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1. Developments in the startup industry  📰

Today we’d like to share some startup inspiration. Let’s look at a truly fascinating case of Genki Forest, a Chinese beverage manufacturer that’s sold in 40 countries. Its revenue amounted to 👉🏻 $450 mil in 2020. The startup's valuation tripled in a year to $6 billion 😎

“China no longer needs good ecommerce platforms, but it needs good products to sell on them”, said founder Tang Binsen ©️

🥇 At 22, he won a gold medal at a programming event in France. Then he also launched a gaming startup ELEX Technology — which he sold for $400 million in 2014. After that, Tang Binsen decided to try his programmer approach on physical products.

At first, Genki Forest used a traditional food manufacturers method — a multi-stage internal selection of ‘future blockbusters’ through massive focus groups and expensive marketing preparation. However, it was quickly abandoned for a MVP approach. 

🗣 Genki Forest reasoned: “We can’t actually know in advance what people will like. Let’s therefore release as many pilot batches as possible and keep those that receive positive reaction”.

New flavours are tested almost every day — with 95% of the created drinks not passing the testing stage and, thus, not being released to the market 🙌🏻

This case shows us that sometimes it’s not one ‘killer’ product that leads to success, but rather a large variety of ‘ordinary’, simply good products. This is a much more structured algorithm of scaling than search for a mythical mind-blowing hit 💡

For this approach, you need a means to quickly and inexpensively test a large number of hypotheses. This works with physical goods and this works with digital products.

It’s essentially a case of how to apply programming skills to business: manufacturing, logistics, marketing and sales 😉

1. Our Mission ☝🏻

We’ve already talked a bit about how Voypost came to being, and we’d like to continue our introduction with presenting our mission statement. 

What exactly is a mission statement and why is it important for a business to outline one❓

A mission statement basically tells why we, as a company, exist. It identifies the overall goal of an organisation 👉🏻helping with defining brand character 👉🏻 the trajectory of operations 👉🏻 and the internal and external policies. It also helps to 👉🏻 measure the success of a company.

At Voypost, our mission is to reinvent software development. We strive to become a Software development platform to build digital products that will enable businesses to digitally transform and grow through innovative technologies, smart tools and experience 📊

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1. Freelancers

A recent study by the home improvement marketing firm CraftJack has shown that 45% of American teleworkers regularly work from a couch and 38% work straight from bed 🛌 

🦠 It’s quite clear that we all are tired of talking about covid in general, about covid statistics, pros and cons of vaccines etc. It’s also clear that we cannot escape the impacts of the pandemic on our everyday life. Particularly the work environment.

After numerous lockdowns, many of us had a taste of a freelancer life: 

➖ working from your home and balancing crying babies,

➖ loud washing machine and lots and lots of emails;

➖ attending Zooms in a white ironed shirt and pyjama bottoms; 

➖ washed out boundaries of work-life balance.

Now the world seemingly returns ‘to normal’, but normal itself has changed 🤔

Voypost team has always worked remotely, even before the pandemic. The biggest advantage is that we can afford to get anyone, no matter where they are located. So we don’t have to settle for less and can concentrate on really searching for someone who matches our requirements and principles. 

❗️That’s why our people are our greatest strength and we can form any kind of team combinations, tailored specifically for any project.

1. Car Apps 🅿️

The niche of tech startups, dedicated to helping repose find and reserve places to park, is on the rise again 🚗

After the pandemic, when megalopolises looked like ghost towns and parking spots were in abundance, now people try to stay away from public transport and value personal space again, ergo the need for places to park.

For instance, for SpotHero Inc., which makes an app that helps drivers locate parking spaces, it was a turbulent period. In April 2020, their business was down 9️⃣0️⃣% compared with February. They had to lay off half their employees. 

Bookings started to come back in January, accelerating to levels higher than before the pandemic, making the startup profitable for the first time in 10 years — all thanks to a sharp increase in car ownership, spurred by people avoiding close contact with others.

All in all, we are now more picky with whom they share their personal space. Instead of public transport or taking Uber, more and more people are now looking for ways to share rides in a closed community. Some went even further and turned it into a recreational lux experience, like for instance, Drivers’ Club 🔒

Drivers Club is a community, where members discretely share their vehicles in an exclusive environment. Voypost currently works on developing a native mobile app to help users to stay connected to events, drives, and coordinate service requests with local partners.

