When you start a startup and find out that it is not a startup at all
It happens the same way, you collect a team of guys, invest money and / or attract an investing partner to your project, work day and night for almost a year to offer the world, in my case, of course, your city a unique invention and voila!
You come up with a project in the form of a working prototype to defend yourself on a crash test organized by an entrepreneurial party and they say to you - “Guys, why are you, is this already, in Europe a similar mobile application“ meetap ”is common and everyone uses them, why? you do something in your own way, just take it and copy it!
Honestly, the eye almost fell out when I heard such words from the jury members of this crash test for startups invited to Novosibirsk, i.e. man a priori believes that it is impossible to do something better than foreign projects and you just have to copy everything!
')
The position is wonderful, but it’s certainly not about her, it’s about the unborn startup that already has a certain Western competitor that is present in Russia.
Probably now you have thoughts, but why didn't you immediately google competitors before starting work on a startup? What is there to be surprised if you yourself are looking bad, right? Do you have such thoughts?
Yes, in fact, the right thoughts, which is already there, but before the fact, I have a competitor, then it turns out that this is not my first competitor and not even the second, and if I pick a little more into the past, then it turns out that such startups already there is nowhere to dig in.
Then it turns out that one of the competitors is not something that does not heal, but also pays the organizers for the participants to record through their application! And you don’t have a budget for this, you’d have enough money to refine your ideas and that’s good ...
And everything arrived, you think, how can you make money in such conditions?
Ok, I certainly embellished the limit of my disappointment and the whole picture that I saw at the time of launch of the prototype in January 2017, because at the time of launch I knew only one competitor, probably not unknown to you, meetap, but compared to our prototype seemed just divine! Everything seemed so comfortable and beautiful ...
And here, after 11 months, I am very glad that I did not go to copy my competitors, because at the time of creating the prototype and preparing the structure of my startup I didn’t know about their existence!
Actually, as it turned out, the mitap here in Russia is not particularly developed, rather, only for organizing educational events in the IT sphere for the most part, while our focus is to collect people for spending time together in entertainment and sports , go paintball, play volleyball, etc.
We found closer competitors, but for the most part, they all went only to sports, which again gives us more room for maneuver.
Since I’ve already had a bad start-up behind me and the understanding that it’s impossible to revive money with a simple start-up, especially when a business project is focused on several B2C and B2B planes.
For example, we cannot massively start attracting users with an empty application, where there is nowhere to go, and we cannot attract organizers to an application where there are no users, because after some time they will be disappointed and leave the application.
This is the trouble of all service projects serving the interests of several parties.
In my opinion, there is only one effective way out - you have to make money on this application yourself, i.e. you must have a business whose interests you pursue in your Internet service.
And yes, on the one hand, this is a definite hemorrhoid, because everyone should do his own thing, you say, we should only develop the service and be an unbiased platform with open competition for everyone!
But guys, the working conditions in Russia are such that if you don’t start earning money on your service, then no one will come to you when you start to unwind in the service the direction in which you get the benefit - other organizers in this area will begin to pull up and only So!
And only then your startup starts to develop! When others see that you yourself earn it.
And this is the key to the success of your startup!
So do not be afraid of competitors, you just have to take it and start making money yourself! Thus, you better understand the needs of your users and quickly implement the necessary updates, rather than trying to move at random by adding new features and gadgets, hoping to attract paid customers to them.
In January 2017, we rolled out a terrible beta version of our mobile app “Who to where - friends in interests”, terrible in terms of design and amenities, now of course, also not a fountain, but much better than it was originally, the original idea was to create a catalog of available entertainment in the city, so that users choose what they want to do, book entertainment through the app, and other users can join the event.
Everything was great, they made a catalog, filled it with various kinds of entertainment and not exactly entertainment (they added bathhouses, hookahs) and began to try to drive users out of advertising on Instagram.
Publication of mobile advertising on Instagram is still an adventure, as it turned out, I had to tinker and to be honest, I still haven’t really figured out the pricing for conversion costs, at first it seemed to be cheap at about 15 rubles per click and the installation went, then it reached 80-130 rubles ... in general, we no longer use this advertising tool, did not want to understand, and I liked the target of VK + segment target more.
