One year after the announcement
Hello to you,% username%, on this beautiful day.
In connection with the youdo.ru project, on Habré our blog was silent a little over a year from its first announcement , when we officially opened the registration on the site and shared with you the idea of creating an exchange of tasks. Since all this time we were completely absorbed in the implementation of plans, the hands did not reach to share with you information about the experience gained, monetization, marketing, mistakes made, results achieved.
Over the past year in the life of the site really a lot of bright events happened. First of all, they began to recognize us, and I’ll tell you that now the traffic police call us just by name and patronymic. We were several times on the pages of glossy magazines and television , competitions from the site were covered on the waves of radio stations , and many reputable online media talked about the shocking feats of our users in the performance of tasks.
In December last year, YouDo became a finalist in innovative projects in the field of Web Ready technologies (top 8 out of 400 candidate projects). In the StartupIndex rating , we were awarded the investment attractiveness indicator “A” (cooler than us are only two kind of pathetic projects about buses and talking humanoids (Ilya, hello, I was joking!)). To date, more than 600k users have been registered on the site, more than 5k tasks and competitions have been held, ten dramas and not a single massacre have been arranged.
After the resource was launched, we received a lot of feedback from the professional audience that the chosen concept of monetizing the site would not justify itself, that it would be very difficult for users to explain the essence of the project, and paid tasks would be very rare, and with symbolic amounts. Fortunately, all this was only in the form of forecasts, and we continued to do our work.
')
Recruiting a community is one thing, but tracking and developing its interests, generalizing and analyzing them is a completely different, no less difficult task.
About a year ago, it became clear to us that in the comments to the tasks and decisions, users become very closely connected, the community gained momentum and demanded socialization tools. Thus was born the kneading . This section is quite unique in design for collective and personal communication, in the form of endless scrolling notes, the ability to restrict access to your notes, blackjack and other pleasures of life.
After a while, it was noticed that the dating movement was gaining momentum in Kameza, it turned out that the visual format of presenting information that we had invented was suitable not only for conversations on various topics, but also for dating. It was foolish not to take advantage of the moment, so the question arose about the development of the dating course, which was recently launched in March. The name was designed to suit both the beautiful and the best half of humanity. That is how the Romantic appeared . Girls should see romance in it, and boys should see pick-up in it. If you belong to the male sex, but still you read something about romance in the title, then for people like you, too, it is quite possible, there is a couple with us :-). Romantic is easy to use and perfectly fulfills its main essence - to acquaint people. In Romantic, manual moderation of profiles and photos, more than 2,000 photos are added every day, low-quality and fake photos are rejected by our valiant moderators. The main usability feature, as in the Kneading, is the removal of objects with a simple click on the cross. In acquaintances, you clearly know who should be removed and whom to leave, filtering is very convenient and turns into an exciting journey into the world of romance ... pickup :-).
Not so long ago another section appeared on the site with the equally incomprehensible name Quiza . It was decided to add to the site a simple tool for training the brain and warming up before participating in a television show. By the way, at the design stage, an experiment was conducted on non-interference of the authorities in the development of not only technology, but also the concept (!) Of this section. We briefly described the idea and said that we no longer want to hear anything about it, except for the dates when we can see everything ready on the site. The result unanimously everyone was satisfied. This is a very important point - trust your employees , give them a chance to prove themselves. They can be much more than you think at first glance.
We are tired of investing money and we started counting. Draw charts with an elevation angle of earnings not lower than 45 degrees, incredible ROI and other mandatory attributes of future oligarchs. It turned out that in order to recoup the costs of the project, we need to take a dollar every week from every 12th user on our website. Even from those who registered when the site consisted of three pages and does not know a single word in Russian. (I take this opportunity to say hello to Microsoft Vice President Danel Lewin , our number 32 ). About the wave of negativity caused by the phrase “send SMS”, I think it’s not even worth mentioning. Well, in general, we abandoned the idea of taking money from users. If not 100, then 99% of the site is all free. So what will I buy gasoline for my future Aston Martin DBS (with white skin, no more than 10,000 mileage)? That's right - on the money brands. And you know - we were right, there really is money for gasoline . By choosing the direction of monetization on product placement, we solved a number of important tasks: earnings, replenishment of bank assignments with weighty prizes, increasing the attractiveness of YouDo brand image and awareness, cross-promo joint actions with brands, and most importantly - monetization, which increases user loyalty. And without any SMS.
