How to build the business of your dreams: life story

In the comments to the previous articles of the blog SmartProgress, readers asked to describe cases from the life when the service helped people achieve their goals. Therefore, I decided to tell about the wonderful story of Semen Yaroslavlev, the purpose of which was to make the world kinder. Initially, he did not think about the fact that his idea could gain popularity and develop into an interesting project involving many people ...

How it all began

It all started a few years ago when a girl at the bank helped Semyon fill out a receipt. She was glad to help him, and our Semen was very pleased because the employee made it from the bottom of her heart. However, he felt that he would like to thank her for her kindness and human understanding with something more than a simple verbal “thank you”. On his life’s journey, he was lucky to meet good people who shared their kindness with him, in response to which Semen also wanted to give them something - a pleasant memory, a smile, a good mood. And then he had the idea of ​​creating “good cards” - small cards the size of a regular business card, on which would be written pleasant words of gratitude or just phrases designed to elevate a person’s mood. Semyon also wanted to draw funny illustrations on “volunteers” so that they could make a person smile involuntarily. Such cards could be given to good people in order to make the world a better place. Big things start small, and even a small trifle can bring joy and return colors to the faded world.
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First failure

Lit up with the idea of ​​a good card, Semyon decided to develop their own design. He tried to draw illustrations for them, but, due to the absence of any skills of an artist or designer, this idea failed miserably - the good cards turned out to be just awful. It was a shame to give them to people, and therefore Semyon postponed the embodiment of his idea to life until better times. However, every now and then he returned to the thoughts of his old dream of making the world kinder thanks to these little rays of joy, which can be shared with a sad passerby or just a good person who showed kindness. Often, Semyon was sorry that the first attempt to create a once-conceived good card turned out to be a failure, and he hoped someday to return to this good project.

Introducing SmartProgress

So five years have passed. And once in one of the articles on self-development, Simeon read about the SmartProgress service, which immediately interested him with the simplicity of the idea and its high-quality implementation. Simon immediately decided to personally test this project and familiarized himself with the work of the service. Everything turned out to be much simpler than one would imagine. Initially, it was necessary to simply formulate your goals and break them into stages. For each task it was required to register the deadlines. And the plan is ready! Then it remained only to stock up on willpower and faith in your own dream and go towards your goal, consistently fulfilling everything that was planned. In order to monitor their progress in this field, a diary of achieving the goal was compiled, which also helps keep the righteous one from going and is the foundation for assessing success and healthy criticism.



The most important thing was that thanks to SmartProgress, Semen managed to take a different look at his own goals, to understand what he really wanted to achieve in life, and what he really wanted to do. What previously seemed abstract and unattainable, has gained clarity and quite distinct outlines. In addition to the desires of wealth and well-being, which is not alien to most of us, he wondered what he would like to devote his life to, what activity would make him truly happy. The answer was simple: he wholeheartedly wished to make the world kinder. But now he was faced with a new question: what exactly needs to be done for this?

Second try

Bingo! Semyon remembered his long-standing idea, which he had failed to bring to life several years ago. Then he had no idea that in a year his dream would not just become a reality, but surpass all expectations, and people would love his idea and would gladly buy his sets of good cards to share positive moments and joy with others.

After all, what could be simpler than extending such a card to a person? It does not matter whether you are familiar with it or not: this small gift will cause a smile even to a casual passer-by and will remind him that people are not indifferent to each other, and the world is full of good. So Semyon decided to repeat his attempt, only this time to plan the way to his goal and stubbornly go to it. For a start, he wanted to create a set of cards for himself so that he could give them to people.

From thought to business ... Semyon made a detailed action plan. This time for creating illustrations he decided to use the services of artists. But, in addition, it was necessary to still consider the subject of the cards and decide exactly where they can be used. Not only the plots of illustrations depended on this, but also the texts that were yet to be invented. And it was necessary to deal with the mass of such nuances that our hero had not even previously come to mind: for example, what is the quality of using paper and where it is better to print a good card. After all the items were filled, the goal became available to the public . And it was then that he found people, or rather, they found him. Later, Semyon would call chatting with like-minded people the most interesting experience on SmartProgress.

People and Motivation

It was the people whom Semyon met in the service community that impressed him most. There he met many like-minded people who helped him on the road to his dream. The fact that these other users were determined not only to talk about their goals and talk about their dreams, but also to act in order to realize them, was captivating. “This is a service of action, not mythic motivation,” he later writes in a story about his story. Users talk about their goals, create and publish plans to achieve them, read diaries of other people, find like-minded people, share their experiences and encourage each other.



Surrounded by such people, you involuntarily begin to feel not only the desire to create, but also responsibility for your undertakings, because now they support you, help you with word and deed. An ephemeral idea earlier becomes something quite real and meaningful. It was thanks to the community that supported Seeds and was ready to help in every way, he not only realized his original goal - to create good cards for himself to share good, - but he understood that others also like his idea and mission very much. He saw that people would love to purchase such cards to give them. Moreover: in the comments, people expressed their interesting ideas about the development of the project and the improvement of the good cards. Many of them have been implemented. In addition to praise and encouragement, he received constructive criticism, which helped to avoid the mistakes that he would certainly have made when making decisions alone. In the SmartProgress community, he met those people who were happy to cooperate with him: this way he found excellent artists who were willing to work in perspective on illustrations for good cards, and also assembled a team for his project.

Long-awaited success

November 10, 2014, Semyon created his key goal on the SmartProgress portal, and a year later his project with good cards reached a completely different level, people started talking about it and writing in the media. Now Seeds already has a headquarters of artists and a great team, and the volunteers have received a new name - good cards. The project has a logo and a wonderful motto, which inspires faith in humanity: "Good faith." During the year, a domain was purchased and a website was created, over whose birth not only Simeon and the team worked, but also SmartProgress users. During the year, 16,000 visitors visited the site, and the total number of visits exceeded 28,000. Gradually, all issues related to printing and the format of cards were resolved.



To support the site, groups were created in popular social networks: VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram. On the last resource, a new project gathered about 800 subscribers. And all this despite the fact that no one dealt specifically with the "promotion" of the project - people accidentally found it, became supporters of the idea and shared it with their friends. 12 artists worked on creating illustrations. Over the year, the team and artists came up with more than 200 lay-out layouts, 52 of which were approved and sent to print.

"Do good to the whole earth ..."

But the most important thing for Semen is the understanding that he managed to infect other people with his dream. His project made others think that we can all do good, and if we really want to make the world a better place, then we need to start from ourselves.

The story of Semyon Yaroslavlev was so much liked not only by the SmartProgress community, but also by the creators of the service, that a video was made about it:

New target

There is not much good, and now Semyon has set himself a new goal: by November 10, 2016 to present more than 100,000 smiles! But now he is no longer afraid that he will not cope with the task, because he has already taken the first steps towards success and towards the realization of his dream. Now our positive hero knows where to look for advice, because communication in the SmartProgress community has helped him to understand that people like his idea, and they are ready to support it.

The world has become kinder!