Features of family start-ups and domain as indented at divorce
We all heard the success stories of startups created by married couples, which turned into big family businesses. But at the same time, startups often waited a brighter fate than families, who rarely stood up to all the trials of family startups.
In our Russian realities, of course, as the very first example, Kaspersky Lab came to mind, which was created by Eugene and Natalya Kaspersky together, and for many years it was the spouse who was the head of the company, Eugene was engaged in the technical part. And, honestly, it seems to me that if it were not for her, he would have worked as an ordinary programmer (well, well, the project manager) to this day, and his name would not have become part of one of the most popular software brands in the world. But on a Wikipedia page, for example, Natalia is not mentioned at all among the founders or in general in any form. It was not there as if it were there.
I also decided to share my story of a family startup in connection with the termination of the family - the husband would never let anything like that be published. Suddenly, someone my revelations will be forced to abandon the idea of ​​drawing a spouse into the business, and at the same time they will help me to solve my own self-interested task, which is in the end.
')
So, in 2006 I got married. Three years before that I had worked for the then future husband in a maaaaaaa little such company that made CMS. My role as an English-speaking person was to call European hosters and convince them of the need to purchase this particular CMS. It turned out in different ways, especially in view of my humanitarian education and the same mindset. I honestly found it difficult, and it wasn’t very good to sell. As a result, the future husband was well able to sell the business of one company terribly well-known in Russia, the name of which I will omit just in case, but everyone can guess.
So, at the same time with the marriage, that is, in 2006, the idea of ​​a start-up, who was supposed to change the world, was born with us, as usual. Under the startup, an investor was found (also, by the way, a person from our family, but the topic of family investment is completely separate and much more complicated), and the startup itself is slowly launched into development.
The name for the future product arose by choosing an attractive domain - the sonorous domain Profy.com managed to buy for a few thousand dollars, which became the name for the future platform on which numerous cloud applications were to be deployed. Then everything started to set up platforms, however, to call them cloud until it came to mind. We didn’t call either, so we were very trendy. We were not in the trend in that we were engaged in development in Novosibirsk, where we lived, whereas such ideas are well developed all the same in the Valley.
But, anyway, the decision was made, and just then my role arose. By that time I had been selling planes to my liberty, and my husband decided that a person with marketing experience would be able to promote anything. I was told to write a blog about web 2.0 and other online news. The idea was that for the six months that the development should go, I set up a multi-author English-language blog, around which a party of technologically advanced people would form, so that later they would all help me unleash the launched product. The problem was that I didn’t know what a blog is or what web 2.0 is. But Wikipedia and Google helped quickly enough to set up production of quite decent news content, thanks to which Profy was regularly quoted by other much more well-known blogs, and sometimes traditional resources like The Washington Post. Well, the place in the top 100 of the world blogs about high-tech news according to Techmeme, we also took more than once and not even two.
The problem was different: the development, as usual in Russia, was delayed, so the product was launched not in six months in beta, but after one and a half in alpha. Our wonderful development team (I say this absolutely sincerely, I love everyone very much, I am friends with many) was fascinated by the creation of a spacecraft, to which no one really knew which side to attach wings on because of the lack of relevant experience, so the alpha did not look very convincing, interesting in principle. It was finally launched as a blog platform with an integrated RSS reader and, of course, a social network, because where would it be without it.
Launched, by the way, quite well. The plan worked: in a year and a half I managed to make friends with all the leading publications, so TechCrunch , CNET , CenterNetworks wrote about us (without reference, the author was a good friend of mine, but he passed away last year) and many, many other smaller editions. I found out for myself that, in principle, free PR of a startup is quite possible on its own, despite all the horror stories about prices for publishing an announcement on TechCrunch, but, frankly, if you take into account the costs of this blog, then hiring a professional PR agency would be at least several times cheaper.
But, unfortunately, this startup was not able to achieve world-wide fame, although over time we launched it into beta (also closed, by the way), having specially visited the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco for this, where many people liked it too. Received many laudatory publications. Technical problems due to the fact that no one knew what, in fact, we want to get from this platform, and, most importantly, how this can be achieved, which was noticeable even to users, and then the difficulties that began with financing due to the 2008 crisis years, led to the fact that we again closed the platform, again left only one blog. For a while, they all peeed together, then all American authors fled from lack of money, I stayed and continued to write with great enthusiasm - because my child, my dear. This, by the way, is an absolutely accurate comparison - a family start-up necessarily plays the role of a beloved child, a whimsical and constantly demanding attention and complete dissolution in his interests. Including therefore we were not up to human children - and without them, there was enough of someone to take care of.
