12 years in the cloud
Hi, Habr! We are reopening the MoisStore tehnoblog.
MoySklad is a cloud service for managing trade. In 2007, we were the first to come up with the idea of ​​transferring trade accounting to the cloud in Russia. Recently, MySkladu is 12 years old.
While we have not yet started working employees younger than the company itself, I will tell you where we started and what we came to. My name is Askar Rakhimberdiev, I am the head of the service.
MoySklad company began in 2007 with a team of four people, interface layouts in a notebook and domain registration moysklad.ru . The two guys quickly ended their enthusiasm, I and Oleg Alekseev , our technical director, remained.
')
At that time I hadn’t written code for several years, but I was delighted to work it out again. We chose the latest technology stack: JavaEE, JBoss, Google Web Toolkit, and PostgreSQL.
I had a workbook in the box where I wrote down to-do lists, solutions, and even interface layouts. It's a shame that after a few years the notebook was lost, only one photo remained.
The first interface layouts were minimalist.
At first, My-Mu Cafe was the office of My Warehouse. We met once a week to discuss matters. Oleg Kodil in the evenings and weekends, and I could work all the time, since I quit my job to work on my Warehouse.
In the summer of 2007, the layout turned into such an implementation. Please note that Internet Explorer was not yet embarrassing.
Alpha version, summer 2007
On November 10, 2007, the following important Milesstone took place: the first public announcement. We wrote about the beta of My Store on Habré . Received a publication on the main and a lot of comments, but the most important - active users at a free rate - did not appear.
For the first round of investment needed at least a few real users. I spoke with a dozen Russian investors, but no one wanted to risk it. The product was usable, but damp. Small business in 2007 did not trust SaaS, Oleg and I did not have any experience in starting a business.
From hopelessness, I started looking for Western investors and through LinkedIn I found one fund from Estonia. He was led by a former head of Skype development, named Toivo. In his heart, Toivo was not a professional investor, but a real engineer. I suspect that the transaction took place, because we did not use MySQL, as some govnokodery, and PostgreSQL (immediately clear, serious guys). Postgres was much less popular then than now, but it was used in Skype itself.
February 2008, we still can not decide on the name of the service
We quickly agreed on the amount of $ 200 thousand for 30% of the company and began to process the transaction. I was very impressed with how e-government works in Estonia and I realized that we need to compose jokes about slowness.
In February 2008, we sent out a press release, and the IT media wrote about us, first of all, it was very authoritative at that time, CNews . Of course, we wrote a joyful post on Habré .
After the announcement, the first clients appeared. These were small shops that were opened by former IT specialists (who would have read CNews). In their hearts, they were still drawn to new technologies. The very first platnik suddenly turned out to be my cousin's god-daughter.
Among the first customers was another category: CIOs in large companies that temporarily closed holes in their automation with cheap MyStorage. Even the huge holding Rusagro worked with us.
I am very grateful to them, their custom-made modifications of several hundred thousand rubles actually helped us to survive during the first years.
The first version of the site
The country has gradually evolved cloud community. In 2008, the SaaS-vendors association of Russia gathered several times at the Shokoladnitsa cafe on Shabolovskaya. It had as many as four vendors: Megaplan, MoySklad and two more long-closed projects. And on April 13, 2009, the very first conference “SaaS in Russia” brought together 40 people.
In general, the leader of the Russian SaaS then and the next few years was Megaplan. He infuriated him a little with his rollicking marketing, but he did a very correct thing - he promoted the idea of ​​clouds to the people.
After the first round of investment, we began to pay ourselves generous salaries of 60 thousand rubles and hired the first employees. There was enough money for a year. When they ended, it was necessary to save money: hired employees left, and founders continued to work for free. From a small office had to move.
I think that at this moment Moysklad saved the crisis of 2009 - otherwise Oleg and I would most likely have returned to work ourselves. But because of the crisis there were simply no good offers on the market, so we continued to engage in service.
The author of the meme “No money, but you hold on” is not Dmitry Medvedev, but an accountant of My Warehouse
Investors still looked at uslike shit without enthusiasm. Now because of slow growth. In mid-2009, we had only 40 paid accounts. For almost a year we lived in the mode of total savings.
But gradually and at first, good events did not start to occur very noticeably. Send cash improvements for large customers. Suddenly, in the fall of 2009, Forbes wrote an article about us. It was good stuff with a beautiful photo of me and Oleg in the warehouse of one of our clients. We did not have an office then. This publication immediately brought dozens of new accounts.
