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[–] yamalight [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Okay, you asked for it, so brace yourselves :P Here we go:
Before I start I want to note that I'm Russian and first two ventures I tried to start was also happening in Russia. This is important to remember IMO.
So, the first thing I tried to start was looong time ago, back in the days when Symbian devices was considered "smartphones" (I think it was like 2005) and when investors wanted to see huge business plans before giving any money. I had that awesome idea of making a mobile MMO that would be tied to user's location. At a time I envisioned it as sort of a mix from popular back then Ragnarok Online and Ingress (which obviously didn't exist back then, but you get the idea). Since doing a project like this for mobile devices was pretty much impossible without any money, I thought I'd write a business plan and try to raise some from local investors. I spent about 4-5 months writing a huge ~150 pages business plan that had everything - project roadmap, market research, budget planning, competition assessment, etc, etc. I managed to assemble a decent team and even to book a couple of meetings with local investors. One of them got interested and offered $600k + office space for 49% of the new company (which was pretty typical for russian market at a time). He had only one small condition - he wanted to see finished game design document that was due in ~3 weeks (and was about 70% done). And that's when it all fell apart. Our game designer started coming up with more and more strange reasons on why he can't finish it in time. And he never did, I still don't know why exactly. We never got funds, team and project fell apart and I was left with a huge pile of text document we'd created of the duration of the project (~7-8mo).
The next thing I tried to start happened about a year after the first one failed. I thought I'd try something smaller, something that wouldn't require too many people and third-party investments. Something I can bootstrap. I came up with this great idea of mobile messenger that would work using mobile numbers instead of arbitrary logins/emails (once again, note that this is pre-iPhone era, I think it was 2006). And since installing apps on Symbian devices was a pain in the ass, the service needed to be based on existing mobile and web technologies. The way it worked was pretty simple - you go to the WAP (old mobile web) site, enter/pick your friend's phone number and hit a button "connect". Your friend gets a USSD message "Your buddy X wants to speak to you" with two buttons YES/NO. If he picked yes, he'd be forwarded to the same WAP site and a live chat session would start. Dead stupid, simple and easy to use. The business model was as well pretty straight forward (as I thought) - I wanted to make the service free for users and simply take a small share (~5%) of the money from traffic generated by the service from cell operators. From the initial estimations I saw that if I could get a contract from one of three biggest cell operators in country and only 0.5% of users will use the service ONCE per month, it could generate about ~$1M for cell operator. I thought that was great. To test the model out I launched a small pilot project with a local area operator that was pretty tiny. Service worked great, but user base was too small. Then I'd spent almost two years trying to convince the big guys that it's gonna be worth for them to sign a contract with me. That was all they had to do - sign a contract and grant access to USSD gateway. And they'd get additional revenue. The answer I heard most of time - $1M is not too small for us. At some point I'd given up and closed and sold the company to cover for my expenses. At this point I decided to move to Europe, so I'd found a PhD program and went to Germany to get a doctorate degree.
While doing my PhD, I'd attended a summer school for my field and met some interesting people there. I'm still not sure how I ended up working with them, but at some point I got contacted and asked on whether I'd be interested in working as CTO/Engineer for a mobile music app startup. They'd already raised some money for it as a research project, it was partially related to my research, they offered shares and salary, so I thought why the hell not - and jumped on board (I think that was 2010). App idea was pretty interesting - it was essentially a social music player with a geo-twist. The app would aggregate all the existing services (spotify, soundcloud, youtube, whatever) to one app, so that you can keep using the service you like. You could follow people and see what they'd listened to and where they listened to it. Sort of twitter for music, I guess. We'd also built a pretty sophisticated recommendation system that had a bunch of vectors that wasn't used by anyone at a time (like position, popular songs around you, weather, etc). And we had a map view, where you could look at what genres/songs are popular in your/other city, district, etc. All went pretty good, we worked on the project for almost two years, released two major version for iPhone. But we had two problems: (1) we couldn't spend any of the research money for marketing and (2) we started next fundraising round too late. Because of (1) our userbase was pretty small (~1.5K users after ~8 months) and when we went fundraising, it was pretty hard to convince people that our product is something that people actually want. And since we'd started fundraising too late, we had ran out of money before we could raise anything. That's when things got even worse - one of co-founders said she wanted 50% + 1, while initially we agreed on equal split. And in the end all this bollocks fighting for non-existent shares (and lack of funding of course) killed the project.
Next year or so I'd spent mostly finishing up my PhD. In some free time during that we'd collaborated with some of my fellow researchers on a small project that's ment to turn complicated machine learning and natural language processing tools into simple to use web services. We'd spent some time building conTEXT (http://context.aksw.org/) that looked pretty fancy, won some research awards, etc. We tried to apply with it to several startup accelerators, but it was never convincing enough. Then one of the team members left for a PostDoc position in a different Uni. And we started re-thinking and re-evaluating our approach. Now we'd came up with a nifty flexible platform that can do literally any data processing in a very simple way that could be used even by people who have no idea about ML, NLP and any of that stuff. We'd applied to some accelerators and currently awaiting news from there. Hoping that this one will finally fly :)
And that’s it for now. I hope that was at least partially interesting :)