Created his own IT startup and won a grant for a million rubles

I went from being a translator in China to creating my own startup.
In this article I will tell you about the idea of ​​a startup, changing three CTOs and teams in a year, offering investments, sales and winning a grant for a million rubles.

Disclaimer: The article was written by the author of the blog «POV startup» based on an interview with Grigory Dyukarev, founder of omnichem.ru.

First experience of entrepreneurship and work in IT

Initially, I wanted to be a diplomat. I studied international relations at the Siberian Federal University, and then at Shandong University in China. In short, I studied everywhere I didn’t have to. And I had to go to MGIMO.

After returning from China, I tried to get a job at the central office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, but the only thing available to me was the most junior position with a salary of 17 thousand rubles. Without housing in Moscow, this option was obviously not suitable.

I started thinking about what I could do. While still living in China, I worked part-time as a translator for Russian entrepreneurs who came there for negotiations. One of these entrepreneurs owned a contract manufacturing of cosmetics in Russia. That's how I learned about contract manufacturing.

I decided to order a batch of cosmetics from the entrepreneur I had once translated for in China. Sales were going well. Over time, I began to place my cosmetic brands in the Familia chain.

In addition to selling my cosmetics, I was engaged in subcontracting for production. One day, an order for 70 million rubles was received. None of the manufacturers were ready to produce such a large batch, so I decided to create my own cosmetics production.

I contacted a technologist I knew, and we mixed up some trial samples. The customer was satisfied with the quality. So we got a contract for 70 million, which we used to buy equipment and start working.

Six months later, a corporate conflict with a partner arose, due to which I had to leave my production with a debt of two million rubles. Sales of my cosmetics at that time brought in little money.

Our family was expecting an addition, and I decided to go to work for hire. While we were creating our production, I studied different approaches to organizing the team's work: scrum, kanban, and others.

My experience managing a team helped me find a job as a product manager.

Startup idea

After a couple of years of working for hire, I thought it was time to start my own business again. I was thinking about how to combine the accumulated background in the spheres of contract manufacturing, cosmetics and IT.

When I was working on my cosmetics, I delved deeply into production issues. That's how I learned that:

• The price of a label depends on the print run and size of the label.

• It is essential to put a liner in the jar of cream, because without it the oil phase will leak out from under any lid.

• You can optimize logistics by choosing the right size of can. For example, by reducing the width by half a centimeter, you can fit 2,000 more cans on a pallet.

• And much more.

Then I came up with a service that produces cosmetics on a turnkey basis. The concept is that the client comes with an idea for cosmetics, and we take care of everything else on our side: we communicate with the production, formulate the technical task, control the quality and deadlines. For production, we act as a hassle-free client who clearly knows what he wants.

I started to conduct castdev. I found out that large cosmetics sellers already have employees who are responsible for working with production, and beginning entrepreneurs do not see the value in this service – they think that no problems can arise during production. There were few interested entrepreneurs.

While I was doing castdev, I also talked to manufacturers. And every second one talked about one problem — finding chemical raw materials. Manufacturers are constantly looking for them. Due to the high key rate, distributors keep a minimum of warehouse stocks, so even 20-30 distributors may not have the required material. Distributors do not post catalogs of raw materials on their websites, much less their leftovers. As a result, you have to call them or write to them by email, which takes a huge amount of time.

The second problem of production is the search for similar materials. For example, in the composition of cosmetics it is necessary to replace one component with another. There are no sites in RuNet where you can find chemical materials by certain parameters and see their characteristics.

So I had an idea to create a raw materials search and ordering service. In this service, production employees will search for the necessary materials, study the characteristics of the raw materials and the balances from distributors.

Production managers save time searching for goods, and distributors receive leads. The service was planned to be monetized using paid subscriptions from distributors.

MVP development, forum participation, sales

I thought that I needed like-minded people. I liked the university communities with young and motivated guys who wanted to launch their startups. So I entered the master's program at MIPT in the direction of “Technological Entrepreneurship”.