And the result of advertising in Instagram was about 150 installations and 0 activity.
We tried to advertise for some time, in the application we didn’t implement statistics collection, because in our country, the horse did not lie still, in the main, in our opinion necessary functionality.
But the fact is that having achieved the first 350 installations, we did not receive a single event that the users themselves would create and even request in the social. networks with a request to help figure out how to create an event.
Thus, we came to the understanding of the fact that we should not count on the activity of users, the percentage of initiative people who are ready to organize something is rather small (at least in the audience that we have attracted).
Conclusion number 1 :
And yet, since we advertised the application in general terms, such as “Download and lead an active lifestyle, have fun and enjoy life” (I outlined the text, of course, so that the essence was clear) we were faced with a massive removal of the application, t. to. people installed out of curiosity, did not find events interesting for themselves that were launched in the application and simply deleted the application.
Conclusion number 2 :
Our principle:
As it turned out, this approach was not only effective, but also wildly economical in terms of advertising costs!
We use Target VK for users located in groups of different companies of competitors and for all newly entered there (i.e. undecided users), the Segmento target helps us in this by downloading lists of all new users to the advertising office and there our advertising posts with links to the application.
We started attracting users in this way in May and as of this writing, only 15,677 rubles of CTR from 1 to 5.5 were spent! Number of transitions 1323.
Of course, if there are a lot of directions, otherwise you just risk breaking into parts and not having time anywhere!
Of course, this is a rather slow development option, but in the conditions of limited resources and a great likelihood of inexperience, it is the best option for us to lower all funds into the toilet.
At the same time, competition does not stand still, while we are busy in Novosibirsk, competitors are not asleep and appear in other cities, although they are not yet experienced and they have yet to step on many rakes.
Conclusion number 3:
This means that you can kill two birds with one stone!
1. You will kill the unborn konkretrenov, unless of course your name is on everyone's lips, then it is highly likely that the team will not even get involved in the race, because you are already working and are ahead of them for a year and by experience and the necessary functionality, which still to be done.
2. You can still attract additional funds if you sell your startup, this is not a deductible, but if you can earn money directly from this startup, then you are more likely to find interested city partners by offering them a price incomparable to developing this project on their own.
In our case, these are sporting events: volleyball, football and basketball, they are already generating us consistently about 60 thousand rubles. profits, although with monthly development costs we are still in the red, but your partners will not participate in the development, which means they will immediately earn and popularize your service in your city!
You know how it inspires when in the changing room on volleyball you hear how the players say “Damn, that's great, those who came up with the app!”, “Cool appletuha”, etc., not knowing that next to him the founder of this idea applications :))
Actually, we have most of the users (about 60%) generally came on word of mouth and this is cool!
But of course there are a number of problems over which we puzzle ...
For example, there are events that take place every hour, for example, “Crossfit”, “jumping on trampolines” and we cannot add all the events of one company, since there will be a huge canvas of events for each hour, and adding them to 1 event per day and requiring recording only through the application from their clients - in this case it is absolutely meaningless for them.
By the way, in our case we have another very important rule:
The events that are placed in the application can be accessed only by registering in the application and nothing else, only in this case, users begin to take the application seriously.
After all, if you present a choice to a person: Sign up for an event as before, call, sms, send a message or Vkontakte, or record something differently, establish something for this, deal with it - naturally, they will prefer the old familiar way without even trying.
Although in fact, recording through the application for regular events is more convenient, as practice has shown, and small surveys of sports fans. directions that used to be recorded through VC, ticked off by pluses, then someone wrote a minusik and everyone steamed, how many free places and who goes and does not go and sit there, count the pluses.
In general, from the article has grown some sort of monster, round out
You come up with a project in the form of a working prototype to defend yourself on a crash test organized by an entrepreneurial party and they say to you - “Guys, why are you, is this already, in Europe a similar mobile application“ meetap ”is common and everyone uses them, why? you do something in your own way, just take it and copy it!
