The history of the development of the project idea

After we published here the first post about the YouDo project , we received several suggestions from habra people to more thoroughly highlight some aspects of resource development. Since the topics of the questions are quite broad, we decided to publish a series of articles with a more detailed presentation of our thoughts and ideas about the monetization of the project, about competition and promising analysis of development in the market, about new technical solutions implemented on the resource and innovative functionality, about large joint projects with other resources and much more. Logically, it would be better to start with a story about the history of the project’s idea, its initial implementation and some plans for the future.

“I sat with friends and discussed the fact that the 221st Mercedes is expensive, and especially the prices for the options of white color are mercilessly fought up. We began to think about how we could drop the price. The idea came to make an affiliate program in which $ 10 was paid for a photo of a white Merin, in which the proper word is written on the entire side with a can of balonchik. Any other color - do not touch. We wanted to achieve a situation where you come to watch the car, and it shows that 5 parts were repainted and sold URGENTLY, because the owner had already repainted the car twice in black or painted over the inscription in white paint :-). Later, at the meeting of the future founders, this idea was briefly told and the thought appeared that it was stupid to limit yourself to Mercedes - you can get people to do anything, and the tasks could be set not only by the owners of the service, but also by the users themselves. This is how the idea of YouDo appeared. ” - Nikita Kuzmin is the founder and producer of the YouDo project.

Everyone liked the idea and the next day a more serious discussion began in the office , after which it was decided to scale it up by creating a kind of exchange in which, on the one hand, there were people who wanted to place their own tasks, which they wanted to implement, and on the other hand the parties are people ready for reward or fame to perform these tasks. Initially, we planned a resource with very crazy tasks, which often contradicted legislation, for example, how many Cossacks could block the movement on the ruble. There were a lot of such ideas and we even had a name - freakhire - that is, hire freaks . But considering that this idea could not be popular and hardly become socially useful, we completely abandoned targeting such an audience and content, deciding to make a very mainstream project that can be shown to both mother and teacher at school or opened in front of the office . As a result, it was decided that we accept tasks and decisions that do not contradict the law.

Further, in the course of the development of the idea, we saw that we can, gradually expanding the functionality , move on to adjacent niches. For example, from our assignments we can make a rating of "Who is the best" , creating a kind of YouDo record book and become a platform for preparing new records for the Guinness book . By the way, I note that we studied the question of how to set a record and fix it in the Guinness book. This is a very complicated or expensive procedure. The process takes no month if it is done for free and quite a lot of money is worth speeding it up. Plus, the process itself is extremely complicated and bureaucratic. YouDo will be an ideal platform to set records first on it, and then, perhaps, we ourselves will help users to record these records already at Guinness. This functionality is still in development, but in the coming months, the first records will appear on our website.
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After the first design was ready , we conducted a mini-survey to find out if the users understand where they went. Opinions are strongly divided. Someone said that he got on the blog, someone on the new tub site, someone said personal page. In general, no one understood what was going on. It was decided that without a video, it would be difficult for us to convey the idea in words. They took a video and after watching it, the majority of questions immediately disappear, what kind of site is this. So I highly recommend to those who have not yet looked and who are still interested in the project, spend a couple of minutes of their time - www.youdo.ru/tour

The most important point in the development of the project is a very clear change of the entire development team from talented and promising graduates of the Moscow Medical and Computer University MSU to experienced graduates of the Moscow State Technical University. Bauman. Especially the change of the project manager did not go as smoothly as the change of coders and the main reason for this is the lack of standards. Going to work, PM with 5 years of experience said that after 2 weeks he will bring the documentation into proper form and will start working in full force. Subsequently, it took about 3 months and the ideal, in his opinion, was not achieved.

In technical terms , there were no dead ends when changing teams, and never the idea of ​​“rewrite everything from scratch” came from anyone. In this I see a huge merit in the introduction of a development culture among "my" programmers by Microsoft. In our opinion, the continuity of development is the most important development bonus on .NET. For those who are afraid of the cost of software from MS: we are members of the BizSpark program and received ALL software for free, both for servers and developers, all that was required of us is to simply fill out a questionnaire. We were given software one year after we started working on the project, so this was only a confirmation that we were right in choosing.

For those who follow the project, it may be a discovery that Youdo.ru is just a run-in technology and a test of the perceptibility of the service by people. The main goal is to launch an international version of the project with the translation of tasks into different languages ​​and, accordingly, the organization of a global task exchange.
Our goal is to instill the idea in all people that if you don’t want to do something yourself, then there will surely be someone who wants to do it for you. And there he, of course, on YouDo . After the launch of the .com version, the tasks created by the Englishman will be translated into other languages ​​by the community and people from all over the world will begin to fulfill them.
After connecting PayPal, the payment can be made almost anywhere. PR-actions on our platform can become truly global. We are moving to a very large-scale idea, when a distorted Japanese or American can create an assignment for a decent amount, and a poor Chinese or Indian person can complete it and receive this money. It brings people together and blurs the boundaries. That is what we want to get in the end.

Despite the fact that development has been underway for almost two years, a huge number of ideas still remain in the list of possible implementations - the working code is more important than the twisted functional.
I will share with you one more idea that seems very interesting to us: the user can delete “for himself” any object on our site. Do not like the task - delete, do not like the user - no longer see any tasks or comments from it. This functionality will be of particular importance after launching “Communication on the site” - an absolutely new solution for communicating users within the social network. This is a unique development of its own, which has not yet been used (it is currently in the testing phase and is almost ready to launch) . The same goes for blog entries, banners, news. You will not be day-to-day to mazolit uninteresting content. I am sure that this concept will be explored in the future by other sites as well, for example, dating sites lack it very much.

Thanks for attention.