How to start a growing b2c startup after hackathon

Foreword

I think many have read an article about whether teams survive after a hackathon .
As written in the comments to this article, the statistics are depressing. Therefore, I would like to tell about myself in order to correct the statistics and give some practical advice on how not to be discouraged after the hackathon. If at least one team, after reading the article, does not stop developing its great idea after the hackathon, takes advantage of my advice and creates a company - this article can be considered successful :)
A warning! This article will not be the technical details of the implementation of the application. In the beginning I will tell our story (TL; DR), and useful tips that we brought to ourselves in the course of development are given at the end.

“Success” story

My name is Danya, I founded emovi - a service for the selection of a film by emoji, which over the last few days has grown by 600%. Now the application has 50 thousand downloads and hit the top 2 of the App Store and Google Play. In the team I do product management and design, and before Android development. I study in MIPT.

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Disclaimer: we understand that this is only the beginning, not a “success story”. We have a chance to continue to grow rapidly, and to lose everything. But, taking this opportunity, we decided to tell our real story, hoping to inspire those who want to launch their startup someday, but have not yet come to this.

The path of our team began in the Finnish hackathon Junction, where there was a track dedicated to movie services. On that hackathon, the team from the Physics and Technology Institute won, they managed to do more, but did not continue to develop the idea . At that time, we formed a concept - search for films based on the emotions they cause, using emoticons. We believe that the abundance of information about the film: long reviews, ratings, lists of actors, directors - only increase the search time, and choose a few emoji is quite simple. If the ML algorithm, which determines the emotions in the films will work well, and we will remove the films that the user has already watched, then it will be possible to find the film for the evening in 10 seconds. But then the reality was not at all like that, and we were playing with such a project.

After losing to Junction, the team needed to close the session, then we wanted to continue developing the project. It was decided to move towards the mobile application, due to the lower level of competition in comparison with the websites. As soon as we started to get together for work, it turned out that not every member of the team is ready to devote his free time to study (and someone else’s work) to develop a project that:

• complicated
• laborious
• requires full returns
• not the fact that someone needs
• will not bring profit soon

Therefore, very soon there are two of us left: me and my friend with the FKN HSE, who helped with the backend. Coincidentally, I lost my interest in scientific activities at this very moment of my life. Therefore, despite good academic performance, I decided to go to academy. I was hoping for a year to have time to launch a new project and find myself in a new activity. It is also worth noting that the problem of choosing a long film at Kinopoisk has always been my pain, and I wanted to ease it by offering people a new way to choose.

Challenge was in constructing the algorithm for determining the emotions of the film and collecting datasets, including because we did not have a professional expert in data sciense. And also, as a developer, to make a convenient and new UX, but at the same time a beautiful UI. After I redid the design 10 times, I got something quite comfortable, and even looking good, thanks to some innate sense of beauty. We started writing backing, collecting a database of films, we need dataset, develop an Android application. So spring and summer passed, there was a base of films and API, the MVP of the Android application was made, a dataset appeared, but there was no ML emotion prediction algorithm.

At that moment, something that should have been expected happened: my friend, who was working on the backend, could no longer work for free, got a job at Yandex on part-time, and soon scored on the project. I am left alone. All that I have been doing these six months is a startup and a part-time tutoring. But I did not abandon him and continued to move on alone, in parallel offering to engage in a project on various DS with PCFs, but no one had the motivation to work for free.

In September I went to Fiztech. Start, where I was not taken, but where I met my current co-founders. Having told about the project, I convinced the guys to join me. So, before the October hackathon Hack.Moscow, we were engaged in the full-time project. Made the iOS version of the application, and wrote the main algorithm that uses NLP to determine the emotions in movies. We came to Hack.Moscow with a ready project (the track allowed it, it was called “My track”) and only dealt with the presentation for 36 hours. As a result, we won, received good feedback from mentors, were invited to the Google Developers Launchpad in December and were very excited.

After the hack, work began 24/7 on the product in front of the Launchpad. We already came to it with a finished product, a working beta on Android and the alpha of iOS, and a new co-founder with the HFC, which replaced me with a backend, since I could no longer do well with Android, backing up, and thinking about what else do users need from the product. On Launchpad, we were greatly pumped up in marketing and product management. Within a month, we completed everything we wanted, released, and ... nothing happened.
The application itself was not gaining anything, although it seemed to us that it should (we just made publications in our social networks, Picab and in a couple of telegram channels).

