About startups clean

With enthusiasm, you can achieve everything. Enthusiasm is the brilliance of your eyes, the swift pace of your walk, the strength of a handshake, an irresistible surge of energy and will to put your ideas into practice. Enthusiasts are wrestlers. Enthusiasm is the cornerstone of all progress! Only with him is success possible. Without it, you have only opportunities.

Henry Ford



I have long wanted to share with the audience of habr my thoughts and accumulated experience that I received through tears, sleepless nights and gray hair.



I did not insert a picture here to attract attention, it would spoil the text, as the story. So, let's begin:

Instead of intro

I decided to link my life with programming in the 10th grade, and we will not dissemble or deceive ourselves, yes, just for the sake of money. Just then, began to take off Vkontakte, Facebook, Google. And then a thought arose: I want to become not a cook, not an architect, not a musician, but a businessman, the founder of a super company.

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Oh, how foolish I was then. I still didn’t understand with my school brains that there are 8 billion people on earth, and Pasha Durov and Mark Zukenberg and Bryn the Earring are alone. 3 people for 8 billion ... for people familiar with the theory of probability and statistics, it will not be a problem to calculate that the chance that you will become the 4th of this gang is much lower than the chance that on one of your flights on the route Moscow-St. Petersburg at the plane refuses hydraulics (this is a 100% drop, no one has managed to land without hydraulics so far).



35 exams at the university and 42 credits gave me the necessary base and skills, in the intervals between my studies I was programming, hard and scary, I did not sleep at night and had poor nutrition. I was so fascinated by this occupation that I began to lose touch with reality. But we will not go into the details of my treatment in the mental hospital ... this is a story for a separate publication.



So, after graduating from university, I, as an ordinary and standard person, went to get a job.



One day, when I was sitting in a business center and was waiting for someone to call me for an interview, to once again force me to sell a tree on C on a piece of paper 2-3, this thought again came to me - I had to create my own company, so I asked I have a 2-3 tree on ASM, and not sitting here and not being humiliated in front of some strangers.



After 5-6 interviews I was offered a vacancy for 60 thousand rubles in one of the companies of the city. Well, I was glad. And he began to work. I got up at 6-40 in the morning, traveled by train, crowded on the bus and walked for 10 minutes, came to work and wrote the code. At about 4 p.m. I did not understand who I was, where I was, why I was here and what I was doing here. After 2 days I came and wrote a letter of resignation. The director invited me to his place and offered to increase my salary to 75 thousand, but after 15 minutes I left the company door forever with a work book in my hands.



Since then, I realized that the work is not mine. So began my sunset as a start-up (who read Nitsche understand).

Hackathons

Several times I participated in the hackathons. I think that this is a great experience for any startup, you come up with an idea, implement it, manage the development process. Learn to share responsibilities, delegate authority, and make important decisions on the fly.



It was on the hackathons that I understood the main problem that haunts anyone who decided to start their own business - the team. The success of any undertaking depends on people. We will not take as examples unique in nature enthusiasts, day and night, writing code all alone. The results of their work are ultimately needed only by them and they don’t go further than their computer. This is a very good myth that you can do something alone. No, you can not.



The main thing is the team. You need not just people, you need people who will do it, who will write code on holidays, during a session, at night, at a temperature, with chills and coughs.



The most valuable and most expensive resource is people. If you have people, you have 80% company.



On one of the hackathons, I met one team, they were real professionals, but I remember one - the captain. It was a man who inspired confidence, after talking with him for 15 minutes - I already understood, these guys - they would take the main prize. A clear understanding of what they do, why and for what. Competent and skillful separation of duties and quick making the right decisions. Unfortunately, I lost contact with them, but I think that these guys are no longer in Russia and are doing something in the Californian garage that is possible in the next 2-3 years will create a furore in the field of IT.

First project

I will not talk in detail about the first project, and perhaps I will not talk about the next one either. This is a general article and not an advertisement for applications and platforms and is beyond the scope of my story.