Now, when I told you the background of such dense years, I can also talk about how hard it is to conduct a family startup - for both the family and the startup. Even when Profy was in development, we faced a lot of problems due to the presence of our couple at the helm, which we constantly tried to win from each other. If we didn’t agree on something, the feathers literally flew in all directions, and I sincerely feel sorry for our guys, programmers, who often had to participate in our either family or any business disassembly. In this case, too often the dispute started on a professional theme, turned to the individual and vice versa.
However, these problems are solvable for business, in the end disassemblies occur in almost any company, and their intensity does not always depend on the closeness of the relations of the participants. But there are some pluses. For example, when a husband and his wife go on a business trip, and not just the general director (male) and marketing director (female), the company saves a little by paying them one hotel room for two instead of two. In addition, no one is jealous of her husband to work, if he sticks out in the office until midnight, because the wife does the same, and it is still unknown which of them has more cases in the office, so that at the initiative of his wife you can sit in the office and two nights, for example. And the full support of the second half seems to improve the climate in the team. Yes, and for the environment it is good when two employees get to work on one machine, and not on two.
But for family life, the family business is a huge test. True, I’ll just make a reservation that our marriage didn’t survive this way, we coped well with the roles of startups, but we couldn’t manage the roles of parents much later, because an ordinary human baby is still much more difficult than any startup. Nevertheless, I can definitely say that working with my husband and wife is categorically contraindicated. It all starts with the same clashes that arise on professional grounds, and end with phrases like "You are a fool, not a marketer." And in some situations, the marketing director should be able to say “I obey!” To the general director and get down to implementation, and a rare wife today is capable of such a feat in relation to her own husband.
Spending together all 24 hours a day is also not very useful for my wife and husband, restricting communication with professional topics is harmful at all, but these are all the inevitable side effects of joint business, from which one cannot get away in this situation. Still, the most terrible thing is to remain without income at the same time, if a startup unexpectedly and due to circumstances that are not always dependent on you, will burst, as often happens with them, which happened to our family and our startup in 2008.
Gradually, of course, we got out. I started consulting and localizing other startups and not startups at all, but after a while my husband found a new investor and started a new startup. Then another and another. I did not risk any more, my role in all his subsequent projects was limited to the role of an interested consultant and a free assistant.
However, of course, at some point we decided that our favorite domain is too good to use it under a low-income blog, and we again started another startup, the fundamental difference of which was that we did not need investors : we had to do marketing with our own (my) strengths, and our good friend who had once worked for us at Profy had to write it. However, this startup (the idea of ​​which, by the way, has not yet been implemented anywhere, although it is a miracle as good) was never destined to be born, because I had just given birth to a child, and my husband quarreled with that programmer, although he was almost ready for a more or less working prototype.
Well, and then, still later, we still decided to divorce. A blog that has been my favorite child for so many years has lost its role in favor of an ordinary child, so at first I almost stopped writing it, and then didn’t crawl at all when some tricky hosting issue arose. I post posts from it from time to time on Facebook so that the good will not disappear if the topic suddenly turns out to be relevant.
My husband offered me a broad gesture to keep the domain at divorce and dispose of it the way I want. It’s clear, probably, that I’m not going to plot another startup on it, but I just want to sell it at a higher price, which, by the way, is not too much of a secret purpose of my post here, because there are other places where people can find worthy use. , I do not know. The mechanisms of ordinary domain exchanges do not allow to sell it expensive, and I do not want to sell cheap - let it be better for memory. But at the same time there are a lot of very good links to it from various news blogs, websites of newspapers, aggregators, start-up directories, and so on. Yes, and more or less well-known brand - this is also a kind of bonus. So I would really like to give it in good hands for some professional project for Russia or for a startup designed for an English-speaking market, so that the buyer could use a good reputation and a familiar name there, I would just be glad that I would do it with pleasure here if interested people are found. Particularly interested, I can hand along with the domain also an idea that has never been implemented, suddenly comes in handy.
