How we lost 150,000 and closed the project

Hey. My name is Andrey Vlasenko and I want to tell you about our stupidity, because of which we have lost several months of time and about 150,000 rubles.

And it was like that

A little more than a year ago, my friend Vasily Mezko and I decided to make a unique and necessary for everyone product. At least we thought so. Everything went according to the standard scenario: Idea -> thoughts about millions -> project implementation -> time and money draining.

They usually say: "But they got a good experience." Yeah. Only if you think well, you could not receive it.
')
The essence of the service was that VKontakte are very common draws with physical prizes, where the winners are usually one or several people. But, the last couple of years, mechanics are gaining popularity, when the author encourages subscribers to make reposts for some endless product: pdf instruction, e-book, webinar recording, etc. Moreover, in 99% of cases, the author of such a draw calls for reposting, subscribing to his public and writing personal messages to him in order to collect his prize. I saw similar posts where there were more than 1000 reposts ...

The idea is fire!

We thought. And they decided to automate this chaos. After all, we can track those who join the community or repost its records, which means we can give access to certain content only to those who have fulfilled the required conditions: repost, subscription or repost + subscription

As a result, the admin of the public is released from the tedious distribution of monotonous messages to those who fulfilled the conditions of the draw, and the subscriber receives what he needs so much immediately after the conditions are met. Cool? In theory, yes.

Thought over the interface. Wrote the code. Everything is working. Now we need to somehow sell it and then it started.

You are breaking VK rules

So we were answered by several people in the very first SMM public, where we placed a post about our invention, and some even refused to advertise for money, calling our brainchild “gray mechanics”.

And here. Drumroll. We decided to read the rules VKontakte.

Why not? The service is ready. Time and money are invested, now is the time to think about, but in general, does not our product violate the rules of the site where we are going to make millions?

Read. Grieve. VK rules are written in such a way that the same action can be interpreted in different ways. It seems to be possible, and seemingly impossible. We decided to ask for support and received an answer in the style of the rules described above.

" Do it. And we will see and maybe block, or maybe not block "

Oh him

We thought and scored on the project for a long time. Fortunately, it was not the main child and we had something to do. But time passed. The frozen project became depressed every time the thought of it appeared in our bright minds. And there was also news that Twitter launched the same mechanics, and again we thought that we should resume the project, because the direction is promising.

We started to think about where to get the traffic and I wrote to a fairly well-known person with a proposal to test our product. Surprisingly, we received a positive response and agreement to test the service. Naturally, when a person who is an authority for you in many things, approves of your product, motivation comes by itself.

Ayaz approves, but no VKontakte

Further, everything again went wrong for the scenario that somehow intersects with the millions in our pockets. Ayaz wrote that VC support does not endorse our idea. I decided to finally understand the question and asked the support the most understandable and capacious questions that cannot be answered evasively and received an answer that cannot be interpreted ambiguously.

Hello Andrey! You can. We do not see anything forbidden in it yet.

We do not violate the rules, steep peppers are ready to test a blog service with an auditor 200k +, Twitter introduces such mechanics - it means we are on the right track.

Hire an administrator and start traffic

For the New Year holidays, we found a very good administrator for our public, ordered a design, set up an advertisement, and it seemed that everything was about to go uphill, but no. On a cold winter evening, messages arrive from the administration of Vkontakte:

"The application" SmmReact "(vk.com/app5478456) has been blocked. "

And here comes the realization that somewhere we made a fatal mistake. Somewhere at the very beginning of the journey, when we tried to make a service on the site, the rules of which we did not even read.

Results

As a result, the project costing about 150,000 rubles was left without the possibility of monetization. You can, of course, swim against the current and fight with the support service and try to circumvent the restrictions (especially since we had a solution in this regard), but there is a big risk that VC will start to block the communities of service customers, many of which have invested in Their projects are much larger than we are.

Therefore, we, with a clear conscience and a fresh mind, decided to forget about this project and concentrate on our main service Constructor of sales scripts - Scriptogenerator , which does not violate anyone's rules and carries much more benefit for our customers. But, I will tell about it a bit later.

PS Service SmmReact, which was discussed now fully functioning as a separate site, but we no longer plan to do it, so if you have a desire to become a Jedi and go against the rules, write , we can transfer the product for a small fee with a full transfer of copyright right