I have no programming skills, so I needed a co-founder who would take on development, while I would work on the product and sales. In search of a co-founder, I went to thematic chats in Telegram. Fifteen people responded to my message about searching for a CTO, we called ten of them, and met three in person. One of them became the CTO. We agreed that 30% of the startup would go to him, and signed a letter of intent. We assumed that the rest of the team would work for the experience.

The CTO brought a designer and a front-end developer to the team. He himself planned to write the backend. In a month and a half, the work did not move from the dead point. I said goodbye to this team.

There was a lack of understanding of how to find a new team, and a feeling that such an approach would not work. Luckily for me, my second CTO wrote to me.

The second CTO mentored IT specialists and attracted two back-end developers, two front-end developers, a project manager and a DevOps specialist to the team. In four months, we planned to make an MVP, which would include a catalog of chemical materials and a distributor's personal account.

A month before the planned release, I spoke at the forum “Strong Ideas for a New Time.” At this event, an investor approached me and said that he really liked our idea and was ready to invest ten million rubles in us. However, we did not agree on the investment – I did not know how we could use his money to grow, for example, 100 times.

A week after the forum, I found my first potential distributor clients. People asked for an invoice to pay for the subscription, but at that time we didn’t even have a legal entity. I was quickly opening a legal entity and preparing for the release of our MVP.

After the release, it turned out that the personal account was not developed. The team did not even know that it needed to be done.

I myself do not fully understand how this happened. The personal account was on the mockups, everything was marked in YouTrack.

Within a month, the project left us — she went to an American startup. Later, a couple of developers left — they also found work. The CTO did not want to manage the team and lost motivation to work. Work stood still for almost three months. The CTO claimed that money was needed for a normal team to develop faster. And without a product and sales, investments are impossible. A vicious circle.

I decided to say goodbye to the second service station.

I felt like giving up everything.

The second wind of the project

The project was idle for some time. A month after parting with STO, we won the accelerator “PHYSTECH.IDEA+” and earned two hundred thousand rubles. Motivation to continue working was provided by messages from clients asking when the service would be ready.

I understood that we have prospects. Everyone confirms to us that the project is needed.

I found a new CTO thanks to my Master's degree. From time to time, my classmates and I discussed each other's successes. The husband of one of my classmates is a development leader at a foreign bank. He was interested in the project, and we started working together. Unlike previous CTOs, he writes the code himself. In a couple of months, he significantly improved the internal structure of the entire product.

We also won a Student Startup grant for a million rubles. The money should arrive in October-November.

Plans for the future

We plan to finish the personal account and launch in October of this year. Upon reaching 200 active distributor clients, we will add a paid subscription, which will provide features such as increased ranking, advanced analytics, advertising banners, etc.
At the second stage of the project development, we want to become a marketplace. Clients will be able to buy goods directly on the site. There will be an opportunity for joint purchases and safe transactions.

At the third stage, we will create our own financial services for deferments, customer scoring, and more.

Stack and fuckups

The data is stored in PostgreSQL, the backend is written in Python, and the frontend is written in React.

Our catalog contains 170 thousand chemical materials, the search for which took three minutes. The search by name on the site worked like this: when you enter one symbol, the search began, which took three minutes. We enter the second symbol – and again wait three minutes. The current CTO implemented Elastic, and the search began to work much faster.

The second fuckup is the lack of indexing of the catalog of materials. I have repeatedly said that we need SEO traffic. As a result, the pages were made as Single Page Application, which are not indexed by search engines. To solve this problem, we moved to Next.js.

What advice would you give yourself before creating a startup?

Decisions need to be made much faster. It took me a month and a half to say goodbye to the first STO, although it was clear in the first week that he and the team were not working. I also waited three months with the second STO.

We need to get rid of perfectionism. We spent a lot of time to make not just working functionality, but also tried to make it visually beautiful.

Don't be afraid to try. After failing with my own business, I felt impostor syndrome for a while and postponed creating my product. Now I don't have these fears. I understand that difficulties can be overcome, and even a team can be assembled without money, finding non-material motivation for everyone.

Disclaimer: The article was written by the author of the blog «POV startup» based on an interview with Grigory Dyukarev, founder of omnichem.ru.