During the life of the project, we managed to change the entire development team, change the hosting (5 servers sitting on CDNe, hundreds of gigabytes of content and dozens of gigabytes of data, as well as five external services running automatically with our infrastructure, the simple Copy function will not be in the data center in another parts of the world for a couple of hours of downtime, even if you take them to the MiG-25), change wines2003 to wines2008 and many more changes that the YouDo technical team suffered with valor. Many thanks to the guys from radikal.ru , who shared information with us, how to keep the load under Windows and where to look for the causes of site degradation, except in IIS-reset every 12 hours.
Some numbers:
1. The number of registrations per day is 2000-3000.
2. Users online 800-1200.
3. The number of requests per second ~ 500.
4. The largest database table: 29 million records.
Were there any technical difficulties?
Technical difficulties were and will be :) Basically, problems arise in two places: the database disk and the web server CPU. As a rule, all performance problems can be solved by optimizing sql queries, data aggregation, and, of course, caching. Unfortunately, some questions still remain open, for example, we want to try Comet for a chat, but our hands have not yet reached. Using SQL-dependency is still “off-screen”, there are also thoughts in the direction of Velocity , as a distributed cache.
Prevention
To keep the website in good shape, you have to periodically look at what is happening on the database server, build reports on the most difficult requests, collect and analyze statistics, look “under the profiler” of the site page, before sending the sql request to the production, you need to look how well it is executed.
Having determined the priorities, we got mail to pr@youdo.ru, marketing@youdo.ru, and in general, we got to do what we personally (the project leaders) never did. We met with companies, heads of advertising agencies, sales, we were told in one voice that the offer was awesome and in general we are good guys, tomorrow we will be presented to the client along with VKontakte and classmates. Call back, asked for details. And everything, then silence. No movement. Thinking. They reduced the development team, but they filled up the staff of marketers and sales staff - their time has come. For three months the professional market learned about us. Feedback started, sales started. Tip: do not sell yourself, you will not succeed. And even if it works out, you will still earn less money than if a professional who has been spinning in this world for 10 years and knows what customers need and how to present your product so that it can be coordinated at all levels by the client . First, the sales salary will pay off with an increased number of sales, and secondly, you will be able to spend your free time on improving the product or other projects. Time is money.
PS We are open and interested in partners, friends, associates. Write to marketing@youdo.ru if you have something to advise or offer us.
We are looking for moderators who are ready to watch several thousand photos per day, as well as people capable of explaining to a person that Writing a Christmas tree is ugly.
Great spring outside the window, from April 1 you!
In connection with the youdo.ru project, on Habré our blog was silent a little over a year from its first announcement , when we officially opened the registration on the site and shared with you the idea of creating an exchange of tasks. Since all this time we were completely absorbed in the implementation of plans, the hands did not reach to share with you information about the experience gained, monetization, marketing, mistakes made, results achieved.Over the past year in the life of the site really a lot of bright events happened. First of all, they began to recognize us, and I’ll tell you that now the traffic police call us just by name and patronymic. We were several times on the pages of glossy magazines and television , competitions from the site were covered on the waves of radio stations , and many reputable online media talked about the shocking feats of our users in the performance of tasks.
In December last year, YouDo became a finalist in innovative projects in the field of Web Ready technologies (top 8 out of 400 candidate projects). In the StartupIndex rating , we were awarded the investment attractiveness indicator “A” (cooler than us are only two kind of pathetic projects about buses and talking humanoids (Ilya, hello, I was joking!)). To date, more than 600k users have been registered on the site, more than 5k tasks and competitions have been held, ten dramas and not a single massacre have been arranged.
After the resource was launched, we received a lot of feedback from the professional audience that the chosen concept of monetizing the site would not justify itself, that it would be very difficult for users to explain the essence of the project, and paid tasks would be very rare, and with symbolic amounts. Fortunately, all this was only in the form of forecasts, and we continued to do our work.
')
Interaction with users and new sections of the site.
Recruiting a community is one thing, but tracking and developing its interests, generalizing and analyzing them is a completely different, no less difficult task.
About a year ago, it became clear to us that in the comments to the tasks and decisions, users become very closely connected, the community gained momentum and demanded socialization tools. Thus was born the kneading . This section is quite unique in design for collective and personal communication, in the form of endless scrolling notes, the ability to restrict access to your notes, blackjack and other pleasures of life.
After a while, it was noticed that the dating movement was gaining momentum in Kameza, it turned out that the visual format of presenting information that we had invented was suitable not only for conversations on various topics, but also for dating. It was foolish not to take advantage of the moment, so the question arose about the development of the dating course, which was recently launched in March. The name was designed to suit both the beautiful and the best half of humanity. That is how the Romantic appeared . Girls should see romance in it, and boys should see pick-up in it. If you belong to the male sex, but still you read something about romance in the title, then for people like you, too, it is quite possible, there is a couple with us :-). Romantic is easy to use and perfectly fulfills its main essence - to acquaint people. In Romantic, manual moderation of profiles and photos, more than 2,000 photos are added every day, low-quality and fake photos are rejected by our valiant moderators. The main usability feature, as in the Kneading, is the removal of objects with a simple click on the cross. In acquaintances, you clearly know who should be removed and whom to leave, filtering is very convenient and turns into an exciting journey into the world of romance ... pickup :-).