When the first disappointment of his own misunderstanding passed, we began to analyze what went wrong, but everything was exactly the way it should be, because then we knew nothing about marketing and PR, and the product did not have viral features.

Since there was almost no money, we were interrupted by cheap advertising in VK publics, which kept us growing by 1K installations per week. This was enough to test the product hypotheses for this audience and at the same time to look for investments, having become acquainted with most of the Moscow venture capital industry through various pitches and conferences. We went to the HSE Inc accelerator, where we worked on the product, bizshev and attracting investments, additionally went to the course of the founder of Prisma and Capture Alexei Moiseenkov “How to make a product?”, Which greatly helped to understand what to do next. But things were not going as well as we would like: growth was small, and our Data Scientist went to work ... guess where?
- Yes, in Yandex!
- By whom?
- Product.

We almost developed a new section in the video-related product, engaged in attracting investments, which helped to work out an understanding of the streaming market, business model and vision. I learned with varying success to convey this to investors, but otherwise I could not see any kind of clearance. There was only faith in ourselves and in our insight that no one decided to solve the problem of choosing a film on the Russian market in free services. By this time the money was over, we began to engage in zero-cost marketing, which brought very little. It was very hard, but faith and one hundred percent trick saved. During the accelerator, we actively communicated with various experts, investors, and received a lot of feedback - not always positive. Many thanks to all the guys from HSE Inc for their support in difficult times. As founders, we understood the specifics of a startup and believed that nothing was lost yet.

And then we did a post on Picaba and turned around. Basically, the main task was to find users who really need our application, they were the guys from the “Serialomania” thread at Picaba. They first picked up the wave, much liked and shared, brought us to the “Hot” and then we had problems only with the servers ...


We went to the tops of the Play Market and the App Store, received 600 reviews, we fell and rose, and at the same time wrote press releases to publications and gave interviews ... Special thanks to the largest community of Russian Hackers hackatons in which people helped us solve technical problems for free.

By the evening, the HYIP was asleep, the servers were working normally, and we were about to go to bed after the 20-hour marathon, as the incredible happened here. Our application liked the admin of the public NR Community and he made a free post about us in his group of 5 million people without our knowledge. Servers were already better able to handle the load, but we still spent most of the time on optimization.



But, as YCombinator says, if your server falls, it means success (cite as an example Twitter). Yes, it would be better if we were ready for such a load in advance, but we did not prepare for such success after this post.

At the moment we have an offer from an investor, and we will develop further. The main task we set ourselves to finalize the product so that it suits the majority of our users.

We now turn to the tips. Our team believes very much in the error of the survivor and thinks that tips like “Make A, B and C” are useless. Let the business coach talk about this. Peter Thiel wrote in “Zero to One”: “Anna Karenina begins with the words“ All happy families, equally happy, all unhappy in their own way, ”everything about the company is exactly the opposite.” The path of each company is individual, and no one will tell you how to do your business. But! You can be prompted what exactly you need to do. Some of these mistakes we made ourselves.

