Rakes, which we managed to step on
Usually in company blogs it is customary to write about successes, and failures not to advertise. Although reading about mistakes and conclusions made on their basis can be much more interesting and useful than about achievements. Today we want to share with you all the major mistakes that we made from the moment the idea arose to the beginning of the construction of the first real houses . All errors are in the form of conclusions and recommendations, following which, these errors could have been avoided.
IT is full of investments. They like to write media about projects that have received venture money and built an effective business system on them. But there are a lot of projects that have spent a lot of effort on the search for investments - instead of real work - and in the end could not take off. Of course, nobody writes anything about such projects. As a result, many have the impression that the search for investments is a simple, correct and, in general, the main way of development of the project.
I believe that most projects (especially at an early stage), the idea of ​​finding investment money causes tremendous harm. As a treatment for this obsessive idea, I would suggest using the thesis MONEY NO ONE as a mantra. If you fix it well in your head, it allows you to switch efforts from writing presentations and walking through countless meetings to really important things:
At the beginning of the journey, it seemed unrealistic to finance the village project from its own funds, working on ordinary programmer work. Because of the great response after the first article on Habré, it seemed that everything would be easy with investments. I killed dozens of hours for the preparation of presentations, financial plans and meetings. Spending imaginary investment money is easy and pleasant - so the expenses indicated a lot of unimportant garbage that you would never do when it comes to your own money.
')
In general, it was only when a vague awareness began to creep into my head that NO ONE GAVE MONEY did the matter really begin to move. In a few months, I had to find a way to double the salary, find a suitable site, pay the first installment and start land survey work.
To start sales and start construction, the site had to be first delimited. Surveying is such a procedure for the legal separation of one site into several small ones. By this time, we already had a planning solution ready, that is, no creative work or other intellectual efforts were required of the surveying company.
In a nightmare, I could not imagine that instead of the promised 3 months, this procedure, which seemed simple at first glance, would take a whole year. At the same time, there were certain bureaucratic delays on the part of the administration, but still it is necessary to recognize that the main reason is the extreme lack of professionalism of the contractor, that is, in the end, our joint in its selection.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this. If the work you are going to delegate is a blocker for all the follow-up, you need to:
Many people who have not tried building in practice have a common bug in their heads. They want to live in a tree house, in a six-sided house, in a domed house or (God forbid) in some gingerbread house or in general a mushroom house. If the tree house can still be somehow explained by evolution, then the nature of the other manifestations is completely inexplicable.
Unfortunately, I, too, was subject to this dangerous ailment. It seemed common sense to make futuristic architecture in an innovative village. Especially liked the house with a semicircular roof, like these:
We have allocated a special recreational zone in the village, where it is planned to place small guest houses, cafes, a nursery and sports grounds, etc. While the land survey lasted, we could not start building real houses. Then it was decided to try out this brilliant futuristic concept in the guest houses. Moreover, there are precedents for the implementation of the idea just for such a functional:
At that time we had not yet acquired an architect in the team and our construction company. Therefore, they themselves slightly "adapted" the design of these buildings (the so-called camping grounds) to our needs - so that there was a bathroom and more space inside, they found a brigade of vigorous builders and launched development. Here's what happened in the end:
I have listened to hundreds of witty comments about the appearance of the resulting structure. Future neighbors and other friends who have visited the village, now troll me camping, as soon as they see something semicircular. "Hangar", "Shell" and "Armor" - the most innocent of all the labels that were glued to this poor building .
In general, here is a list of problems that are guaranteed to lead to an attempt to use such atypical solutions in architecture:
As a result, the experience of this building completely cured me of craving for unusual architecture. Still, we are planning to bring the camping-base story to the victorious end - to remake it and make it look normal. Simply, it translates into a little bit of other money, which is now more important elsewhere - we are beginning the stage of active construction of houses and communications.
We are well able to do so that "this thing worked." Usually this requires remarkable abilities and common sense - therefore we can evaluate the adequacy of the design quite well and even give good advice on how to improve it. But we should not go into any design issues entirely!
An example with a camping sub-file is an extra confirmation of this. At that time, we didn’t have a designer in the team, so I, according to a good start-up tradition, decided to design it myself. Unfortunately, the difference between architecture and IT is that design errors are slightly more expensive to correct here.
In general, immediately after the experience with the camping site, we began an intensive search for the designer in the team. We were incredibly lucky - one of my old acquaintance of the last few years was engaged in designing cottages in expensive Moscow villages. By this time, he was already full of Moscow, returned to his historic homeland, and happily switched to designing a functional and practical style that now forms the basis of the first houses in the village.