They will not give statistics so that you read to the end and do not close this article, but for now let's say so, success and money are also far from me, like the Earth to the star nearest to the Sun - Proxima-Centauri.

For 2 years of my searches and research in the field of business, promotion and start-ups and communication with those who have already achieved any significant results, I cite further:

Money problem

Often I hear such a good myth that money is needed. We need investors, we need angels, we need huge amounts of money.



It works and the money is really needed if you are going to open a giraffe farm. Yes, you need pens, you need food, you need vitamins for giraffes, you need at least a male giraffe and at least a female giraffe. One giraffe costs 300 thousand euros. Agree, to buy a pair of giraffes for their own savings - it is very difficult.



But, we are creating an IT company. We do not need a giraffe, we need a computer, a bundle of chips and a garage on the outskirts of Moscow with good internet. Everything.



Agree that you can write your own Google sitting in the garage and rented a 5 thousand server on Amazon with 12 cores on board and it will work. The need for money at first is the biggest myth and world deception, which restrains us and makes us doubt our abilities.



But there is one point where money is needed - this is ADVERTISEMENT.

Promotion

Oh, this is the most interesting and most exciting section. If you already have a prototype - a working, smart product that should "break the world." Something people need to know about him.



What do you need to do to know about it?

Right - advertise. How to advertise? Of course, to pour in hundreds of thousands of dollars for promotion in top-end sites, in top-end groups of social networks and in videos on youtube. No, this is a major mistake.



Take yourself as an example. The network has such unique and interesting products, such as the Vkontakte network, the Facebook network, the BlaBlaCar application. Yes, even such a resource as habrahabr ... Have you ever seen an advertisement about them on TV? And advertising in groups in a social network? Did you see the booklets or announcements in the subway, where the inscription “Vkontakte - come in and find your friends” would look like? No, because, you learned about it from your friends, acquaintances, came across by chance.



It is important to understand, you can push the promotion of your platform, application or site with a couple of unobtrusive articles or posts in 2-3 publics. But your idea should produce the notorious "Wow effect."



Recently appeared such an application as "Periscope", I heard about it from a friend. And for 4 hours I was following the life of an “African American” in the criminal district of Compton (this is a gangster district of Los Angeles). And what do you think? I immediately wrote 10 to my best friends so that they downloaded this application and also laughed at how this fat guy wanders about the neighborhood and sells hashish, shooting it all on camera and translating into the application.



This is called a cool idea, it hooks, makes you spin it, it acts like a sect, spinning itself. You just push it, then it lives its own life.



And when they tell me that one person poured a decent amount into the promotion of his application and received 10,000 downloads and is now tearing his hair out. I answer him that the idea is complete nonsense. It did not produce a “wow effect” and sank among millions of equally useless and senseless creations.

Idea

As I mentioned above, the idea is the cornerstone of success. This is your all. If you have no idea, you have nothing. I often meet on the forums and in all resources such a text “The idea is nothing, this is nonsense, share it with us.” This is written specifically. Do not believe such advisers.



The idea is worth a fortune. There are thousands and millions of people in the world who will be able to write you a second Vkontakte, a second Facebook and a second Yandex, and in the notorious India there are thousands who want to write you anything for a ridiculous thousand dollars.



Therefore, take care of your idea as the apple of an eye, do not share with it even with your friends, relatives or friends.



There are many people in the world, perhaps even in your surroundings, who without a shadow of a doubt in secret from you realize the idea and launch it before you and it’s far from a fact that you can turn around even if your implementation is better. Wins the one who used to finish Persek, and not the one who showed the best running skills and showed a greater width of the step or ran in a warm fur coat and felt boots. Who was the first in time - he won.

Summarizing

What you need to create a super company?

• People (team)
• Great idea
• Knowledge
• Nerves of steel
• Incredible luck
• Luck
• You must be a great psychologist.

Team, idea. Here is the main thing. Forward. It's time to act. It is time for aging Durov and Brin to retire, the time of their glory has passed, it is time to update the history textbooks and Forbs lists. And who knows, maybe this article reads the one who will cause envy in half the globe in a couple of years. Good luck.