6 tips on launching a start-up designer anything

Designers of documents, sweaters, resumes, bots, websites, posts for social networks - such projects are constantly caught the eye. The concept of the designer is really relevant and universal for many products and services. But why some designers like Tilda “fly up”, and many fail at the very beginning of the way? Let's try to figure out what errors lead to failure and how to approach the creation of the constructor correctly.

Do not create a constructor for the sake of the constructor

You did awesome (as it seems to you) designer of crocheted microfibre tablecloths, but for some reason nobody buys your wonder products. And all because the buyer does not want a month to wait for the production of the order, or overpay for customization. It is easier and cheaper for him to buy a finished tablecloth. “It may turn out that the designer is only suitable for synthetic examples, and without it the real task is cheaper and simpler to perform,” says Sergey Bazhenov, CEO of Clevertens . You must make sure that factors such as price, interface complexity, or the speed at which the product is manufactured will not detract from your competitive advantage.



Anastasia Andrizhinevskaya, founder of clothing designer Aveeva, talks about how her project manages to win against the competition: “Our competitors are all market players in the production and sale of clothing, from the studio to large retailers. And our competitive advantage is that our project has integrated in itself all the positive aspects of the existing approaches to ordering clothes, leveling out the inconvenience. Everything is fast, easy, high quality and at the price of a mass market. ” It turns out that the designer of clothes solves the problems of fitting clothes and matching the specific tastes of the client, but at the same time does not “overreact” according to other important parameters for the client.



“Creating a new designer, you take the same steps as in any startup - analyzing the needs of the market and competitors, working with the audience and trying to get out of it an understanding of the value for which it is ready to pay. But the most important thing to understand is that people come to the designer not to use the designer, but to get a certain result in a simpler and more budgetary way, ”says Dmitry Molchanov, product manager of the calculator designer uCalc .

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“ We need to know what constitutes the main problem when trying to solve the same problem without a constructor. Ideally, you should initially be in business, solving the same problem with “hands” in order to know where to dig, ”concludes Sergey Bazhenov.

Do not create a constructor in one night.

The designer of something is a long time, if we are talking about a high-quality, useful and complex product, and not an application that helps to choose a print on a t-shirt. It is necessary to carefully consider all possible user interactions with the designer and as the need arises to adapt the project to his needs.



Kirill Grishanin, WB – Tech partner, explains development: “Before developing something, you need to design and prescribe all possible situations (the program’s responses to user actions - test cases). In the case of the designer, the number of user scripts is very large, which is why they are time-consuming to plan. ”



Kirill cites the example of a successful startup Designma Readymag and emphasizes that the project has been created for several years: “As it is now, the project was done for three years exactly. Another of the most successful is Tilda. Both projects developed very gradually, they were not going to immediately release as many features as there are now. ”

Add templates and popular solutions

The designer will have to be without popular solutions, especially if the interface is complex. “Website builders will need ready-made website templates like air. Application Designer - ready-made applications for popular tasks. And so on. Moreover, initially it is you who will have to develop them, ”says Sergey Bazhenov.

Do not overdo it with "phishing"

No need to try to hit the client with “the scope of opportunities”, you would rather confuse him. For a person it is important to quickly understand where, what and how to do.



“There is a golden rule: make all the most important settings on the first screen and classify them well. Determine the minimum set of the most valuable features, and all additional or complex settings that are useful only to experienced users, hide under the spoiler, in the documentation, and if you can do it at all in a separate paid tariff, ”says Oleg Lisovenko, product manager of social designer. widgets for uSocial sites.

Add tips

Help the user, otherwise he will leave or make a mistake. “Your user is left alone with the system, and if he doesn’t understand something and is not motivated enough to write to tech support (be sure to place a link to a contact form or online chat in a prominent place), he will stop working in the constructor. Clues are what bring him to the target action.



At the start, we ourselves made this mistake by not adding hints to some fields. For example, by creating a set of social network buttons for a site, a person had to indicate the address of his resource. Prior to the introduction of a hint to the site address field, people regularly entered invalid data there (for example, they gave a link to a social network, and not to their site). By adding a clear hint on what to insert in what form, we reduced the number of input errors to 1%, ”says Oleg Lisovenko.

Test, test and test again, what has already been tested.

A long but instructive story is shared by Irina Cherepanova, product director of uKit : “One of the important lessons for us is experiments with the monetization model. Two years ago, we started as a site builder with a trial model (you get time to test, and from a certain day have to pay for the system) and a single tariff. The hypothesis that small companies and private specialists would be willing to pay a few dollars for the site was confirmed, but at the same time we conducted split testing, showing parts of new users and different conditions: freemium.



After several split tests, we were faced with a fact: the user stayed with us more often and was better converted into paying on the freemium. The shareware version generated more money, so in January 2016 we switched to it.



At the same time, the product, the market, the economy, or dozens of factors, some of which you do not always know for sure (for example, we did not immediately find out how the weather affects payment schedules, but there is a connection), are in constant change. We decided to recheck the previously obtained findings. Periodically returned to the tests "trial against freemium." In the second year, we saw that the shareware model, which had the important effect of speeding up the base (by the end of the first year we had 300,000 users, and the second - already 1.3 million), appears to be less profitable at a distance.



Tests showed that with the development of a product, people began to see more value in it and feel a return on the result of working in it (you are selling not the designer, but the result). From this July, we re-returned to the trial model for new users, retaining the freemium for those who chose it when meeting with us. But this does not mean that we will not recheck the current conclusions further. "