The first post about the village of programmers for the day read more than 100 thousand people. The wave was picked up by several regional and federal media, and the resulting overall response was impressive. The next few posts were less interesting, but the traffic and the amount of feedback was still impressive. It seemed that it will always be so.
However, land-development and construction is not an IT industry. No matter how it would make you mad, here, without a lot of money, everything moves in a turtle (compared to startups) pace. Turning at the very beginning not to go there, we lost a lot of time, lost interest in the media and Habr's subscribers. When we finally got back on the right path and were able to write about it, we immediately received a ban on Habré due to the changed policy regarding the publication of our projects. When, finally, we managed to regain access and the administration gave us a startup account, all non-technical posts of Habr were transferred to GeekTimes with a much smaller audience.
I have this to what. Habr is a unique resource and many startups received a start in life only thanks to the blog “I am promoting”, which helped create the first wave of traffic. But to rely only on Habr today is impossible. It is still effective to use to get traffic, but all this traffic must be recorded on Twitter. If we did this at the very beginning, we would now have built up the entire first sector, and not the first street, as now.
Despite all the mistakes made and difficulties encountered, we are moving forward. They delimited the first sector, stretched electricity, formed a profile of the future road inside the village, bought a trench and conventional excavators for laying communications.
At the moment, 4 families from different regions of the Russian Federation have joined us. A peculiar tag cloud, characterizing the geography of the birth of participants, currently looks like this: Peter 2 , Murom 2 , Buzuluk 1 , Kirov 1 , Tambov 1 , Togliatti 1 . All 4 houses are at different stages - in the first the decoration is already starting, the fourth is still at the design stage. Some of the guys at the time of construction moved to Kirov, and we gradually formed an excellent get-together of future migrants. For the summer, several more visits are planned for guests - potential neighbors from other cities. So join us!
As always, you can get acquainted with our concept on the site - poselok-programmistov.ru , follow the news on Twitter - twitter.com/it_poselok , and follow the construction progress on Instagram - instagram.com/it_poselok
1. No one will give money
IT is full of investments. They like to write media about projects that have received venture money and built an effective business system on them. But there are a lot of projects that have spent a lot of effort on the search for investments - instead of real work - and in the end could not take off. Of course, nobody writes anything about such projects. As a result, many have the impression that the search for investments is a simple, correct and, in general, the main way of development of the project.
I believe that most projects (especially at an early stage), the idea of ​​finding investment money causes tremendous harm. As a treatment for this obsessive idea, I would suggest using the thesis MONEY NO ONE as a mantra. If you fix it well in your head, it allows you to switch efforts from writing presentations and walking through countless meetings to really important things:
- Finding a business model that requires less money;
- Work on the real value of the product;
- Finding a solution to how to earn more with current activities.
At the beginning of the journey, it seemed unrealistic to finance the village project from its own funds, working on ordinary programmer work. Because of the great response after the first article on Habré, it seemed that everything would be easy with investments. I killed dozens of hours for the preparation of presentations, financial plans and meetings. Spending imaginary investment money is easy and pleasant - so the expenses indicated a lot of unimportant garbage that you would never do when it comes to your own money.
')
In general, it was only when a vague awareness began to creep into my head that NO ONE GAVE MONEY did the matter really begin to move. In a few months, I had to find a way to double the salary, find a suitable site, pay the first installment and start land survey work.
In fairness, it is worth saying that as a result of all these efforts, I was still offered money, but on terms that would completely kill the project. Negotiations with several developers immediately ended with a proposal to declare the object already under construction as a “programmers village” and ensure sales for the corresponding remuneration.
2. Always punch contractors
To start sales and start construction, the site had to be first delimited. Surveying is such a procedure for the legal separation of one site into several small ones. By this time, we already had a planning solution ready, that is, no creative work or other intellectual efforts were required of the surveying company.
In a nightmare, I could not imagine that instead of the promised 3 months, this procedure, which seemed simple at first glance, would take a whole year. At the same time, there were certain bureaucratic delays on the part of the administration, but still it is necessary to recognize that the main reason is the extreme lack of professionalism of the contractor, that is, in the end, our joint in its selection.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this. If the work you are going to delegate is a blocker for all the follow-up, you need to:
- Carefully monitor the selected contractor. At the same time, the presence of a large office and dozens of employees does not give any guarantee. The only criterion can only be the number of negative reviews about his work.
- Call them every day and demand a result. So you can get tired very quickly, but create an additional incentive to quickly finish your work in order to get rid of you.
3. Stay away from atypical solutions.
Many people who have not tried building in practice have a common bug in their heads. They want to live in a tree house, in a six-sided house, in a domed house or (God forbid) in some gingerbread house or in general a mushroom house. If the tree house can still be somehow explained by evolution, then the nature of the other manifestations is completely inexplicable.
