How an IT specialist from Auchan got out of a salary of 35,000 rubles

DISCLAIMER: The article was written by the author of the blog based on an interview with the owner of playrooms and developer of children's games V. Makarenko.

I'm from a small town and have always envied entrepreneurs. On Instagram* they looked so free, so happy. When I saw their black cars and snow-white veneers in the regional center, I dreamed that someday I would become an entrepreneur myself.

I worked at AUCHAN for 35,000 ₽ per month, and despite the fact that my employment record said IT specialist, in fact I worked on the phone:

Hello, my scales are broken, please come!

My cash register is broken!

Therefore, there was a lot of time left to think about how to earn money.

Attempt to go into business No. 1: Ikea shelf for virtual reality

In 2013, the first VR glasses appeared – Oculus Rift. I ordered them on Ebay (30,000 ₽) and covered the IKEA shelf (it was already at home).

For 4 sq.m. in a shopping center they quoted me a rent of 30,000 rubles. I increased employee salaries and advertising costs. The estimate turned out to be 90,000 rubles and I decided that I couldn’t afford it.

Attempt to go into business No. 2: children's play den

Finally, my wife and I decided to work for ourselves and, instead of just one VR shelf, we planned to open a children's play park. The plan was to move from Ufa to Beloretsk (population 60,000), so that it would be a new thing in a small town.

So, in 2014, receiving a salary of 35,000 rubles, I felt like a professional entrepreneur, quit my job and took out a loan for 450,000 rubles.

Investments children's play center

I bought Xbox and PlayStation consoles (RUB 100,000) and TVs (RUB 70,000).

In total, we invested 335,000 rubles, and the rest went to the first salaries and rent.

Expectation
The profit was estimated on a napkin. I calculated that 50-60 people will come per working day from 9 to 22.00, entrance is 300 rubles, multiply by 50, we get 15,000 per day. For a month – that’s 450,000 rubles, that is, 350,000 rubles net!

Reality
In the city of Beloretsk, for 60,000 people, no one wanted to go to a game park for 300 rubles, and gradually the price tag dropped to 120 rubles, and the number of visitors fell far short of the business plan.

We planned to be happy and rich, to work when we wanted, but we started working from 9 to 23:00 seven days a week for 3 years like zombies. And the average profit of the establishment was around 45,000 rubles per month.

Hookahs, beer, children

We didn’t understand which client to target, and it turned out that everyone began to use the premises in their own way.

– Anticafe

The guys came in to play FIFA and board games, and we organized a hookah for them. Embers from hookahs burned through furniture.

– Gaming club

A group of boys aged 16-20 are thinking: “What should we do?” — 120 ₽ per hour, which doesn’t seem like much. And now you have decent guys playing, and now our friends are calling them.

Ale, where are you?! I'm in Megatron!

This is how the whole party gets involved.

So, all local personnel under various substances become your visitors.

– Pivbar

Our landlord, rest in peace, let’s say, she got her bearings. She saw crowds of teenagers of varying degrees of prosperity in her building, put 2 plus 2 together, and set up a sports pub opposite us.

That is, now the guys who came to us to fight in mortal kombat and fifa could now conveniently grab a beer opposite. And then we spent the rest of the night cleaning up everything from the spilled beer. So, step by step, we formed a hot spot combo.

– Games room

Mothers immediately brought their children to play.

We survived financially, but there was a catastrophic lack of money. At one point we were unable to pay our loans, and when the collectors started calling, we split up. My wife stayed in the playroom, and I additionally opened a photo salon.

Attempt to go into business No. 3: photo salon

I took a printer (20,000 ₽) and a sewing machine (10,000 ₽), rented a nook in the market (10,000 ₽) and started printing on T-shirts and pillows, which I sewed myself. I bought advertising on VKontakte in local public pages.

What I experienced in this booth, I did not see either in our gambling den or in a taxi, where I sometimes worked at night. Clients who pay little want to shake the soul out of you. Now I’m afraid to pass by those places, I’m physically shaking.

The regular customers were the category of romantic girls. Girls printed T-shirts with their photo or where they are kissing a guy and hearts to give to their other half. This is probably how they tried to “mark theirs.”

There were so many of them that I even thought about running separate ads for them.

She wants him to have something about her. Probably no one has ever worn these T-shirts. Surprisingly, there were boys like that too. They printed T-shirts:

“Karina, I love you, with you forever”

In the best months, this brought in about 30,000 rubles. Considering that I sat there from 9 to 20:00. Once there was more, and once upon a time we had to return the money.

The tax situation

While my wife and I worked for days (she in a gaming den, I in a photo salon) for 75,000 rubles, we, of course, had no money left for taxes. I submitted zero declarations. And then a letter arrives from the tax office.

Before going to the mat, I consulted with my friends.

– How do they know that you worked at all? Say that you have been doing repairs for 3 years, testing something little by little.

With this plan, I went to the inspectorate.

– What is it, Vladimir, you work and don’t pay us taxes?!

– Where are we working, Anastasia Viktorovna, we’re doing repairs.

I show you the photos. We really did a lot of renovations back then. The inspector opens our VK group.

– Why are you freaking out? All our children already come to you for holidays, we celebrate with you ourselves.

And there are adult women, they really have children of 8-10 years old. Then I realized that I had to give up.

– If you want problems, we will arrange them; if you don’t want them, pay using the tax payment clarification column.

I paid 90,000 rubles for three years, and became friends with the tax office, they advised me on a convenient taxation system – a patent (42,000 rubles per year).

Attempt to go into business No. 4: children's play center

Everything changed when one mother came with a request:

The child doesn’t want any animators or presenters, he wants to celebrate his birthday with you. We took a little more than the hourly price, launched Kinect Sports and Xbox and held a celebration. When we received more daily revenue from one person and a minimum of problems, we decided that we needed to focus on children's parties.

