QRoom - Social Q & A in Russian

Hello. Today I would like to show you our small experiment, which gradually turns into a successful and visited project. QRoom.ru was originally conceived as a Russian-language clone of formspring.me, but at the moment we can confidently say that we have already surpassed the original in possibilities. But first things first.

It all started very simply, modestly and agile as much as possible - one person worked on the technical part of the project, it was possible to launch the first version in two weeks. Everything was done on RubyOnRails and lifted on Linode VPS. It was interesting for us to check whether the Russian-speaking audience was ready for a so-called. Social Q & A services. After the launch, the revision and tightening of new features continued. At the same time, the number of users began to grow steadily, and within a month after launch we reached the figure of 3,000 unique per day — all this without investing any money in advertising. Competitors began to appear in the Russian-speaking segment. It became obvious that the high point of services like formspring.me has come.
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Meanwhile, the work was in full swing: we expanded the team a bit, added a ton of new small features (for example, we were the first to plug in the new API of VKontakte, which allowed us to enter the site through this social network), made a redesign, moved to the domestic platform “Skalaksi” .

Now QRoom.ru usually has 10 thousand unique visitors per day. On average, people spend 10 minutes on the site. The maximum figure for the number of page views per day is 142.180 (an average of 125 thousand).

In the near future we are planning many interesting innovations. In particular, we understand that so far QRoom is not interesting for all social groups and we would like to become a platform for a wide range of discussions: between client and companies, between members of professional communities, between students and teachers. Of course, we would be interested to hear your thoughts on how to make such discussions comfortable.

In the meantime, we will continue to work. I wish our competitors success - on how quickly and successfully they work partly depends on our will to win. And if you're not with us yet, join QRoom and offer your ideas. Feedback is always welcome, and relatively small in terms of useful work innovations that are offered by users, we usually release it very quickly.

So, as you can see, it is realistic to invest a minimum of money and time to launch a small project and test the concept's performance. And then develop it. For us, the strategy of bootstrapping was successful in every sense. I hope this short review will inspire others to launch their startups.