I went from being a translator in China to starting my own startup.
In this article, I will talk about the idea of ​​a startup, the change of three CTOs and teams in a year, an investment proposal, a sale and winning a grant for a million rubles.

Disclaimer: the article is written by the author of the blog “POV startup” based on an interview with Hryhoriy Dyukaryov, the founder of omnichem.ru.

First entrepreneurial experience and work in IT

At first I wanted to be a diplomat. He studied international relations at the Siberian Federal University, and then at Shandong University in China. In short, he studied wherever he didn’t have to. And it was necessary in the Moscow State University.

After returning from China, I tried to get a job in the central office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, but the only thing available to me was the youngest position with a salary of 17,000 rubles. Without housing in Moscow, this option was obviously not suitable.

I began to think about what I was doing. While still living in China, he worked as a translator for Russian businessmen who came there for negotiations. One of these entrepreneurs owned a contract production of cosmetics in Russia. That’s how I learned about contract proceedings.

I decided to order a batch of cosmetics from the entrepreneur I once translated for in China. The sale was going well. Later, I started placing my cosmetics brands on the Surname network.

In addition to selling his cosmetics, he engaged in subcontracting production. Once an order for 70 million rubles arrived. None of the factories were ready to produce such a large batch, so I decided to create my own cosmetics production.

I turned to a technologist I know, and we mixed test specimens. The customer was satisfied with the quality. So we got a contract for 70 million, for which we bought equipment and started work.

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 little money.

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

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

Startup idea

After a few years of being a freelancer, I thought it was time to start my business again. I thought about how to combine the accumulated background in the fields of contract manufacturing, cosmetics and IT.

When I was engaged in my cosmetics, I deeply immersed myself in production issues. So I learned that:

• The price of the label depends on the edition and size of this label.

• You must 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 if you choose the right size of the jar. 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 invented a service that “turnkey” produces cosmetics. The concept is that the client comes with the idea of ​​cosmetics, and we on our side decide everything else: we communicate with the production, formulate the technical task, control the quality and the deadline. For production, we act as a problem-free client who clearly knows what he wants.

Began to hold castings. I found out that large sellers of cosmetics already have employees who are responsible for work with production, but novice entrepreneurs do not see the value in this service – they think that no problems can arise during production. There were few interested entrepreneurs.

While conducting castings, he communicated, in particular, with productions. And every second person spoke about one problem – the search for chemical raw materials. Productions are constantly in search of it. Because of the high key rate, distributors keep a minimum of inventory, so even 20-30 distributors may not find the right material. Distributors do not post catalogs of raw materials and, even more so, their leftovers on their websites. As a result, you have to call or write to the post office, which takes a lot of time.

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

That’s how I got the idea to create a service for searching and ordering raw materials. In this service, employees of factories will search for the necessary materials, study the characteristics of raw materials and distributors’ balances.

Production managers save time searching for products, and distributors get leads. He planned to monetize the service with the help of paid subscriptions of distributors.

MVP development, forum participation, sales

I thought I needed like-minded people. I was impressed by university communities with young and energetic guys who want to launch their startups. That’s how I entered the master’s degree at the Moscow Institute of Technology in the direction of “Technological entrepreneurship”.

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

STO involved a designer and frontender in the team. He himself planned to write the backend. For a month and a half, the work did not move from a dead point. I said goodbye to this team.

There was a lack of understanding of how to look for a new team and a feeling that such an approach would not work. Fortunately for me, my second service station wrote to me.

The second STO mentored IT engineers and involved two backenders, two frontenders, a project manager and a devops team. In four months, we planned to make an MVP, which would include a catalog of chemical materials and a distributor’s personal office.

A month before the planned release, I spoke at the “Strong Ideas for a New Time” forum. 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 the first potential customers-distributors. People asked for an invoice to pay for the subscription, but we didn’t even have a legal entity back then. 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 didn’t even know what to do.

I myself do not fully understand how this happened. There was a personal account on the layouts, everything is indicated in YouTrack.

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

I decided to say goodbye to the second service station.

I had a desire to quit everything.

The second breath of the project

The project was idle for some time. A month after parting with STO, we won in the FIZTECH.IDEA+ accelerator and earned two hundred thousand rubles. The motivation to continue work 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 necessary.

I found a new service station thanks to my master’s degree. We periodically discussed with our classmates who was successful. The husband of one of the group members is a development leader in a foreign bank. He was interested in the project and we started working together. Unlike previous SRTs, he writes code. In a few months, he significantly tightened the internal device of the entire product.

And we also won a “Student Startup” grant worth a million rubles. The money should come in October-November.

Plans for the future

We plan to finish with the personal account and launch in October this year. After reaching 200 active distributor customers, we will add a paid subscription, which will provide such features as increased ranking, advanced analytics, advertising banners, and more.
From the second end of the project development stage, we want to become a marketplace. Customers will be able to buy goods just on the platform. There will be an opportunity for joint purchases and safe deals.

In the third stage, we will create our financial services for deferrals, customer scoring, and more.

Stack and facaps

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

Our catalog contains 170,000 chemical materials, the search for which took three minutes. Searching by name on the site worked as follows: when entering a single character, a search began, which took three minutes. Enter the second character and wait for three minutes again. The current STO implemented Elastic and the search started working much faster.

The second flaw is the lack of indexing of the catalog of materials. I have said many times that we need SEO traffic. As a result, the pages were made as a 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 starting a startup?

It is necessary to make decisions much faster. It took me a month and a half to say goodbye to the first service station, although it was clear in the first week that he and the team were not working. With the second STO, I also waited for three months.

You need to get rid of perfectionism. We spent a lot of time to make it not only functional, but also visually beautiful.

Do not be afraid to taste. After failing with my own business, I experienced imposter syndrome and put off building my product. Now there are no such fears. I understand that the difficulties are surmountable, and even a team can be assembled without money, finding intangible motivation for everyone.

Disclaimer: the article is written by the author of the blog “POV startup” based on an interview with Hryhoriy Dyukaryov, the founder of omnichem.ru.