Honestly, the eye almost fell out when I heard such words from the jury members of this crash test for startups invited to Novosibirsk, i.e. man a priori believes that it is impossible to do something better than foreign projects and you just have to copy everything!
')
The position is wonderful, but it’s certainly not about her, it’s about the unborn startup that already has a certain Western competitor that is present in Russia.
Probably now you have thoughts, but why didn't you immediately google competitors before starting work on a startup? What is there to be surprised if you yourself are looking bad, right? Do you have such thoughts?
Yes, in fact, the right thoughts, which is already there, but before the fact, I have a competitor, then it turns out that this is not my first competitor and not even the second, and if I pick a little more into the past, then it turns out that such startups already there is nowhere to dig in.
Then it turns out that one of the competitors is not something that does not heal, but also pays the organizers for the participants to record through their application! And you don’t have a budget for this, you’d have enough money to refine your ideas and that’s good ...
And everything arrived, you think, how can you make money in such conditions?
Ok, I certainly embellished the limit of my disappointment and the whole picture that I saw at the time of launch of the prototype in January 2017, because at the time of launch I knew only one competitor, probably not unknown to you, meetap, but compared to our prototype seemed just divine! Everything seemed so comfortable and beautiful ...
And here, after 11 months, I am very glad that I did not go to copy my competitors, because at the time of creating the prototype and preparing the structure of my startup I didn’t know about their existence!
Actually, as it turned out, the mitap here in Russia is not particularly developed, rather, only for organizing educational events in the IT sphere for the most part, while our focus is to collect people for spending time together in entertainment and sports , go paintball, play volleyball, etc.
We found closer competitors, but for the most part, they all went only to sports, which again gives us more room for maneuver.
Since I’ve already had a bad start-up behind me and the understanding that it’s impossible to revive money with a simple start-up, especially when a business project is focused on several B2C and B2B planes.
For example, we cannot massively start attracting users with an empty application, where there is nowhere to go, and we cannot attract organizers to an application where there are no users, because after some time they will be disappointed and leave the application.
This is the trouble of all service projects serving the interests of several parties.
In my opinion, there is only one effective way out - you have to make money on this application yourself, i.e. you must have a business whose interests you pursue in your Internet service.
And yes, on the one hand, this is a definite hemorrhoid, because everyone should do his own thing, you say, we should only develop the service and be an unbiased platform with open competition for everyone!
But guys, the working conditions in Russia are such that if you don’t start earning money on your service, then no one will come to you when you start to unwind in the service the direction in which you get the benefit - other organizers in this area will begin to pull up and only So!
And only then your startup starts to develop! When others see that you yourself earn it.
And this is the key to the success of your startup!
If you yourself can earn on your startup as a client, then your startup is viable!
So do not be afraid of competitors, you just have to take it and start making money yourself! Thus, you better understand the needs of your users and quickly implement the necessary updates, rather than trying to move at random by adding new features and gadgets, hoping to attract paid customers to them.
In January 2017, we rolled out a terrible beta version of our mobile app “Who to where - friends in interests”, terrible in terms of design and amenities, now of course, also not a fountain, but much better than it was originally, the original idea was to create a catalog of available entertainment in the city, so that users choose what they want to do, book entertainment through the app, and other users can join the event.
Everything was great, they made a catalog, filled it with various kinds of entertainment and not exactly entertainment (they added bathhouses, hookahs) and began to try to drive users out of advertising on Instagram.
Publication of mobile advertising on Instagram is still an adventure, as it turned out, I had to tinker and to be honest, I still haven’t really figured out the pricing for conversion costs, at first it seemed to be cheap at about 15 rubles per click and the installation went, then it reached 80-130 rubles ... in general, we no longer use this advertising tool, did not want to understand, and I liked the target of VK + segment target more.
And the result of advertising in Instagram was about 150 installations and 0 activity.
We tried to advertise for some time, in the application we didn’t implement statistics collection, because in our country, the horse did not lie still, in the main, in our opinion necessary functionality.
But the fact is that having achieved the first 350 installations, we did not receive a single event that the users themselves would create and even request in the social. networks with a request to help figure out how to create an event.
