How ideas are born. The story of a startup - part I

Dear users, with this topic we are starting a small series of articles devoted to the history of creating a startup. The purpose of the articles is to highlight the whole process of creation from the point of view of real life, to tell how it was, and not how it should be in theory.

Perhaps this will help many people to decide on the first step, to draw some ideas, or simply not to step on such a rake, which spoiled our nerves. We hope that everyone will find something of their own. Go…



March 2008 Some lyrics. My company is flourishing and developing. More and more clients, all thicker projects, in short everything goes uphill. We are engaged in web development, graphic design and the creation of business systems to order. It would seem, what else is needed for a happy life?
')
But, all this is a project business, with each new client we go through all the same stages, solve the same problems, face the same misunderstanding. Who worked in custom web development understands me well :) In short, each time we punch head through the same concrete walls only with different logos.

More projects, more customers - this is a dead end. We sell our time, but it no longer becomes, and the price of time forever will not work. We need something of our own, something for the soul and a little for money :) A direction in which we will not have to sell our time.

April 2008 Additional impulse. Another stimulus for the development of something of their own was a visit to RHS-2008, held in Moscow. The atmosphere and the reports at this conference really pushed us forward.

May 2008 What exactly do? Probably, we approached this issue rather trivially. And what do we, as a company, lack? We use the services of many third-party companies, some suit us, some not quite. But doing the same with slightly different functions does not make sense.

Then we went in a simple way - we sat down and modeled our entire internal process of working on the project from A to Z. Everything worked out smoothly, except for one bottleneck, namely, the discussion of sketches that our designers give birth to. It is often difficult to communicate the necessary changes by phone or e-mail, and the meeting is sometimes simply impossible. And then we had a simple idea - and let's write a small service that will allow us how companies solve this problem. Got hooked on this idea and went on!

June 2008 Share your idea . Awesome idea arising in the head of one person may be completely delusional in the head of another. Everyone knows that, so don’t be in a hurry to do something right away, let the idea settle, form.

After some time, when our idea settled down, we brought it to the target audience (both in our company and outside it). The reaction ranged from “Well this is a bomb!” To “Well, why the heck?” But, the majority saw a rational grain in our idea.

As you know, 1 bad review is worth 10 good. Therefore, do not focus on bad reviews, let these people not let you kill your creation. Estimate the proportion of pros and cons, if 1 out of 5, then boldly continue!

And yet - never be afraid to share ideas, no one will steal them from you, nobody needs it, believe me :)

July 2008 Competition and uniqueness. We perfectly understood that we would not accomplish some kind of revolution, and this is not the main goal. Therefore, it was assumed that this is already somewhere in some form. Remember, if after a thorough search your idea is nowhere and in no way implemented - think about it, most likely it is just that nobody needs it.

Of course, during the search we found a number of potential competitors. And do not believe it, they were very happy. This proved to us that there is a market for this service, that someone is already working on it and it is growing (based on data from competitors). We spent a whole lot of time analyzing existing services and brought out a number of advantages of our idea.

How far will we go? We decided that our idea has the right to a separate commercial project. It is very important to understand how far you look. Are you planning to do this for yourself, Petit, Vasya and a neighbor on the porch, or is this an idea of ​​a universal scale? Are you planning to make money on it or not? Now we will do it, and then we will see how far we go - it does not work!

August 2008 All on paper! Next, we recorded everything that we had accumulated in 4 months, starting from the competitors and ending with the functions for the first iteration. Paper should always be, it may lose relevance, become unnecessary, but it is necessary for understanding the project as a whole because the head is prone to miss the details, in any case, mine :)

It's time for loot! Not. No time Ideas are so rarely bought that you can forget to bow to investors. We did not go, and saved a lot of time and nerves. Let's go for the money a bit later :)

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That's all, we have an idea that has already received the first comments, which has competitors and which has resulted in a document! Now we are ready to make a pilot! About this in the next part of our cycle ...

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Briefly about the main parts

• even if you are doing well, this is no reason not to look around and not think about change.
• good ideas are always around you, they are with you when you go to take out the garbage or when you write another piece of code.
• if nowhere is there even a hint of your idea - think it over, maybe nobody needs it?
• Know the competitors, learn from them, do not copy them.
• It’s important to understand how far your idea is being spread commercially (if any).
• with the idea behind the money do not go.

Further in our cycle:
Part II - building a pilot. About how we built, then broke and built again, and then rebuilt again. And how not to do this :)