Making smart faces
We were helped by many people and companies to whom I am still very grateful. For example, sales of my stock through SKB Kontur. The project was launched by Leonid Volkov, then not yet a comrade of Navalny, but one of the leaders of the Contour. The joint product was sold so-so, but for the integration we received money that was noticeable for that period.
For the first time at this conference, we appeared thanks to Sergey Kotyrev from UMI. Then we still could not afford our own booth, but Sergey wrote: “Listen, we have free space at the stand at the RIW at the front desk, we can put your leaflets in.”
At the end of 2009, we again felt financial stability, began to pay ourselves salaries of 20 thousand rubles, and even rented a small office in the Research Center of the Moscow State University (for two with a startup friend).
2010 is the most lamp period of My Warehouse. We earned on subscriptions for 200 thousand rubles a month. For this amount, we somehow rented servers, outsourced SEO, paid four employees and moved to a separate room at Moscow State University. Someday I will write a separate material, “How to save in a startup without going for a gimmick.”
The most important thing is that we grew steadily and predictably. I understood that MoiSklad already took place exactly as a business, so I did not want to look for investors right now. It is better to wait another year for the company to grow.
Nevertheless, when at the end of 2010 we were invited to startups competition in St. Petersburg, I agreed. MoySklad reached the final of 10 participants. These 10 projects claimed six or seven prizes. We managed the almost impossible: not to win anything. It was a shame for the time spent.
Before traveling back to Moscow, I went to the office of former colleagues. Not without whiskey. With some difficulty, I managed to get to the station and it turned out that in the next chair an employee of 1C was sitting, who was also in this competition. There is nothing special to do in Sapsan, so I, trying to breathe aside, talked about our service for four hours. The next day, Nuraliev, the director of 1C, called me.
For a month, we settled the conditions and signed the Term sheet - an agreement on the terms of the transaction. A share of Estonians bought 1C, and MoySklad received a solid investment in the next spurt.
We had big doubts about this deal. We feared that 1C would influence the product strategy and management of the company. As you can see now, everything happened the other way around - investors helped, but did not intervene. I think that working with 1C is one of our most successful solutions.
2011 has become monstrous. We started spending the 1C investment so correctly that the number of leads and customers increased several times over several months. Tickets in technical support lay unanswered for 3-4 days. Leads did not have time to process. To close the tickers or call the new registrations, once a week we spent a Saturday.
The team has grown from four to twenty people. At the same time, as is usually the case, complete chaos reigned in the company. We actively traveled through events and experimented a lot: for example, we tried to sell Moysklad on the markets. They did it with the same success as they are now trying to talk about labeling on the Gardener.
There were other difficult moments. For example, a large planned loss in 2012. The client base grew, everyone worked for 12 hours, but the money in the account was getting smaller. Psychologically, it is difficult not only for the tops, but also for all employees.
The second time we reached a stable profitability in 2014. Over time, Bitrix24 and amoCRM joined the cloud model. I think we helped each other a lot.
For the last five years we have been growing steadily by 40-60% per year. The company employs 120 people (we are always happy with the new, send a resume). As far as I can see, we are a confident leader in our segment in Russia and are now trying to enter the US market.
But we face a difficult task - not to slow down. Maintaining non-linear growth is difficult, but necessary.
Number of new customers by month
Since 2016, the Russian government has been actively helping us (I don’t think it knows about it) with online-cash projects and mandatory product labeling. We are adapting MoiSklad to new requirements, we are growing our customer base at free rates.
Of course, during this time we could release a dozen new features that would help customers increase efficiency. But we understand that now it is important for small businesses to survive, therefore the priority remains the requirements of the legislation.
Globally, the goal of My Warehouse is to help small businesses. Therefore, the number of clients and revenues are not just numbers, but objective indicators, as far as entrepreneurs need us.
Now there are more than 1 300 000 registrations in My Store. Every day, 100,000 active users create half a million new documents, generate 1500 requests per second and 8TB of traffic. In the backend we use Java, Hibernate, GWT, Wildfly, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes. For the development of retail desktop applications - Scala.js and Electron. Mobile apps written in Kotlin and Swift.
In the following posts we will talk more about the processes within the company and product development. For example, there will soon be an article about how we built the API. Write in the comments, from which side you would be interested to learn about My Store, vote for interesting wishes.
