How to invest a million and burn
My name is Semen. For the last 5 years I have been doing web development, gradually began to move into the status of a project manager and now I program only for my own pleasure.
This story began in mid-2014. My friends and I sipped cocktails at the bar and discussed life. We were visited by the idea that it was time to change something. Need to lose weight! Just lose weight is not interesting, but counting calories is very difficult. And we decided to make a project that will explode the Internet, a project that will help us keep ourselves in shape, build beautiful graphics and consider everything for us.
Internet search did not give positive results. We could not find a complete system that can:
1) Count the calories of dishes, cocktails, products
2) Count the number of vitamins consumed
3) Calculate the system of weight loss, depending on the lifestyle.
You say that there are a lot of such sites and applications and you will be partially right.
There are many systems that partially solve these issues, but there is no unified system.
It took us about two months to plan this: we did a lot of tables, presentations, analyzed the market, thought with what our product was better than the rest, and told our friends and friends about the project.
As it turned out, our friends do not use “calorizers” on the Internet at all; it is much more convenient for them to write everything down in a notebook. We tried to find out for a long time what the notebook was more convenient than popular sites and received a lot of reviews, which were then taken into account during implementation.
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The first version was a page with a table of main products that we use at home.
The second version allowed to enter the name of the product and obtain data on proteins, fats, calories, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals in the same table as in the first version
The third version already provides an opportunity for a full analysis, we enter the name of the dish, we get a table that describes how much and what is in this dish.
This version allows, depending on the lifestyle and food diary, to offer an optimal diet for a specific person.
At this work on the project is over. We thought about the monetization of this project for a long time, there were many options. Here are the main areas where we stopped:
• Links
• Subscription
• Advertising
References Many projects lived with this method of monetization and about the same number died ... With the advent of minusinks from Yandex, this method disappeared by itself.
Advertising. Displaying advertising is a good way to monetize, as long as advertising is unobtrusive and does not interfere.
Subscription. As we have seen for ourselves: some of the functions are available for free, you have to pay for some.
As a result, we stopped at advertising or subscription. All users see ads, if you do not want to see ads, then for money you can turn off all ads on the site.
And now the most interesting: How we burned out and lost millions! The site has been invested a lot of effort, and most importantly time. Over the site (for 2 years) 2 development teams worked, 4 CMS, 2 php-framework, 3 JS-framework, several dozen third-party libraries were used, but in the end it all ended in failure.
What millions were spent for: payment for programmers, content was ordered for the site, advertising on the Internet was bought, but we underestimated the competitors.
There are several giants in this direction on the Internet and it was not so easy, or rather unreal, to lure people from sites that they visited for years!
But this is not the end. We have several successful cases of enticing users from competitors.
In the following articles I will share the technical implementation of the site code, a description of the most interesting moments in the behavior of hungry or undernourished users and several cases of poaching customers from competitors' sites (more important for the media).
Ps. Millions were in Belarusian rubles
This story began in mid-2014. My friends and I sipped cocktails at the bar and discussed life. We were visited by the idea that it was time to change something. Need to lose weight! Just lose weight is not interesting, but counting calories is very difficult. And we decided to make a project that will explode the Internet, a project that will help us keep ourselves in shape, build beautiful graphics and consider everything for us.
Internet search did not give positive results. We could not find a complete system that can:
1) Count the calories of dishes, cocktails, products
2) Count the number of vitamins consumed
3) Calculate the system of weight loss, depending on the lifestyle.
You say that there are a lot of such sites and applications and you will be partially right.
There are many systems that partially solve these issues, but there is no unified system.
We have started planning!
It took us about two months to plan this: we did a lot of tables, presentations, analyzed the market, thought with what our product was better than the rest, and told our friends and friends about the project.
As it turned out, our friends do not use “calorizers” on the Internet at all; it is much more convenient for them to write everything down in a notebook. We tried to find out for a long time what the notebook was more convenient than popular sites and received a lot of reviews, which were then taken into account during implementation.
')
Realization!
First version: analysis assistant
The first version was a page with a table of main products that we use at home.
The second version: analyze the products
The second version allowed to enter the name of the product and obtain data on proteins, fats, calories, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals in the same table as in the first version
Version Three: Analyzing Recipes
The third version already provides an opportunity for a full analysis, we enter the name of the dish, we get a table that describes how much and what is in this dish.
Version Four: Final
This version allows, depending on the lifestyle and food diary, to offer an optimal diet for a specific person.
At this work on the project is over. We thought about the monetization of this project for a long time, there were many options. Here are the main areas where we stopped:
• Links
• Subscription
• Advertising
References Many projects lived with this method of monetization and about the same number died ... With the advent of minusinks from Yandex, this method disappeared by itself.
Advertising. Displaying advertising is a good way to monetize, as long as advertising is unobtrusive and does not interfere.
Subscription. As we have seen for ourselves: some of the functions are available for free, you have to pay for some.
As a result, we stopped at advertising or subscription. All users see ads, if you do not want to see ads, then for money you can turn off all ads on the site.
And now the most interesting: How we burned out and lost millions! The site has been invested a lot of effort, and most importantly time. Over the site (for 2 years) 2 development teams worked, 4 CMS, 2 php-framework, 3 JS-framework, several dozen third-party libraries were used, but in the end it all ended in failure.
What millions were spent for: payment for programmers, content was ordered for the site, advertising on the Internet was bought, but we underestimated the competitors.
There are several giants in this direction on the Internet and it was not so easy, or rather unreal, to lure people from sites that they visited for years!
But this is not the end. We have several successful cases of enticing users from competitors.
In the following articles I will share the technical implementation of the site code, a description of the most interesting moments in the behavior of hungry or undernourished users and several cases of poaching customers from competitors' sites (more important for the media).
Ps. Millions were in Belarusian rubles
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/297676/
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