Just do not buy this domain for a family startup, he has a very bad story in this regard. This is how to buy used wedding rings after someone else's divorce and hope for personal happiness.
In our Russian realities, of course, as the very first example, Kaspersky Lab came to mind, which was created by Eugene and Natalya Kaspersky together, and for many years it was the spouse who was the head of the company, Eugene was engaged in the technical part. And, honestly, it seems to me that if it were not for her, he would have worked as an ordinary programmer (well, well, the project manager) to this day, and his name would not have become part of one of the most popular software brands in the world. But on a Wikipedia page, for example, Natalia is not mentioned at all among the founders or in general in any form. It was not there as if it were there.
I also decided to share my story of a family startup in connection with the termination of the family - the husband would never let anything like that be published. Suddenly, someone my revelations will be forced to abandon the idea of ​​drawing a spouse into the business, and at the same time they will help me to solve my own self-interested task, which is in the end.
')
So, in 2006 I got married. Three years before that I had worked for the then future husband in a maaaaaaa little such company that made CMS. My role as an English-speaking person was to call European hosters and convince them of the need to purchase this particular CMS. It turned out in different ways, especially in view of my humanitarian education and the same mindset. I honestly found it difficult, and it wasn’t very good to sell. As a result, the future husband was well able to sell the business of one company terribly well-known in Russia, the name of which I will omit just in case, but everyone can guess.
So, at the same time with the marriage, that is, in 2006, the idea of ​​a start-up, who was supposed to change the world, was born with us, as usual. Under the startup, an investor was found (also, by the way, a person from our family, but the topic of family investment is completely separate and much more complicated), and the startup itself is slowly launched into development.
The name for the future product arose by choosing an attractive domain - the sonorous domain Profy.com managed to buy for a few thousand dollars, which became the name for the future platform on which numerous cloud applications were to be deployed. Then everything started to set up platforms, however, to call them cloud until it came to mind. We didn’t call either, so we were very trendy. We were not in the trend in that we were engaged in development in Novosibirsk, where we lived, whereas such ideas are well developed all the same in the Valley.
But, anyway, the decision was made, and just then my role arose. By that time I had been selling planes to my liberty, and my husband decided that a person with marketing experience would be able to promote anything. I was told to write a blog about web 2.0 and other online news. The idea was that for the six months that the development should go, I set up a multi-author English-language blog, around which a party of technologically advanced people would form, so that later they would all help me unleash the launched product. The problem was that I didn’t know what a blog is or what web 2.0 is. But Wikipedia and Google helped quickly enough to set up production of quite decent news content, thanks to which Profy was regularly quoted by other much more well-known blogs, and sometimes traditional resources like The Washington Post. Well, the place in the top 100 of the world blogs about high-tech news according to Techmeme, we also took more than once and not even two.
The problem was different: the development, as usual in Russia, was delayed, so the product was launched not in six months in beta, but after one and a half in alpha. Our wonderful development team (I say this absolutely sincerely, I love everyone very much, I am friends with many) was fascinated by the creation of a spacecraft, to which no one really knew which side to attach wings on because of the lack of relevant experience, so the alpha did not look very convincing, interesting in principle. It was finally launched as a blog platform with an integrated RSS reader and, of course, a social network, because where would it be without it.
Launched, by the way, quite well. The plan worked: in a year and a half I managed to make friends with all the leading publications, so TechCrunch , CNET , CenterNetworks wrote about us (without reference, the author was a good friend of mine, but he passed away last year) and many, many other smaller editions. I found out for myself that, in principle, free PR of a startup is quite possible on its own, despite all the horror stories about prices for publishing an announcement on TechCrunch, but, frankly, if you take into account the costs of this blog, then hiring a professional PR agency would be at least several times cheaper.
But, unfortunately, this startup was not able to achieve world-wide fame, although over time we launched it into beta (also closed, by the way), having specially visited the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco for this, where many people liked it too. Received many laudatory publications. Technical problems due to the fact that no one knew what, in fact, we want to get from this platform, and, most importantly, how this can be achieved, which was noticeable even to users, and then the difficulties that began with financing due to the 2008 crisis years, led to the fact that we again closed the platform, again left only one blog. For a while, they all peeed together, then all American authors fled from lack of money, I stayed and continued to write with great enthusiasm - because my child, my dear. This, by the way, is an absolutely accurate comparison - a family start-up necessarily plays the role of a beloved child, a whimsical and constantly demanding attention and complete dissolution in his interests. Including therefore we were not up to human children - and without them, there was enough of someone to take care of.
