way to show discounts, promotions and news from all the objects that surround us on the map! The question was in the correct implementation of geo-binding messages. In Facebook, for example, there is a geo-location function for a message, but “not only everyone” (c) uses it.
At the same time, the clear majority of the businesses of interest to us, which are already writing messages on social networks, use couponers and generally actively promote the Internet, and are registered on Google or Yandex cards. The idea to make a 3-step cracking belongs to Michael, and I believe that it is almost brilliant in its simplicity (although it is very difficult in technical implementation, as our practice has shown):
- Crawley google maps and collect registered businesses
- We launch a separate crawler, which runs according to business information and finds a link to their website, and from there it finds a link to profiles in social networks
- The third crawler collects pages on social networks and links them to business objects.
An outline of the “3-step crawling” solution was completed in a month. And the decision was made - we will make a mobile application and enter the market! But first - you need to get quality content.
We have collected objects in all cities of the CIS. Data turned out a little more than a lot. One of the first problems was the cut-off of B2B businesses that are not interesting to the end users of the future application. For this, we had to implement “category mapping” - bring the list of categories from Google Maps, Facebook, Vkontakte to a single view of “our categories” and insert a number of exceptions for B2B filtering.
The second problem was that the overwhelming majority of messages (more than 90%) that businesses write on their pages on social networks are essentially “advertising noise” and the work of non-professional SMMs. And the remaining less than 10% of messages that will be of interest to the user, divided into categories: discounts, promotions, news and events, vacancies. Next, we actually needed rocket science, as I believe: a neural network with initial manual training. The recruitment of people to the “message classifier” position (58 people, mainly from the Central Asian application), the organization of remote work of the whole group, moderation of the work results and updating of the documentation - all this is worthy of a separate tragedy comedy. More than 200,000 messages were manually sorted. And we still got it!
Development of mobile applications, website, testing and debugging, preparation of the concept of RK, test on the focus group - and finally, hurray! On October 22, we went live with the first version of our wonderful Inby application for iOS and Android. We have 132 cities in the system (88 in Russia, 43 in Ukraine and 1 in Belarus). For them, there are 2 million POI, which generate from 500 thousand to 1 million messages per day. Only from 20 to 25 thousand messages pass the selection and get to the users.
All this is just the beginning. There are additional sources of objects and messages, such as Yandex.Maps (which change the API with such a frequency that we don’t have time for them), Instagram (here we need to make our own classification mechanism, because the text is very small and our neuron does not cope well). , for now), API Edadil and other similar systems, possibly aggregation from couponers. And the next big step will be the dashboard for business, which will allow us to write messages directly to us in Inby.
For 10 months of working on the project, I actually mastered the new software industry, the product manager's profession, I lost 17 kg and finally made friends with people who only 3 years ago seemed strange “nerds out of this world” to me.
During this time, I made a number of observations and analogies that may be interesting for girls and young mothers who decide to get involved in a similar story:
- A good understanding of the target audience is a very important component of success in developing an application for the mass market. In vain IT people do not like marketers!
- To teach a team of creative programmers, some of whom work remotely, to using Jira and generally planning and reporting is not as easy as teaching a one-year-old child to the pot.
- Python, PostgreSQL, PyMorphy, ElasticSearch, Celery and other scary things turn out to be quite understandable if someone can explain them in simple language. And to teach IT people to speak simple language is not much easier than teaching a one-year-old child to talk.
- Graphic designers are very gentle, complex and poorly organized comrades, to work with them you need to remain calm, to explain the problem many times with very simple words, and to have great patience. Literature on parenting, where complex cases are described, really helps!
- The decree can be the end of a career, and can open a second wind: new areas of activity, new knowledge, the beginning of interesting projects (I want to believe that it is large and successful).
I hope my story will be interesting, but for someone, it may serve as a magic pendel to get involved in an interesting startup. A big request to habrajiteli - do not hesitate to criticize and express your wishes and suggestions! We are already in the stores . And we will be very grateful for any advice on the development of our service.
At the end of the article I want to say a special thank you to my husband, Vladimir Kuzmenko, for wise advice and calm long explanations of complex things in simple words.
PS: We are not going to make the world better. We just help people optimize costs and make life more interesting!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/296034/
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