MoySklad is a cloud service for managing trade. In 2007, we were the first to come up with the idea of ​​transferring trade accounting to the cloud in Russia. Recently, MySkladu is 12 years old.
While we have not yet started working employees younger than the company itself, I will tell you where we started and what we came to. My name is Askar Rakhimberdiev, I am the head of the service.
The first office - cafe Mu-Mu
MoySklad company began in 2007 with a team of four people, interface layouts in a notebook and domain registration moysklad.ru . The two guys quickly ended their enthusiasm, I and Oleg Alekseev , our technical director, remained.
')
At that time I hadn’t written code for several years, but I was delighted to work it out again. We chose the latest technology stack: JavaEE, JBoss, Google Web Toolkit, and PostgreSQL.
I had a workbook in the box where I wrote down to-do lists, solutions, and even interface layouts. It's a shame that after a few years the notebook was lost, only one photo remained.
The first interface layouts were minimalist.
At first, My-Mu Cafe was the office of My Warehouse. We met once a week to discuss matters. Oleg Kodil in the evenings and weekends, and I could work all the time, since I quit my job to work on my Warehouse.
In the summer of 2007, the layout turned into such an implementation. Please note that Internet Explorer was not yet embarrassing.
Alpha version, summer 2007
On November 10, 2007, the following important Milesstone took place: the first public announcement. We wrote about the beta of My Store on Habré . Received a publication on the main and a lot of comments, but the most important - active users at a free rate - did not appear.
First investor
For the first round of investment needed at least a few real users. I spoke with a dozen Russian investors, but no one wanted to risk it. The product was usable, but damp. Small business in 2007 did not trust SaaS, Oleg and I did not have any experience in starting a business.
From hopelessness, I started looking for Western investors and through LinkedIn I found one fund from Estonia. He was led by a former head of Skype development, named Toivo. In his heart, Toivo was not a professional investor, but a real engineer. I suspect that the transaction took place, because we did not use MySQL, as some govnokodery, and PostgreSQL (immediately clear, serious guys). Postgres was much less popular then than now, but it was used in Skype itself.
February 2008, we still can not decide on the name of the service
We quickly agreed on the amount of $ 200 thousand for 30% of the company and began to process the transaction. I was very impressed with how e-government works in Estonia and I realized that we need to compose jokes about slowness.
In February 2008, we sent out a press release, and the IT media wrote about us, first of all, it was very authoritative at that time, CNews . Of course, we wrote a joyful post on Habré .
After the announcement, the first clients appeared. These were small shops that were opened by former IT specialists (who would have read CNews). In their hearts, they were still drawn to new technologies. The very first platnik suddenly turned out to be my cousin's god-daughter.
Among the first customers was another category: CIOs in large companies that temporarily closed holes in their automation with cheap MyStorage. Even the huge holding Rusagro worked with us.
I am very grateful to them, their custom-made modifications of several hundred thousand rubles actually helped us to survive during the first years.
The first version of the site
The country has gradually evolved cloud community. In 2008, the SaaS-vendors association of Russia gathered several times at the Shokoladnitsa cafe on Shabolovskaya. It had as many as four vendors: Megaplan, MoySklad and two more long-closed projects. And on April 13, 2009, the very first conference “SaaS in Russia” brought together 40 people.
In general, the leader of the Russian SaaS then and the next few years was Megaplan. He infuriated him a little with his rollicking marketing, but he did a very correct thing - he promoted the idea of ​​clouds to the people.
Thank you crisis
After the first round of investment, we began to pay ourselves generous salaries of 60 thousand rubles and hired the first employees. There was enough money for a year. When they ended, it was necessary to save money: hired employees left, and founders continued to work for free. From a small office had to move.
I think that at this moment Moysklad saved the crisis of 2009 - otherwise Oleg and I would most likely have returned to work ourselves. But because of the crisis there were simply no good offers on the market, so we continued to engage in service.
The author of the meme “No money, but you hold on” is not Dmitry Medvedev, but an accountant of My Warehouse
Investors still looked at us
But gradually and at first, good events did not start to occur very noticeably. Send cash improvements for large customers. Suddenly, in the fall of 2009, Forbes wrote an article about us. It was good stuff with a beautiful photo of me and Oleg in the warehouse of one of our clients. We did not have an office then. This publication immediately brought dozens of new accounts.
