How I created a startup club and what came of it

Photos from the first meeting of a startup club

If you want to create your startup and are looking for like-minded people, a team and fresh ideas, then come to our startup club. Under the cat is the history of its occurrence.

I will begin, perhaps, with personal motivation. The only purpose I learned to program is to do my projects. And although I did not earn anything at my first startup, but then I learned how to program and started doing it professionally. As a side effect, startups, in general, began to be treated more cynically. However, the dream of creating my own business did not leave me, I changed various offices where I worked as a programmer, in some of them I worked without seeing a white day, and during such periods I didn’t even think about my business. In other companies where I worked, I had free time, and I still started to think about it and even do something. In the summer of 2018 just such a period came. I got rid of many stereotypes with which I started. I made my first startup almost alone. Now I already understood that without a team, the chances of success are close to zero. I was no longer an “ideological zombie,” as with my first project, and already simply cynically looked for ideas for implementation. In addition, sometimes I participate in hackathons , and because of this, I felt the need for a community where I could prepare for them, work on ideas, and generally winning a hackathon is a good start for a team and a startup. In general, I thought about finding some kind of startup community where I could learn, exchange ideas and “cook” in creative broth. I started my search with meetup.com, which turned out to be quite a lot of startup groups.

But it turned out. Partly, of course, it was affected by the fact that I started the search in the summer, but also the real fact and the fact that most of the communities found there were either dead, or half-dead, or were simply not what I was looking for. In some groups, the organizers did not respond even to the letter in a personal, in some there were no scheduled meetings. Numerous one-time events, which are often held in Moscow, were precisely one-time events, and I needed a stable, regularly gathering community. As a result, I seriously thought about creating such a group on my own, and gradually even began to write down my thoughts about the ideology of such a group in a file. In short, I imagined it this way: we are going to some cafe, brainstorming various ideas of startups, we are going to form teams with the most promising ideas, we are sawing and testing MVP, working on two-week sprints in our free time. The idea that a team of professionals would get together and do something, free of charge, during my free time, seemed to me (and not only me) fantastic, in the ideology this was the weakest point. But on the other hand, I observed similar communities that existed, developed, worked, and had tough discipline (although at that time I did not yet know such IT communities). I have seen stable communities that seem crazy to most people. For example, fight clubs, where people threw off at the gym rental, and then fought there with each other without rules and gloves. In general, the task of finding the same kind of patients on my head, like me, seemed to me difficult, but doable.
For a start, I picked up a free template and made a website with this ideology (I successfully bought the domain startup-club.tech on the cheap at a sale). The site made a contact form through which you could subscribe to the news of a start-up club. Technically, it was easy to implement and almost free: I started an account on Digital Ocean (again, I took the tag, I already had $ 100 on the account), the landing page itself is sent to the Digital Ocean, and the script on the node.js that processes sending messages from the form. If the form is ticked off “Subscribe to the newsletter” the sender's email is saved in mongodb (in a free account at mlab.com). The mass mailing itself to the address list is carried out using a script on node.js and also a free account on mailgun.com. Then, having already made this system, I realized that Mong is an obvious overkill, for my purposes it would be enough just to write to a text file on the server. So, it turned out a kind of MVP ideas for a start-up club, which I began to test. And I must say that from the beginning this idea met with some resistance. She was skeptical of many of my fellow programmers. And, in general, I did not see any interest. And usually, if most people think your idea is stupid, the idiot in this situation is either you or them. Moreover, the probability of the first case is much higher than the second. Therefore, it is not known how long I would ripen, and I would have ripened, but one day I just turned up the case - I went to Sawr's discord, started chatting there, discovered the # start-up channel, where I decided to tell about my idea. And then, unexpectedly, for the first time, I met with support. Soer, in his video blog made a screencast, in which he spoke about a startup club. At one time at the bottom of this video there was a link to the club’s website and to the discord server, and this gave the first estimations on testing the idea. Not to say that the results have inspired. With 100 views came 1 - 2 registrations on the site. Also, a number of people from this video went to the discord server, some even began to communicate there. Channel # startups started discussing various projects, and, in general, some beginnings of the community began to form, unfortunately scattered throughout Russia, the CIS and abroad, therefore offline meetings were impossible. The community was small, and as it usually happens with such small and closed communities, it quickly turned into an echo chamber. Discussions went in a circle, and there were few ideas. Therefore, from the very beginning, it became clear that a more diverse and wider audience is needed for success. At this time on the site someone copy-paste in the feedback form ideas for startups, someone offered to invest in projects (!!!), someone just subscribed to the newsletter. And that was my target audience: programmers interested in start-ups. In general, the impression was that the overwhelming majority of these people were ready to consume information gum on the topic of startups, but was not ready to do something with their own hands. Chewing gum of this kind is not difficult to produce, you can simply translate into Russian Western sources, which many do. But I did not want to follow the path of development of the blog, vloga and other things, although it would be useful. By doing something with my own hands, I do not mean immediately to take and saw the mobile application, website, etc. 99% of such hasty beginnings just end in failure, and something like this was with my first startup. Many in this area are inactive because they do not have a suitable idea, but almost any idea can be criticized in one way or another. The search for an idea is a difficult and difficult scientific work that can take months, and not everyone is ready and able to do it. This is not just reading the literature and visiting the pitches, you need to try something yourself, test the hypotheses, otherwise it can all remain fruitless theorizing. And the bare motivation to do something immediately can work as a fuel for an unguided rocket crashing into a nearby wall when launched. And it was the active “scientific” activity of searching for ideas worthy of realization as start-ups, their run-in and became the main goal of creating our club.