Now, when I told you the background of such dense years, I can also talk about how hard it is to conduct a family startup - for both the family and the startup. Even when Profy was in development, we faced a lot of problems due to the presence of our couple at the helm, which we constantly tried to win from each other. If we didn’t agree on something, the feathers literally flew in all directions, and I sincerely feel sorry for our guys, programmers, who often had to participate in our either family or any business disassembly. In this case, too often the dispute started on a professional theme, turned to the individual and vice versa.
However, these problems are solvable for business, in the end disassemblies occur in almost any company, and their intensity does not always depend on the closeness of the relations of the participants. But there are some pluses. For example, when a husband and his wife go on a business trip, and not just the general director (male) and marketing director (female), the company saves a little by paying them one hotel room for two instead of two. In addition, no one is jealous of her husband to work, if he sticks out in the office until midnight, because the wife does the same, and it is still unknown which of them has more cases in the office, so that at the initiative of his wife you can sit in the office and two nights, for example. And the full support of the second half seems to improve the climate in the team. Yes, and for the environment it is good when two employees get to work on one machine, and not on two.
But for family life, the family business is a huge test. True, I’ll just make a reservation that our marriage didn’t survive this way, we coped well with the roles of startups, but we couldn’t manage the roles of parents much later, because an ordinary human baby is still much more difficult than any startup. Nevertheless, I can definitely say that working with my husband and wife is categorically contraindicated. It all starts with the same clashes that arise on professional grounds, and end with phrases like "You are a fool, not a marketer." And in some situations, the marketing director should be able to say “I obey!” To the general director and get down to implementation, and a rare wife today is capable of such a feat in relation to her own husband.
Spending together all 24 hours a day is also not very useful for my wife and husband, restricting communication with professional topics is harmful at all, but these are all the inevitable side effects of joint business, from which one cannot get away in this situation. Still, the most terrible thing is to remain without income at the same time, if a startup unexpectedly and due to circumstances that are not always dependent on you, will burst, as often happens with them, which happened to our family and our startup in 2008.
Gradually, of course, we got out. I started consulting and localizing other startups and not startups at all, but after a while my husband found a new investor and started a new startup. Then another and another. I did not risk any more, my role in all his subsequent projects was limited to the role of an interested consultant and a free assistant.
However, of course, at some point we decided that our favorite domain is too good to use it under a low-income blog, and we again started another startup, the fundamental difference of which was that we did not need investors : we had to do marketing with our own (my) strengths, and our good friend who had once worked for us at Profy had to write it. However, this startup (the idea of ​​which, by the way, has not yet been implemented anywhere, although it is a miracle as good) was never destined to be born, because I had just given birth to a child, and my husband quarreled with that programmer, although he was almost ready for a more or less working prototype.
Well, and then, still later, we still decided to divorce. A blog that has been my favorite child for so many years has lost its role in favor of an ordinary child, so at first I almost stopped writing it, and then didn’t crawl at all when some tricky hosting issue arose. I post posts from it from time to time on Facebook so that the good will not disappear if the topic suddenly turns out to be relevant.
My husband offered me a broad gesture to keep the domain at divorce and dispose of it the way I want. It’s clear, probably, that I’m not going to plot another startup on it, but I just want to sell it at a higher price, which, by the way, is not too much of a secret purpose of my post here, because there are other places where people can find worthy use. , I do not know. The mechanisms of ordinary domain exchanges do not allow to sell it expensive, and I do not want to sell cheap - let it be better for memory. But at the same time there are a lot of very good links to it from various news blogs, websites of newspapers, aggregators, start-up directories, and so on. Yes, and more or less well-known brand - this is also a kind of bonus. So I would really like to give it in good hands for some professional project for Russia or for a startup designed for an English-speaking market, so that the buyer could use a good reputation and a familiar name there, I would just be glad that I would do it with pleasure here if interested people are found. Particularly interested, I can hand along with the domain also an idea that has never been implemented, suddenly comes in handy.
Just do not buy this domain for a family startup, he has a very bad story in this regard. This is how to buy used wedding rings after someone else's divorce and hope for personal happiness.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/297450/
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