Making smart faces
We were helped by many people and companies to whom I am still very grateful. For example, sales of my stock through SKB Kontur. The project was launched by Leonid Volkov, then not yet a comrade of Navalny, but one of the leaders of the Contour. The joint product was sold so-so, but for the integration we received money that was noticeable for that period.
For the first time at this conference, we appeared thanks to Sergey Kotyrev from UMI. Then we still could not afford our own booth, but Sergey wrote: “Listen, we have free space at the stand at the RIW at the front desk, we can put your leaflets in.”
At the end of 2009, we again felt financial stability, began to pay ourselves salaries of 20 thousand rubles, and even rented a small office in the Research Center of the Moscow State University (for two with a startup friend).
Second investor
2010 is the most lamp period of My Warehouse. We earned on subscriptions for 200 thousand rubles a month. For this amount, we somehow rented servers, outsourced SEO, paid four employees and moved to a separate room at Moscow State University. Someday I will write a separate material, “How to save in a startup without going for a gimmick.”
The most important thing is that we grew steadily and predictably. I understood that MoiSklad already took place exactly as a business, so I did not want to look for investors right now. It is better to wait another year for the company to grow.
Nevertheless, when at the end of 2010 we were invited to startups competition in St. Petersburg, I agreed. MoySklad reached the final of 10 participants. These 10 projects claimed six or seven prizes. We managed the almost impossible: not to win anything. It was a shame for the time spent.
Before traveling back to Moscow, I went to the office of former colleagues. Not without whiskey. With some difficulty, I managed to get to the station and it turned out that in the next chair an employee of 1C was sitting, who was also in this competition. There is nothing special to do in Sapsan, so I, trying to breathe aside, talked about our service for four hours. The next day, Nuraliev, the director of 1C, called me.
For a month, we settled the conditions and signed the Term sheet - an agreement on the terms of the transaction. A share of Estonians bought 1C, and MoySklad received a solid investment in the next spurt.
We had big doubts about this deal. We feared that 1C would influence the product strategy and management of the company. As you can see now, everything happened the other way around - investors helped, but did not intervene. I think that working with 1C is one of our most successful solutions.
Flew
2011 has become monstrous. We started spending the 1C investment so correctly that the number of leads and customers increased several times over several months. Tickets in technical support lay unanswered for 3-4 days. Leads did not have time to process. To close the tickers or call the new registrations, once a week we spent a Saturday.
The team has grown from four to twenty people. At the same time, as is usually the case, complete chaos reigned in the company. We actively traveled through events and experimented a lot: for example, we tried to sell Moysklad on the markets. They did it with the same success as they are now trying to talk about labeling on the Gardener.
There were other difficult moments. For example, a large planned loss in 2012. The client base grew, everyone worked for 12 hours, but the money in the account was getting smaller. Psychologically, it is difficult not only for the tops, but also for all employees.
The second time we reached a stable profitability in 2014. Over time, Bitrix24 and amoCRM joined the cloud model. I think we helped each other a lot.
Good, but better
For the last five years we have been growing steadily by 40-60% per year. The company employs 120 people (we are always happy with the new, send a resume). As far as I can see, we are a confident leader in our segment in Russia and are now trying to enter the US market.
But we face a difficult task - not to slow down. Maintaining non-linear growth is difficult, but necessary.
Number of new customers by month
Since 2016, the Russian government has been actively helping us (I don’t think it knows about it) with online-cash projects and mandatory product labeling. We are adapting MoiSklad to new requirements, we are growing our customer base at free rates.
Of course, during this time we could release a dozen new features that would help customers increase efficiency. But we understand that now it is important for small businesses to survive, therefore the priority remains the requirements of the legislation.
Globally, the goal of My Warehouse is to help small businesses. Therefore, the number of clients and revenues are not just numbers, but objective indicators, as far as entrepreneurs need us.
Now there are more than 1 300 000 registrations in My Store. Every day, 100,000 active users create half a million new documents, generate 1500 requests per second and 8TB of traffic. In the backend we use Java, Hibernate, GWT, Wildfly, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes. For the development of retail desktop applications - Scala.js and Electron. Mobile apps written in Kotlin and Swift.
In the following posts we will talk more about the processes within the company and product development. For example, there will soon be an article about how we built the API. Write in the comments, from which side you would be interested to learn about My Store, vote for interesting wishes.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/452016/
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