Founder's advice. Evgeny Luchinin, Lokals

Evgeny Luchinin, more recently, was perceived by many as a designer, author of numerous famous projects. He worked with Habr, Futuriko, Look At Me, Dream Industries, Poster, Rambler and others. Head of his own design studio , employing mutual friends. But in recent years, Eugene is a start-up, a person actively developing a service for renting real estate without intermediaries "Lokals" . Taking advantage of the opportunity, I turned on the voice recorder, and Zhenya told how everything happened and from design he moved to business management based on an Internet service.

Why did Locals become the service that you occupy all your time with today? I know that you were a designer, and at some point became the founder of the startup The Locals. How did this project come about? Why did you decide that this business should be continued?
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In fact, nothing of what is now in the Locals, was not originally intended: everything was triggered by demand. At first it was a blog that Danila Antonovsky led as part of Look At Me. There we met. Then he gradually grew into service. To make it, it was not necessary to invent anything - the idea was already formulated by people. They themselves sent requests for accommodation of apartments, and we only had to make a convenient form in order to speed up the process and free our own time from posting to the blog.

And then he began to fill himself - just as the services with UGC somehow began to fill themselves. Although it seemed, this requires a marketing budget. But here Danila made a great contribution: he has many friends on Facebook and he rocked the group well, in which we made the most beautiful apartments. Therefore, we scored the first audience due to the fact that we had a pretty strong group on Facebook.
Well and, actually, this audience began to form internal content and requirements for how this service should work.

Initially, Danila called me as a designer. The project did not bring money then, so there was nothing to offer besides a share in the project. So I became a co-founder. How come I was the only one of the co-founders? It was just gradually becoming clear who wants and can devote time to this, and who does not.

What conclusions did you draw from the situation that arose with your partner in this project? It is clear that if you want to do well, do it yourself ... but in real life this is not always the case. You still have to delegate, distribute, and so on. What mistakes did you make about which you can say that they definitely won't happen again?

Looking back, I perceive the whole process as a natural flow of things: everyone did their job. As a result, the service began to gain momentum and demanded more time. At some point, it seemed to me that I was putting in more energy and began to demand this from Danila. But he is not a man who can plunge into operational activity and keep his finger on the pulse all the time. Therefore, he himself was not comfortable. And there is nothing in it - it is quite a natural process.

There were no problems, except one: we did not think in advance about the legal side. We understood how much each of us percent. The operational activity was on my IP, the domain name hung on the physical account of Danila. As a result, everything, of course, was ruined, but there was a difficult moment of discussing all the conditions. And with the involvement of new partners in the project were difficult just because everything was not decorated.

That is, the advice would have sounded like this: “Fix a documented agreement and responsibility ashore”

And it is not necessary to involve any supercorporate lawyers. This is a standard LLC, in which the shares will be registered, on which all intellectual property, code and so on will be issued. And it is better to think in advance that everyone who is related to the project - programmers, designers and others - should document to you the transfer of intellectual property rights created by them in the process. Even if not working officially.
This simple set of documents will save you time and nerves when you come to someone for advice or money.

You say that all this happened naturally ... Now the development is somehow different? Or is feedback from users still the main tool for developing development plans?

I have been doing different projects for a long time. I had a project called Taaasty . This is a social platform on which people blog. There is a teenage audience, so there is a lot of feedback. After working with this project, I had a certain filter lined up in my head that helps filter out offers that do not contribute to the improvement of the service.
We spend a lot of time to take into account the wishes of users. However, they do not always have the vision that we have.

And how is this filtering done? What question is important to ask yourself or the user at the moment when he makes a proposal?

If you remember what happened a couple of years ago, there were such criteria - it is difficult / easy to implement, there is time / no time. And now we have a multiplatform story - a web, iOS application, soon there will be an Android. In the near future, the bot will start. And this is all one API, so you have to think about how this or that innovation will work on different platforms.

Well, and besides, there is one more criterion - what benefit in terms of money it can bring. Be that as it may, we now live on our own money. Of course, we can do everything that people ask for, but at some point we will dig in these stories and spend a lot of money.