Thus, we came to the understanding of the fact that we should not count on the activity of users, the percentage of initiative people who are ready to organize something is rather small (at least in the audience that we have attracted).
Conclusion number 1 :
It is necessary to solve the issue with the fullness of the service, to give something for which users will use your service and keep the application on their phone.
And yet, since we advertised the application in general terms, such as “Download and lead an active lifestyle, have fun and enjoy life” (I outlined the text, of course, so that the essence was clear) we were faced with a massive removal of the application, t. to. people installed out of curiosity, did not find events interesting for themselves that were launched in the application and simply deleted the application.
Conclusion number 2 :
If the service involves a lot of areas with different content and you can’t immediately provide your users with a complete or at least more or less decent choice, then it’s worth developing the project and attracting users only in running directions.
Our principle:
Each user involved in the application must have an anchor direction active in the application, for the sake of which he will keep our application on his phone and use it regularly.
As it turned out, this approach was not only effective, but also wildly economical in terms of advertising costs!
We use Target VK for users located in groups of different companies of competitors and for all newly entered there (i.e. undecided users), the Segmento target helps us in this by downloading lists of all new users to the advertising office and there our advertising posts with links to the application.
We started attracting users in this way in May and as of this writing, only 15,677 rubles of CTR from 1 to 5.5 were spent! Number of transitions 1323.
I recommend to break down your service in areas and promote and fill it in parts so as not to choke!
Of course, if there are a lot of directions, otherwise you just risk breaking into parts and not having time anywhere!
Of course, this is a rather slow development option, but in the conditions of limited resources and a great likelihood of inexperience, it is the best option for us to lower all funds into the toilet.
At the same time, competition does not stand still, while we are busy in Novosibirsk, competitors are not asleep and appear in other cities, although they are not yet experienced and they have yet to step on many rakes.
Conclusion number 3:
It is better to foresee the possibility of scaling your service! And taking into account the specifics of our business, it is better that each city has a separate team.
This means that you can kill two birds with one stone!
1. You will kill the unborn konkretrenov, unless of course your name is on everyone's lips, then it is highly likely that the team will not even get involved in the race, because you are already working and are ahead of them for a year and by experience and the necessary functionality, which still to be done.
2. You can still attract additional funds if you sell your startup, this is not a deductible, but if you can earn money directly from this startup, then you are more likely to find interested city partners by offering them a price incomparable to developing this project on their own.
Look for directions that would bring you income in your application / service and try to quickly go to other cities so that work would begin there and not have to butt up for the market in the city!
In our case, these are sporting events: volleyball, football and basketball, they are already generating us consistently about 60 thousand rubles. profits, although with monthly development costs we are still in the red, but your partners will not participate in the development, which means they will immediately earn and popularize your service in your city!
You know how it inspires when in the changing room on volleyball you hear how the players say “Damn, that's great, those who came up with the app!”, “Cool appletuha”, etc., not knowing that next to him the founder of this idea applications :))
Actually, we have most of the users (about 60%) generally came on word of mouth and this is cool!
But of course there are a number of problems over which we puzzle ...
For example, there are events that take place every hour, for example, “Crossfit”, “jumping on trampolines” and we cannot add all the events of one company, since there will be a huge canvas of events for each hour, and adding them to 1 event per day and requiring recording only through the application from their clients - in this case it is absolutely meaningless for them.
By the way, in our case we have another very important rule:
The events that are placed in the application can be accessed only by registering in the application and nothing else, only in this case, users begin to take the application seriously.
After all, if you present a choice to a person: Sign up for an event as before, call, sms, send a message or Vkontakte, or record something differently, establish something for this, deal with it - naturally, they will prefer the old familiar way without even trying.
Although in fact, recording through the application for regular events is more convenient, as practice has shown, and small surveys of sports fans. directions that used to be recorded through VC, ticked off by pluses, then someone wrote a minusik and everyone steamed, how many free places and who goes and does not go and sit there, count the pluses.
In general, from the article has grown some sort of monster, round out
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/343766/
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