How to launch a successful startup without innovation

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Read the real experience of a successful startup that made the job of SEOs and webmasters a little easier and more convenient.

It is generally accepted that a successful startup is an innovative project that came to the head of a lone geek in the garage, after which he became famous and rich in a short time. This need for innovation is stopping many talented people who simply cannot come up with something that has not yet been invented before them.

In fact, it is not at all necessary to invent something new - it is enough to look around, think, and then make the already familiar things better and more practical. And most importantly, it works, because nowadays a person strives for simplicity, convenience and comfort. Read the real experience of a successful startup that made the job of SEOs and webmasters a little easier and more convenient.

One of the examples of a successful startup that is not related to innovation is GoGetTop.ru - a service for buying eternal links in installments, invented by Igor Miroshnik. In a relatively short time for a startup, his small team managed to get off the neck of investors and start making money in the online advertising market.

Igor answered several questions about his service and its foundation, and his experience is a clear confirmation that a successful startup does not need innovation at all, but thoughts about how to make something more convenient and easier for users.

Igor, first, tell us when you came up with GoGetTop and what was the main idea?

We invented it in February last year, with which we came to the management of Mirafox, where I, in fact, work. This is a whole holding company engaged in a full cycle - from development to promotion and sale of sites.

The main idea was to make the process more convenient and easier for the person who needs such services. Only we have chosen the part concerning the placement of advertising materials.

What kind of promotional materials?

These are the so-called exchanges, where the owner of the resource can buy a promo item on one of the sites with the topic he needs and a link to his resource.

Only this process is not so simple, because you need to understand something about this, spend a lot of time looking for a copywriter, choosing a place for placement.

When you do not have a specialist on staff, you have to do it yourself, and many are just scared. So we decided to make a user-friendly interface, which is, in fact, an add-on over the mechanisms already available in Mirafox.

Was it easy to convince the management of the need to launch the project?

At first, no one believed that such movements were needed by someone and that someone would be willing to pay for a convenient "padding". Therefore, I had to think about some kind of killingfeature, which will become a key feature of GoGetTop. And it was invented - it is an installment payment.

Advertising article with payment in installments? What's the point of this?

When placing such materials, the client usually immediately pays a large amount for the "perpetual" placement, or switches to a monthly fee and pays a little bit every month throughout the life of the site.

And this often scares off customers who are planning to expand the campaign to promote the resource, but find themselves tied to a constant monthly payment. They may no longer have funds for further development. And not everyone can afford to buy "eternal" accommodation either.

And here our system with installments works, when the client pays for the "perpetual" placement not immediately, but gradually, over several months.

Thus, the load is small, and after three months he is generally exempted from payment and can use our services again. It turns out not a monthly bondage, but on the contrary - the possibility of further advancement in new directions.

But such a "layer" cannot exist in the air, it turns out that through you it will be more expensive?

Yes, a small commission allows us to work further, develop the project, follow trends, control the sellers of sites and the quality of service.

The client, in turn, gets rid of unnecessary hemorrhoids, saves his time and effort. Indeed, in fact, we undertake 80% of the promotion of his site.

I would also like to mention the effectiveness of this approach due to the fact that buying links is used mainly for search engine promotion, and Yandex and Google are much more loyal to thematic links within articles, and not to links placed in the footer of the site.

How do other departments relate to your activities? Do you use their mechanisms, in fact, take away some of the clients?

The whole point is that we ourselves are clients of exchanges, since we pay them for services exactly the same as the end user would pay.

It's just another door to the same room, just beautiful and doesn't creak. As for the “withdrawal” of customers from the divisions - paradoxically, but our customer base practically does not overlap with the Miralinks and Gogetlinks databases.

How long did it take you to develop the service?

At first there were five of us: three coders, their lead programmer, and myself. And already the design was outsourced. We came up with all this in February last year, and in August we launched the project in beta version.

Launched to evaluate and catch bugs. And three months later, everything was already working at full capacity. Moreover, there were no pauses, the stages changed purely formally.

Is the feeding process by the Mirafox holding, as I understand it, already finished? I mean the financial question, have you become self-reliant?

Yes, and very quickly - already in January we noticed that the profit from the service fully covers our expenses. So, we can say that we have already celebrated the anniversary.

And this summer we also returned all investments to the holding, so now we not only owe nothing, but also make a profit.

What advice would you give to those who are thinking about starting their own project?

First of all, look around. Facebook and Google are good, but they don't happen often. So postpone your maximalism periodically so as not to lose touch with reality. It requires many more simple and effective solutions. And, perhaps, such decisions will bring the maximum profit.

Always think about what you can improve in a particular segment.