In the meantime, I tried to actively participate in various start-up events, learned about a Moscow startup party. As it turned out, there are not so many places where you can listen to the pitches in Moscow. I attended Yellow Door events, various IT conferences. But the most unexpected discovery turned out that my former neighbor, Alexander Butmanov, organized the club “Allies” 2 years ago - where startups nourish every Sunday. If someone told me this story, I would think that this is impossible even in the Flint Valley. “Allies” is a closed, elite club, which can only be accessed by the guarantee of a member of the club. Startups in “Allies” come in search of funding, criticism and networking. The club has a rule - 6% of the profit received from visiting the club goes to charity. A visit to the “Allies” at first even reduced the value of creating a startup club for me. But it was certainly interesting to just listen to other people's pitches, but I needed an active activity. You can even draw an analogy with learning in high school - listening to other people's projects was like attending lectures, and I also needed seminars and laboratory work.

Therefore, I nevertheless decided to implement my initial idea of ​​creating my own group at meetup.com specifically for offline meetings. I made the first meeting in February at Starbucks Cafe on Paveletskaya, and although tentatively, about 10 people expressed a desire to come to the meeting (and from the server’s discord from the group itself at meetup.com), and three confirmed it in correspondence, really only one came. We had a good talk on startups, ideology and ways of promoting a startup club, and ... I never saw this man in the club anymore. But in addition to the possibility of organizing meetings, traffic from this group went, which immediately gave an unexpected result. Slava contacted me - one of the organizers of a large mitap group in which meetings were not held, and which I considered dead, and offered to unite. Literally a couple of weeks after that, the co-working group “Berloga” appeared at meetup.com, which began posting brainstorming meetings, and I purposefully went there to offer to unite. So I met Yura, the administrator of the co-working "Berloga", and our meetings found their home. Thus, three mithaps of the group were united, and so a startup club appeared. From now on, I can no longer continue this story in the singular, and I will continue to use the pronoun WE. From the very beginning, we understood that our community will develop only if the people who come to us really benefit from our events. And the more benefit we bring to the people who come to us and their projects, the stronger will be our community. We created our chat in a telegram, set up a number of Google docks and started meeting once every 2 weeks, on Saturdays. Initially, the idea was the following (and approximately as it was stated in the description of the group at meetup.com) - those who want to present their projects, then we break up into groups, conduct brainstorming on these projects, summarize the results, then the same groups further MVP . The main concern that we had was that there simply would not be people ready to impregnate their project did not materialize, at the very first meeting 5 projects were impregnated. Brainstorming as such did not add up, as it turned out in groups of more than 15 people, it all comes down to the pitching format, then questions, answers, suggestions, discussions. In this regard, we began to hold separate meetings on Fridays, which are attended by a small number of people, and one project is being analyzed. At such meetings, it is really possible to conduct a real high-grade brainstorming and work out the project. At each meeting, we began to put up 2 - 3 projects for pitching, then there was a free microphone format, at which everyone could express the idea of ​​their project (although often people who simply did not take turns at the pitching performed in this format). If we evaluate the quality of the projects, some of them were certainly strange, but outright trash came very rarely, and if that happened, it happened on a free microphone. In general, the idea turned out to be in demand (in a narrow circle), in various start-up groups and chats, people periodically appear with a desire to brainstorm one or another idea, and our groups turn out to be exactly what they are looking for. In the first 2 - 3 meetings, we were unpleasantly surprised by the fact that each time almost a new composition of people came (that is, initially, the retention rate of our club was surprisingly low). However, later, starting from approximately 4–5 meetings, the composition of permanent participants began to take shape, which continues to grow from meeting to meeting. I noticed that motivated people who know why they came to the club become regular participants.

If we sum up the first three months of the start-up of the club, it turned out a little not what we expected, and we did not face the problems that we expected. For someone, our club turned out to be something like intellectual entertainment, a certain percentage of people who come to it, come just by chance, just to see what is happening here. Someone comes to self-actualize, popiaritsya, talk about their ideas, sometimes even not related to startups. Someone comes really motivated and tuned to a long-term search and work. We are trying different formats, maybe our club will perform some kind of educational function, let's see what happens. So, spontaneously, in the chat room of our club, a number of people expressed a wish to get together on weekends, share experiences and code their projects (similar to how ODS Pets Projects does) - if this format settles, then our club will become really what it was originally intended . In June, for the first time at our meeting an online pitch was held, and most likely we will continue to support this format, which expands the geography of our participants. In general, we continue to experiment and develop. Against the background of a rather weak Moscow start-up ecosystem, we certainly found our niche, and it was not difficult. But the most important thing that we have created is that we have created a place where you can come and discuss your idea, and this place is open to all.