The life of a startup during cr * sis

With this publication, we are opening a series of interviews with the leaders of large and well-known startups of Runet. Venturemag decided to find out how startups feel during a crisis. Have their plans changed, and maybe they are going to retire at all. The first signs were the answers of the director of the urban community AroundMe.ru , Vladimir Dolgy-Rapoport.


How has the crisis affected your business?

Positive, as strange as it sounds. The fact is that a crisis is not only a threat, but also new opportunities that weren't there before or we didn’t pay attention to them.
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During a crisis, you can act in three ways:

1. to pretend that everything is normal, not to pay attention to the crisis - this path leads to the almost inevitable death of the enterprise. This path is chosen by those startups that have received full funding for 2008-2009.

2. You can choose a wait-and-see tactic, cut most of your expenses and wait for it to end. This path contains the least amount of risk. He is bad because when the crisis ends, the company will have, at best, a website with the audience indicators that it had before the crisis. Unfortunately, most companies choose this path.

3. The third way is to use the opportunities opened by the crisis. This is the most difficult way. It requires maximum concentration, a huge amount of work, speed, constant generation of ideas, rejection of all unnecessary and patience.

We have chosen the third way. This imposes great obligations on us and a great responsibility.

Have the project development plans changed?

Of course. Due to the expected fall in the advertising market, we recalculated our revenue plans for 2009 in the smaller direction. In this regard, we have revised the development plan, abandoning those projects that do not directly affect the audience or income.

This does not mean that the project will not develop, on the contrary, the development will be even more active than we had planned earlier, this development will only go in key areas.

Is there a reduction in staff?

The fact is that AroundMe.ru and before the crisis was a small, in terms of state, company. So there was no one to cut us. We did not have extra people. But we increased the working day by 4 hours (now 17 hours) and reduced, as I said, all unnecessary processes.

Do you intend to cut costs?

Yes, we revised the budget of expenses for 2008-2009, removing all pleasant but non-binding items from there. First of all, the cuts concerned the project estimate - as I already answered, we froze all the projects that did not directly affect the AroundMe.ru indicators. Thus, the budget for development and marketing was reduced. At the same time, target project budgets remained unchanged.

I did not get a salary fund cut-off - we have people who believe in the project, they work with full dedication. and to cut their salary would be simply not fair. I believe that the well-being of the people you work with and the well-being of the project are inseparable things. A person cannot fully work if he thinks about how he will return the loan or how to feed the children.

Of course, it should be understood that the market has not yet reached the bottom, and no one knows where it is now. And if the most pessimistic crisis scenario is realized, then we will have to cut the payroll as well. But we will do it last.

Are there any problems with the monetization of the resource?

Well, there are no special problems, as long as the resource does not bring income. We planned to start monetization from the beginning of 2009. Neither in terms nor in the models of monetization, we have no changes. The only thing that we have changed, as I said, is downward income plans, as we expect the advertising market to fall in 2009.

We also asked questions to Alexander Smirnov, development manager of Moskva.fm. We received a very interesting answer:

Yes. Changes have occurred. They are as follows: the person responsible for correspondence and correspondence was dismissed. In this regard, no one can send you an answer to the questions posed.

We did not give up and asked, perhaps Alexander himself will be able to formulate the answers. But, alas, Alexander Smirnov replied:

I am a robot, I do not know how to think and answer questions.

Not everything is so good in our kingdom.