And in order to discourage the audience that had formed around us, we moved.

The game that changed the game

Even when I worked in IT, I was always interested in developing mobile games using unity. I'm starting to think about how to make children's parties more interesting. And first I’m playing a game in the style of Minecraft.

The children were divided into teams, and the game generated tasks for them. The host explained the rules, gave out props and congratulated the birthday boy, and everything else happened automatically. The game counted points, turned on music, and determined the winner.

Next, I'm writing an interactive game where children can control the game using their bodies. A regular webcam looks at the child, and the script analyzes the movements.

Children who watched all the Jack Sparrows and Spider-Mans were very pleased with the interactive games.

Whoever squats the most eggs into the box wins. Here the algorithm analyzes the position of the body and understands where the hand is and where the head is. And in the background they play songs generated by a neural network. It may seem that this only works at a wedding, where everything is on a high level, but it also works great for children.

Children see that they can influence the gameplay through their actions and are very happy. They competed, shouted, and it tore up the whole city.

The result was a machine for automating the holiday. And our proposal began to sound like this:

Bring your children and we will do the rest! But don't forget the food.

We did not want to get involved with Rospotrebnadzor.

One likes Batman, another likes Wednesday, but we have different games and the interactivity satisfies everyone.

With interactive games, it became like a business; the whole city came to us to celebrate birthdays, and brought in from 80 to 150,000 net rubles.

Admins received 28-30,000 rubles in salary, and presenters received 700 rubles per holiday.

Attempt #5: Selling games to animators

Inspired by the success, I closed the photo booth and concentrated on the games.

The idea was to sell games that come to other cities and game rooms. I launched VK target and it worked. When I sold my first game, it felt like I had found my first love or found fire. I connected a simple licensed system and took 5,000 ₽.

I sold mainly to animators, and the life of an animator is difficult. You need to constantly be in trend. You just saved up/bought a zombie costume (from RUB 30,000), when Wednesday comes out and no one loves zombies anymore, everyone loves witches. And if the suit is old, no one will order your services. You have to adapt to each holiday; someone buys jokes separately from the scriptwriters (from 5,000 ₽).

And with my games, the presenter no longer needs to jump around with a suit, balls and soap bubbles. It is enough to start the game, and then the children do everything themselves, and the presenter is freed up and can take pictures of happy children. And parents don’t have to separately look for an animator, a photographer, a game designer, or a script; they just need to come.

I thought that my solution had to be bought by all animators at once. The games are constantly updated, interactive, you stand out from your competitors.

Game room owners should also react: you invest in an animator in costumes, acting courses, and he can just leave and open his own game room and take clients.

But it turned out that animators and game owners are conservative guys, and they switch to new things very sluggishly. However, we managed to sell games worth 100-250,000 rubles per month.

Attempt to go into business No. 6: interactive walls

There was still not enough money and I found interactive wall technology.

That same interactive wall with Aliexpress, now there are a lot of them on Avito And then sales started. Major competitors sold such walls for 500,000 rubles. I found similar ones for 20,000 rubles in China, but I didn’t know how to sell them for 500,000 rubles and started selling them for 40,000 rubles. That is, the big companies warmed up the market with advertising, and I picked up demand with my dumping.

I thought that I would save money with my partner for 10 years, I imagined myself giving an interview to Forbes, and we agreed 50/50. I began to earn about 300,000 rubles, but I worked for everyone. My phone was constantly ringing. Either something broke or didn’t arrive, I began to get very tired. It’s probably fashionable now to call it burnout and inability to delegate.

So I came to my businessman friend. He sold children's slides to kindergartens for many millions. He became interested in my proposal and asked:

– How much do you earn?

– 300,000 ₽, approximately.

– You will make 3 million rubles with me!

In total, the company employed 25 people. Initially, I saw the partnership as a portal to kindergartens, but they never entered kindergartens, but made money from my audience by selling interactive walls.

I was responsible for those. part, the partner became a director and promoted the head of the sales and marketing department. Everyone worked to the fullest, and after six months the business reached a turnover of 8 million per month, and at its peak brought in about 2 million rubles in profit.

But we invested the profit back, and after 2 years, I earned the same 300,000 rubles and began to discuss with my partner the increase in my income. The partner explained to me that there was no money in the company, and out of friendship I did not ask to see the financial statements on paper; he managed the money.

Because of this misunderstanding, I went out of business. I received my share.

Last attempt to go into business

I went off to build my own company with blackjack and everything. I thought about different options:

– Start making games for your home

– Create educational interactive programs and reach out to government agencies

– Launch game centers

Now I am responsible for marketing, and for the product, and for sales, and I have already spent the money from the sold business. I have a developer (RUB 120,000) and a manager (RUB 60,000). There is a cash gap. Children always need something new, so I invested a lot in new games.

I don’t always see my planned 150,000 ₽, after 300,000 ₽ before – it hurts. While I was working in partnership, I worked only on the product, but now I do both sales and marketing myself. To be honest, it’s difficult.

If the market has warmed up for interactive walls, then no one knows about my product and everything takes a very long time to decide.

Since 2014, I’ve been in debt for the second time, and I work 24/7, so I decided to write this article and figure out what I’m doing wrong. This is useful at least for me, and if you can advise in the comments, I will be especially grateful.

DISCLAIMER: The article was written by the author of the blog “fell and rose” based on an interview with the owner of playrooms and developer of children's games Vladimir Makarenko.

For more than a year now, Slava Ryumin has been interviewing entrepreneurs once a week about real business, and not this successful success of yours.

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