Not so long ago another section appeared on the site with the equally incomprehensible name Quiza . It was decided to add to the site a simple tool for training the brain and warming up before participating in a television show. By the way, at the design stage, an experiment was conducted on non-interference of the authorities in the development of not only technology, but also the concept (!) Of this section. We briefly described the idea and said that we no longer want to hear anything about it, except for the dates when we can see everything ready on the site. The result unanimously everyone was satisfied. This is a very important point - trust your employees , give them a chance to prove themselves. They can be much more than you think at first glance.
Monetization.
We are tired of investing money and we started counting. Draw charts with an elevation angle of earnings not lower than 45 degrees, incredible ROI and other mandatory attributes of future oligarchs. It turned out that in order to recoup the costs of the project, we need to take a dollar every week from every 12th user on our website. Even from those who registered when the site consisted of three pages and does not know a single word in Russian. (I take this opportunity to say hello to Microsoft Vice President Danel Lewin , our number 32 ). About the wave of negativity caused by the phrase “send SMS”, I think it’s not even worth mentioning. Well, in general, we abandoned the idea of taking money from users. If not 100, then 99% of the site is all free. So what will I buy gasoline for my future Aston Martin DBS (with white skin, no more than 10,000 mileage)? That's right - on the money brands. And you know - we were right, there really is money for gasoline . By choosing the direction of monetization on product placement, we solved a number of important tasks: earnings, replenishment of bank assignments with weighty prizes, increasing the attractiveness of YouDo brand image and awareness, cross-promo joint actions with brands, and most importantly - monetization, which increases user loyalty. And without any SMS.
A bit of technology.
During the life of the project, we managed to change the entire development team, change the hosting (5 servers sitting on CDNe, hundreds of gigabytes of content and dozens of gigabytes of data, as well as five external services running automatically with our infrastructure, the simple Copy function will not be in the data center in another parts of the world for a couple of hours of downtime, even if you take them to the MiG-25), change wines2003 to wines2008 and many more changes that the YouDo technical team suffered with valor. Many thanks to the guys from radikal.ru , who shared information with us, how to keep the load under Windows and where to look for the causes of site degradation, except in IIS-reset every 12 hours.
Some numbers:
1. The number of registrations per day is 2000-3000.
2. Users online 800-1200.
3. The number of requests per second ~ 500.
4. The largest database table: 29 million records.
Were there any technical difficulties?
Technical difficulties were and will be :) Basically, problems arise in two places: the database disk and the web server CPU. As a rule, all performance problems can be solved by optimizing sql queries, data aggregation, and, of course, caching. Unfortunately, some questions still remain open, for example, we want to try Comet for a chat, but our hands have not yet reached. Using SQL-dependency is still “off-screen”, there are also thoughts in the direction of Velocity , as a distributed cache.
Prevention
To keep the website in good shape, you have to periodically look at what is happening on the database server, build reports on the most difficult requests, collect and analyze statistics, look “under the profiler” of the site page, before sending the sql request to the production, you need to look how well it is executed.
Sales
Having determined the priorities, we got mail to pr@youdo.ru, marketing@youdo.ru, and in general, we got to do what we personally (the project leaders) never did. We met with companies, heads of advertising agencies, sales, we were told in one voice that the offer was awesome and in general we are good guys, tomorrow we will be presented to the client along with VKontakte and classmates. Call back, asked for details. And everything, then silence. No movement. Thinking. They reduced the development team, but they filled up the staff of marketers and sales staff - their time has come. For three months the professional market learned about us. Feedback started, sales started. Tip: do not sell yourself, you will not succeed. And even if it works out, you will still earn less money than if a professional who has been spinning in this world for 10 years and knows what customers need and how to present your product so that it can be coordinated at all levels by the client . First, the sales salary will pay off with an increased number of sales, and secondly, you will be able to spend your free time on improving the product or other projects. Time is money.
PS We are open and interested in partners, friends, associates. Write to marketing@youdo.ru if you have something to advise or offer us.
We are looking for moderators who are ready to watch several thousand photos per day, as well as people capable of explaining to a person that Writing a Christmas tree is ugly.
Great spring outside the window, from April 1 you!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/89693/
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