How to change your life by starting the development of the OpenSource project (continued)

Hello my young startups! In continuation of the previous article I would like to answer some of the questions in the comments and describe in more detail the development of my project.

How to recruit a team

The project has 4 developers including me and the content manager. I don’t have any finance for professional and strong middle / senior developers, and made a decision to recruit people for training and grow my own staff. At the same time, there is no rigid binding to the project, I transfer knowledge on a voluntary basis and how they will manage and where to go to work is the decision of the person.

How to train people and how the learning process takes place is a separate topic, but if we speak briefly, we go through the basics of Ruby / Rails testing. In addition to technical knowledge, an important part is soft skills, a person must be able to go out of the comfort zone, cope with stressful situations, be proactive and not stand still in self-development.
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Social Network Statistics

For two months on Facebook, the total number of subscribers is almost 961 people.



7 publications with information about updates of the project were published, the total audience coverage was 100,679, the number of actions performed with the records was 314 (reposts, comments, clicks).


Statistics for the last month



For the sake of experiment, we brought the page to instagram and simply duplicate the content. Statistics are more modest than on Facebook, but nonetheless.





Some analytics of site visits

Task statistics

The total number of tasks is currently completed 71 (including bugs and tasks related to non-technical tasks).



The project is hosted on gitlab, CI / CD is connected (autodevelop on heroku). To measure the quality of the code and in order to avoid syntax errors, rubocop and codeclimate were hooked up, they began to cover the main functionality with tests (I see no reason to completely cover all the tests).

Services for receiving feedback

In search of free ways to get feedback and attract the audience, I ran into such a site as producthunt . You can attract investors, customers, get feedback, but it should be borne in mind that all this will happen only if you reach the top (you need to collect about 300-500 votes in one day). I managed to collect at the moment only 79 votes



On Facebook, I get a lot of useful information, which is worth working on.



I would like to share with you a list of services where you can post an idea or MVP of a startup. Most of the sites are free:

What about customers?

In short, at the moment they are not. Recently, we have completed a commercial offer, which we actively send to potential customers, go to meetings, and communicate with business owners. First page of the offer:

Finance

Hosting costs $ 14 per month, the commercial offer cost 15,000 rubles (~ $ 220), advertising on facebook 1600 rubles per day. The service for chatting with clients (https://www.drift.com/) and monitoring errors (https://rollbar.com) does not cost anything with this load. Total each month the project takes about 30 000 - 40 000 rubles for advertising and costs associated with the project directly (commercial proposal).

Team members volunteer and work for free and perform tasks. The main motivation in gaining experience and in the event of the appearance of clients is the development of their passive income.

In addition to these questions of the previous publication, I talked about my personal financial question. Every month I spent about half of my salary on the project and besides that I invested in stocks, thanks to this I secured myself for several months in advance (4-6 months). He quit his job one day, impulsively, no longer wanted to waste time and energy on the development of other people's ideas, it’s much more interesting for me to work on my project and idea.

What's next?

In order to find the first clients and develop the idea, I’m ready for the first two years to have a profit of around zero or a small minus. The main goal as at the very beginning is to help the business and get experience in a new niche for me.