There are indicators that directly affect our turnover. This, for example, the number of apartments on the site. The more and better we offer, the more users buy subscriptions. Therefore, development related to the quality of the base and the number of proposals is our priority. This is metric number one.
And the number of clicks between the beginning of the search and its completion is a secondary metric for us. We are also working with this, but not so actively.

You said that you exist at your own expense. Have you tried to look for money? Did someone try to give them at different stages of the service development? What do you think now about attracting third-party funds?

These are two different rooms, so to speak. In one room, you are in complete control of the situation, but limited by your own means, and to some extent, the speed of development of the project depends not only on your desire. If you want to make some kind of feature, you have to wait until a certain amount of resources become available, when there will be money and so on.

When you work with external money, that's another story. You can dream, try ... If something does not work out - drop it. You do not lose anything, because the money is not yours.

Recently I talked with the guys and from Qlean - I met Sasha Korovin. They went this way. In the first year, they spent several tens of millions of rubles on experiments, marketing channels, to “feel” the whole story. They made some conclusions, began to move on, raised the next round. This path has the right to life.

We have another way: we put fewer experiments, not all channels have tried, and so on. But after several years of the project’s existence, we can proudly declare that we are able to scale up, that we have tested the channels and have the potential for future investments.

Do you regret that you did not attract third-party funds? If you do not regret - why?

No, I do not regret that we still have not taken them. Loss of control is one of the reasons. The second reason is when investors come in, the project starts working on metrics. And the last thing I want is to show for the next meeting that we grew up on this parameter; no matter what happens with the project, what users are writing, the main thing is to get to the next round with such indicators.

No, we want to work with those metrics that seem important to us. And when we need investments, we will be able to act from a position of strength: "We are already profitable, but if you want to invest by such an assessment, please." We do not want to take investments in situations of need.

What would you say to your child if he made a project and was still in the beginning? What parting words did you give to a man who follows the same path?

In general, in Russia this whole story with startups, subscription models, investments is rather difficult to scale. Therefore, you have to somehow adjust, get out. Our history has come to the point where we are now, just because for a long time, apart from Locals, I had a studio and other small businesses.

I will be very happy if the start-up will be in a situation in which he can not think about how to provide for himself, and will only deal with a new project. As far as I understand, in the same Valley all the conditions for this are created. None of the founders will think like: "I have a startup, but I do not know where to get money for food."

A person must have an internal drive about the idea that he implements. Well, the project should be self-sustaining.

The moment must be true, right? I often hear this. Especially talk about this designers. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the designer knows the value of their time. I have friends who say that a startup can be done under the wing of a mother. But at that moment when you are already in the big world, in which everyone wants to “eat you”, unfortunately, very rarely people have such fateful projects as Facebook.

This is one of the factors. Some element of fate exists. But it seems to me that you can move in small steps, test some small hypotheses, without rushing headlong into it. When the Locals started, all three founders had their own projects at that time, which did not prevent this from growing into a big project. Do not think that you need to quit everything - work, family, go anywhere.

That is, do not think that any startup should be started as a big project, where you are absolutely responsible for everything. And if something does not happen, then you die.
Yes. You just need to confirm some guesses, make sure that it is a working story, wait for the moment, as the project starts to bring a fairly large amount of money. And only then think about quitting work, quitting everything.

But in general, those 20% of the time besides the main work is enough to build a prototype of almost any project, to test and personally start calling people around or send invitations through Facebook. For this you just need a little energy.

You always did a lot of different things. You have had many successful projects. Here are the Locals for today one of them. Do you already know now what will be the next project for which you will spend your 20% of the time? Or maybe there is already something where you are trying out some hypotheses?

Now there is nothing like that. I am now in the head is the process of scrolling options. Now I have a lot of parameters that the next project should satisfy. But there are so many of these parameters that so far none of the projects I have scrolled over are stuck there. Must match a bunch of factors.

So, the next idea should have at least all the current parameters that you consider important for success?

I am quite a pragmatic person. There are technological startups - for example, face recognition. Such projects are quite risky to do. In such stories, I just will not play. I am pretty sure that I am not a person of technology.

For me, it is important that this is a living project that could start earning pretty quickly. That is, it turns out three simple parameters - a good project, high market demand and the availability of monetization methods.