Unfortunately, I, too, was subject to this dangerous ailment. It seemed common sense to make futuristic architecture in an innovative village. Especially liked the house with a semicircular roof, like these:
We have allocated a special recreational zone in the village, where it is planned to place small guest houses, cafes, a nursery and sports grounds, etc. While the land survey lasted, we could not start building real houses. Then it was decided to try out this brilliant futuristic concept in the guest houses. Moreover, there are precedents for the implementation of the idea just for such a functional:
At that time we had not yet acquired an architect in the team and our construction company. Therefore, they themselves slightly "adapted" the design of these buildings (the so-called camping grounds) to our needs - so that there was a bathroom and more space inside, they found a brigade of vigorous builders and launched development. Here's what happened in the end:
I have listened to hundreds of witty comments about the appearance of the resulting structure. Future neighbors and other friends who have visited the village, now troll me camping, as soon as they see something semicircular. "Hangar", "Shell" and "Armor" - the most innocent of all the labels that were glued to this poor building .
In general, here is a list of problems that are guaranteed to lead to an attempt to use such atypical solutions in architecture:
- Non-standard surfaces do not fit well with each other;
- Finishing materials in all stores, it turns out, are sharpened only for orthogonal solutions;
- The builders will think that the customer has gone mad and will go for quality;
- All not fully thought out design decisions builders will take on their own;
- Errors in design are much more difficult to predict and they are much harder to beat the shape of the result than in the case of traditional solutions;
As a result, the experience of this building completely cured me of craving for unusual architecture. Still, we are planning to bring the camping-base story to the victorious end - to remake it and make it look normal. Simply, it translates into a little bit of other money, which is now more important elsewhere - we are beginning the stage of active construction of houses and communications.
4. Techies have no place in design.
We are well able to do so that "this thing worked." Usually this requires remarkable abilities and common sense - therefore we can evaluate the adequacy of the design quite well and even give good advice on how to improve it. But we should not go into any design issues entirely!
An example with a camping sub-file is an extra confirmation of this. At that time, we didn’t have a designer in the team, so I, according to a good start-up tradition, decided to design it myself. Unfortunately, the difference between architecture and IT is that design errors are slightly more expensive to correct here.
In general, immediately after the experience with the camping site, we began an intensive search for the designer in the team. We were incredibly lucky - one of my old acquaintance of the last few years was engaged in designing cottages in expensive Moscow villages. By this time, he was already full of Moscow, returned to his historic homeland, and happily switched to designing a functional and practical style that now forms the basis of the first houses in the village.
5. Twitter!
The first post about the village of programmers for the day read more than 100 thousand people. The wave was picked up by several regional and federal media, and the resulting overall response was impressive. The next few posts were less interesting, but the traffic and the amount of feedback was still impressive. It seemed that it will always be so.
However, land-development and construction is not an IT industry. No matter how it would make you mad, here, without a lot of money, everything moves in a turtle (compared to startups) pace. Turning at the very beginning not to go there, we lost a lot of time, lost interest in the media and Habr's subscribers. When we finally got back on the right path and were able to write about it, we immediately received a ban on Habré due to the changed policy regarding the publication of our projects. When, finally, we managed to regain access and the administration gave us a startup account, all non-technical posts of Habr were transferred to GeekTimes with a much smaller audience.
I have this to what. Habr is a unique resource and many startups received a start in life only thanks to the blog “I am promoting”, which helped create the first wave of traffic. But to rely only on Habr today is impossible. It is still effective to use to get traffic, but all this traffic must be recorded on Twitter. If we did this at the very beginning, we would now have built up the entire first sector, and not the first street, as now.
Current status
Despite all the mistakes made and difficulties encountered, we are moving forward. They delimited the first sector, stretched electricity, formed a profile of the future road inside the village, bought a trench and conventional excavators for laying communications.
At the moment, 4 families from different regions of the Russian Federation have joined us. A peculiar tag cloud, characterizing the geography of the birth of participants, currently looks like this: Peter 2 , Murom 2 , Buzuluk 1 , Kirov 1 , Tambov 1 , Togliatti 1 . All 4 houses are at different stages - in the first the decoration is already starting, the fourth is still at the design stage. Some of the guys at the time of construction moved to Kirov, and we gradually formed an excellent get-together of future migrants. For the summer, several more visits are planned for guests - potential neighbors from other cities. So join us!
As always, you can get acquainted with our concept on the site - poselok-programmistov.ru , follow the news on Twitter - twitter.com/it_poselok , and follow the construction progress on Instagram - instagram.com/it_poselok
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/367307/
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