Tips

• Because of the high competition with big companies, a b2c startup requires a high quality product, which is extremely difficult to implement without the experience of creating b2c products, without people willing to devote themselves to this for a year for free, or angel investments that give you time above all. We are sad to say this, but to find angelic investment for b2c in Russia without growth or a lot of experience is almost unrealistic, so if you have hypotheses about the possibilities for b2b, in Russia it is better to do b2b, because there your first revenue will happen earlier.
• If you still decide to do b2c without money, the problem that you solve should be your personal one. Otherwise, you do not have enough strength and desire to finish it to mind and motivate your team.
• If after your pitches (approx. Presentations to the investor), your project reacts extremely badly, then there are two options: either you really should listen and make a pivot, or the market simply does not understand you, and you have found insight that many have overlooked. These are the things that the rest overlooked or considered unimportant, each year help some startups to grow quickly. It is clear that the probability of the second is less than 1%, but always think with your head after you have listened to everyone, and do what you believe in, otherwise you will never find such insight.
• That is why the idea is worth nothing, because if it is worth something, only 1% will believe in it, and 1% of them will start doing it. The same good idea comes to about 1000 people at a time every day, but only one starts doing, and most often does not finish. Therefore, do not be afraid to talk about the idea to everyone.
• All that you consider necessary to do is your hypotheses for which you need KPI to confirm them. Your time should be planned out, you should know what you are doing on what day, what hypothesis you are testing this week, how you will understand that you checked it, and what deadline, otherwise you will be tied up in constant “doing”. Your answer to the question “What did you do all week” should not be “I did X”, but “I did Y”, where by done did most often means testing some hypothesis.
• In b2c, you can test your hypothesis either by competing products and the market (for example, the service that solves the problem is already there, but you can do it several times better) or by metrics in product analytics such as Amplitude, Firebase, Facebook Analytics.
• If you make b2c, listen less to the fans of the methodology of CustDev, which is popular in Russia, and who use it where necessary and not necessary. Qualitative research and conversations with users are needed to identify insights, but can not statistically test the hypothesis, since they are not quantitative methods of research.
• Invest only after MVP and testing the main hypotheses, if you, of course, have no startup experience in the past. If you have a b2c startup, then without revenue it will be very difficult for you to find an investor in Russia, so think either about how to start growing by users, or how to start earning.
• A startup is primarily a growth rate and decision making. In the current venture realities of Russia, fast motion for a b2c project is not always possible, but do everything to move faster. That is why the founding team usually consists of 2-3 people working full-time, and a team of 10 friends on the part-time at the very beginning is a mistake that will kill you. Many people are also bad due to the fact that a new problem arises: there must be a separate project manager who does just that and gets a share simply because you could not find enough motivated co-founders.
• Do not combine work and startup. It is simply impossible and will kill you sooner or later. You as a company. Personally, you can have everything “perfectly”, you will be taken to Yandex and you will receive a large salary, but you will hardly be able to build something big, because your startup will move too slowly.
• Do not blur everything. One hundred percent focus is very important to you, without which you will pivot (change course) 3 times a week. You must have a strategy and an understanding of what to do, where you are going. If not, start by analyzing the competitors and their market position. Answering the question “Why didn't X do what I want to do?” Before I code something. Sometimes the answer may be “they considered it a non-priority and they were mistaken in this”, but the answer must be.
• Do not work without a quality metric (this is more about ML). When it is not clear what and how to improve, it is not clear what is good and bad now, you can not move on.

That's all. If you do not make at least these 11 errors, your startup will definitely move faster, and the growth rate will be the main metric of any startup.

Materials

As a material for study, I would like to advise you on the wonderful course of Alexey Moiseenkov, the founder of Prisma, from whom we learned a lot.

He will tell what the IT company consists of, how to distribute roles, search for founders, make a product. Such a direct manual "How to build a startup from scratch." But watching a course without practice is useless. We watched it in the video version and went in person, practicing in parallel.

Every start-up should know YCombinator - the best accelerator in the world, which issued such teams of founders as Airbnb, Twitch, Reddit, Dropbox. Their course on how to start your startup at Stanford University is also available on YouTube.

I also strongly recommend the book by Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and the first Facebook investor “Zero to one”.

What are we doing at all?

We make a mobile application that searches for emoticon movies with personalized recommendations based on movie ratings. Also in our application you can find in which online cinema you can watch this or that movie, and user ratings are taken into account in the emotional search. Believe us, emotions are not placed by hand, we worked on it for a very long time :)
More about us can be on vc .

And who wants to download, you are welcome. Download.

Small insight and conclusion

At the end of the article I would like to strongly recommend not to quit my projects after the hackathons. If you can make a product that people will need, you will never be late to go to work for hire, because you will work many times better and more efficiently than people who have never done a startup. In the end, it all depends on your ambitions and goals in life.

And I would like to finish with the phrase that Steve Jobs told John Scully (at that time Coca-Cola CEO) when he called him to work at Apple:

“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”

Over the coming months we will expand the team, so if you are interested in working with us, send your resume and motivashki to jobs@emovi.app.