Restart Ottima or a small history of 2 years of stalling startup
2.5 years ago we startup started with Habra. Now — it's been 1.5 months since restarting didn't know in what format to write a post. Well, let me tell you a cautionary tale of failure, which I hope will be useful.
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Idea, search for a partner, the first test run
I never had service where I would have learned about books of different genres. Part of the idea of this product came through the Mastersland.com. Was and/or there are specific services that cover one or a few related genres. But interests may extend beyond the boundaries of the "genre ghetto". Hence came the idea about creating a news feed about coming out in different publishing houses books of all genres fiction and a little non-fiction literature.
Education and knowledge — I'm more of a marketer than a programmer. So I decided to focus on content and promotion. What was needed was a technical Director in project... recounted her experience here. There were 3 partners (2 per share, and the other combined with the main work for piecework). Of the first two options did not work, the last — appeared the first version of Latima that we came out on Habr and the first round of PR. In a nutshell, the find a good partner in a start — up as difficult as to find a soul mate in love. A little later I found another way for business, but everything should be in order.
With the prototype from the 3rd partner and we launched. I think we too seriously the words of bill gates about what we need to come up with raw products. The website at that time, of course fulfill the basic functions (tape, filter by genre, the list of "will read"). But the rest was done wet. Of course, it was a post on Habr. And PR VK. By the way, then it is quite a roll for free, and today he turned from PR to advertising, and of dubious quality. Detailed with small statistics compared here. But pretty quickly it became clear that convert visitors into regular, very small. After a week of "silence" came about 30 unique visitors a day. Although with such volumes, the site has shown that it can monetize! This has given hope.
Using the moment I want to Express my sincere gratitude to the user k12th for help and advice, as well as all the other abracham that wrote comments, as well as the practice showed us holes in the website.
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Fail, and finding the output
Development did not stop. That's expected appearance of the block of registers. But there happened a force majeure, a programmer — he was offered a wonderful job. Which, alas, turned out to be incompatible with the continued development of the website. Here I note that nobody was thinking bad, I understand the decision partner, we keep in touch, and I am delighted that he has developed all good.
Although this is my Littil was on the verge of failure — was a wet site, posted at the crossing (expanding functionality).
I think you can imagine the morale. At first start the habit to look for another programmer freelancer, but soon refused from this idea.
Here, I want to make a small remark — the option to "hire a programmer" was impossible, because the family ties with the Rockefellers there, and all the capital — money deferred from a relatively small provincial s/n.
Here is another tip to startups: a very good alternative to the partnership is a trip to web-Studio. Check, may be a prototype of your project can be done without losing share of the partner. Yes, there are a number of disadvantages — need to find a to done efficiently, showing a good approach to development, the issue price, etc... But I personally have got speedy development of the project (the Studio makes faster than programmer-partner), a guarantee that the work will be completed and assurance that, if necessary, development of the site can continue another Studio or have already hired our programmers.
With them was finally launched Littil — not so raw, with great functionality. And since we did not stop working the old engine of the site and have accumulated a good amount of content.
I hope the story will help someone. Lest you think that was a wasted 2 years for nothing, I will say that in addition to the content we: received first user worked with the concept of the site, I got experience in this field.
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Littil today
I hope the story was fun and useful. So how can we be useful at the moment:
Tape printed by the leading publishing houses of books
Here we tell about novelties of the largest Russian publishing houses. In the ribbon, there are all genres of fiction and non-fiction: philosophy, journalism, biography, documentary and popular science literature. One of our main ideas is that reading the man is not obliged to limit ourselves to any genre, and can enjoy the books almost the entire spectrum of books.
There is a button to buy these books in shops-partners (both paper and electronic; in the case of the classics, free from copyright, the digital version of books — free).
Functionality "Will read"
Allows registered users to save in the special list of the selected books.
Bibliographies
A relatively young section on our website, but those who already have a good content base. The bibliography will help you better navigate during the search, books: which is better to read from the author, in what order.
Review and rating
You can rate and write reviews of the works that remain in your account and will be visible to friends.
Communication
Users can follow each other to see your friends ' activity: added to the reading of books, the assigned ratings, reviews. Also begin to test message transmission.
Literary news
Here we tell visitors about the most interesting and relevant literary events. With one of the news we got on 1st place of search results in Yandex!
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the Future
To think, to announce upcoming features and terms of its input — a thankless task. I can only say that the development is in permanent mode.
Website traffic gradually increases, monetization yet discourages the hosting, but expect more.
We will be glad, if Littil you will find useful and interesting.
Thank you for your attention. I will be glad to hear your opinion about the site and its technical implementation.
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