Google receipts in my mailbox, or how my own son changed me

Perhaps now it all looks naive to some extent, but it was because of this story that happened 10 years ago that I quit my job as head of mobile application development at a large company. It changed my life a lot. Something for the better, and something for the worse, and something has yet to be evaluated. The tests were serious, but first things first. In this part of the story, I will talk about my son and how he influenced me. In the following stories, I will share the result of what I ended up with. And also, I plan to tell you what it cost me, there are also losses.

It all started with my trip to Germany in 2012. For the fact that I helped to take place another merger (M&A), the boss invited me to ride on CEBIT 2012 in Hannover. A kind of non-monetary motivation, at the expense of the company. Just before the flight from Moscow, I receive a call from my youngest son Dima:

– Dad, please buy me a new iPhone in Germany.
– Dima, and for what such successes in study, I should do it?
– Dad, if you’re talking about money, then I’ll transfer it to your card now.
– Ok, when I arrive, tell me where you got the money from.

To be honest, it was very unexpected, I was in shock. Where does a 16-year-old boy get such money from? In 2012, the latest iPhone 4S cost about 25 thousand rubles. Dima transferred money to me, and of course I bought him an iPhone. All the time at the exhibition in Hannover, and on the way home, I was tormented by the question of where he got the money.

I come home and try to find out: Dima, tell me, where does the money come from? He explains to me in detail what the buyer of the site translated to him. That is, he sold his site. What site? I’m still an IT specialist, everything should be clear to me, for what, how and why. For what a teenager can get such a small amount. During the conversation, it turns out that Dima made two sites, one in the Minecraft theme, and the other as a collection of free CMS and templates for them. Somehow I stuffed links to my sites into the templates. I wrote articles, did rewrites (I didn’t even know the word) of other people’s articles in order to raise my sites in search results. Maybe these links were not the main reason why his sites received a lot of traffic, but the fact is. The traffic was such that it helped him sell these sites on the stock exchange. He bought an iPhone, and left the money to create new sites.

I sell solutions for enterprise automation, the results of automation of factories, plants, regional retail chains depend on me and my team. I have to wander around the Krasnodar Territory, periodically go to Moscow, and my son, without leaving the room, earns half the salary of my sales manager.

I ask him:

– Dima, why did people buy your sites, what will they do with them?
– Well, they will probably stick AdSense there, and they will receive money for viewing ads.
– Can’t you do it yourself?
– Probably I can, I was actually going to do it on new sites.
– Well, if you need money, tell me, I’ll add it.

I was very interested in what Dima would do. And after some time, paper letters from Google addressed to Dima began to arrive. And a few months later, when he was not yet 18 years old, and he did not yet have a license, Dima bought a car. It was a very tired VAZ 2106, which he pushed with friends, as the battery was dead. I reminded him to get his license first. Dima sold this six at a loss, prepared and got the rights when he was 18 years old. And then he came to me again with a request:

– Dad, let’s go buy a new car?
– A new one? (you should have seen my expression)
– Well, not quite new, used, I don’t have enough for a new one.
– How much money do you have?

Then Dima brought some papers from the room and said the amount in dollars. I did not understand and began to look at these papers in English. They turned out to be checks signed by Google’s chief financial officer. Each is about $300 to $500. That is, in about a year, Dima managed to earn quite decent money, which was almost enough for a normal, used car. But Dima may not have had enough experience or knowledge of the English language, because he had just turned 18 years old. He configured something incorrectly in his personal account and Google sent him checks instead of money, which had yet to be cashed. Only VTB agreed to cash them out with a horse commission. There was nothing left but to agree, because you can’t pay for a car with these checks. I told Dima to set up the following payments directly to my personal bank account.

We sat down to advertise with my brother, and found him a Honda Civic in very good condition. I had to add a little to make Dima realize his dream. While all this was going on, I was haunted by thoughts about Dima and what he had done. Purely theoretically, I certainly understood how it all works, sites, traffic, advertising. But the fact that I have in my apartment, my own son, without leaving the room, earns serious money, did not fit in my head.

This story was like a catalyst for me. After all, I, an experienced 1C developer, project designer, head of one of the successful branches of a large company, numbering 5 thousand people, earned money locally. And my sixteen-year-old son was able to do this without leaving his room. I started to experience some serious reappraisal. I realized that the transition from the position of branch manager to the leadership of mobile development was not what I needed in life. I need something edgier.

Along with this reassessment, I realized one more thing. The next 10-15 years, I have to do something that can be sold as a whole, like Dima. Only to have enough not for one car, but for the island. Of course, this is a joke about the island, but once I already managed to sell my company. And it turned out to persuade another company to sell. After all, it was for the purchase of this second company that my boss invited me to take a ride to an exhibition in Germany. But these were all mergers (M&A). In order for a company to be worth serious money, I understood that it should not be inside some kind of closed ecosystem, which was 1C.

Before making a final decision, I called my boss and said that I wanted to be a partner in mobile development. Only a legal partnership can truly motivate me to create something very cool. I’m not ashamed to admit now that he refused me. But I was ready for this, and said that I would quit.

Together with a small team, I managed to create in these ten years something that can be sold (more precisely, rented out, which is even better) and that can be called a business. But most importantly, if sales go well, then we will not have to add much to scale these sales. We are well prepared for this.

The first sales began on the 4th month after the dismissal and were always, of course, they were not enough for development. Not all these ten years we were directly involved in the creation of the service, we had to earn money on something else in order to continue the project. But all this time, we have been slowly and systematically moving towards our main goal – a service that will not only be able to replace trading solutions from 1C for desktops, compete with other cloud services, but also show our main feature – a cloud configurator.

Despite the fact that this part of the project still remains in the form of a prototype, the first part of the goal has been achieved – anyone can automate their own or someone else’s small business using our service. So far only in Russia, but without our participation. And we already had one such sale, which can even be called a mini-project, in Penza. From the comfort of our office, we automated a team of sales representatives and then six more retail stores. And it all works for our mobile applications Nativator.

We managed to combine all our mobile applications in one SaaS, which we also called Nativator. In the following publications, I plan to tell in more detail how exactly the creation of the Nativator service took place, there will be more technical details than in this background.