Our world goes through a rapid digitalisation process, seeing online shopping, apps for reserving parking spaces and even shared car garage-galleries. At Voypost, we deal with many different startups, so it’s always interesting to see new digital products fill out spaces for pains we haven’t realised we had before ☝🏻

1. Software 🖥

There’s a lot more to development of digital products than simply picking the right programming language. It can be a complex, exhausting process. Add a human factor too ☝🏻

Take, for example, typos. So often, we write fucntion instead of function etc.🙈 We’d like to share some handy software tools which our developers use themselves and which can help with long, complicated projects and make programmers’ lives so much easier.

🟡 Bracket Pair Colorizer 2

This VS Code extension allows matching brackets to be identified with colours. The user can define which tokens to match, and which colours to use. This way it’s easier to keep track of all the brackets.

🟢 Redux DevTools

If you work with Redux apps, this debugging and live-editing Chrome extension is a must. It lets us inspect every state and action payload. If there is a problem, you can revert it by ‘cancelling’ actions.

🔵 JSONView

Usually when encountering a JSON document, the browser simply shows plain text. This extension makes viewing JSON right in your browser much more comfortable. The documents are formatted, highlighted, and arrays and objects can be collapsed.

🟣 VSCode:

Auto Rename Tag helps to automatically rename any paired tags.

Better Comments can be used to categorise comments: Alert, TODO, Query — and highlight it with specific colours.

AutoCorrect is there to avoid many common spelling mistakes.

These are not some secret extensions, but we hope that one of those extensions may come in handy for you! 😊

1. Startup mistakes ❌

Have you ever had a product idea that is brilliant in your opinion❓ So what did you do with it first❓ Maybe marketing research❓ Did you develop an MVP❓ Or maybe you started looking for investors who are ready to believe in your idea right away❓

About 90% of startups fail. We will talk about common mistakes that arise already at the idea stage, which we noticed while working with over 50 projects.

1️⃣ Desiring a finished product right away

When you are so passionate about your startup concept, you rush to make the first version of the product, completely forgetting about the prototype or an MVP ☝🏻

⛔️ Skipping the prototyping stage is risky as you can waste millions. 

✅ It is necessary to test the hypothesis and only then invest into a full-fledged development. Launching a basic MVP is sufficient, because you can add functionality along the development of the startup.

2️⃣ Lack of uniqueness

It’s often a result of a poor marketing analysis. A lack of a killer feature is the fastest way to kill a startup. You can invest as much as you want but the product will not become a hit 😔

⛔️ To avoid such an outcome, do your research: maybe such a product already exists or your killer feature is actually useless for the customer. 

✅ You must understand what exactly makes your product unique.

3️⃣ The more killer features, the better

Extremes in both directions are dangerous. Some try to cram at once too many killer features into one prototype in order to target the widest possible audience.

⛔️ Such an overabundance can confuse both the investors and the consumers. A good idea can turn into a product that is incomprehensible or too expensive for a future audience. 

✅ A simple rule to follow: one prototype to test one kill feature. It's perfectly okay to make multiple prototypes when developing a product.

4️⃣ Lack of financing

The thing is, a lot of people don’t understand what they’re getting involved into. Due to the lack of understanding of the real prices in the IT industry, they lose steam.

⛔️ Despite the fact that everybody talks about it, a lot of startups still come to us without any idea that a good product will not be cheap. Unfortunately, we know that it will be difficult for such startups to withstand the competition and survive.

5️⃣ You do it yourself

When you don’t go to professionals from the get go, chances are, we’ll have to re-do everything 😅

Most often, startup-founders lack experience, especially technical. For instance, a lot of ideas don’t require as much money, if you use correct technologies or software but you can only learn about it if you seek for advice.

⛔️ Many also come wanting to finish the project in a couple of months. When we start going into details, it turns out that it’d take at least

✅ In such cases, we help to get rid of ‘unnecessary’ features, simplifying solutions to minimise budget and be able to meet the deadlines.

It’s a shame when cool ideas burn out because of typical mistakes. Take this guide into account and make the coolest and sought-for products! 🚀

1. Case 🚀

We’ve recently finished a major project with Bexchange, Europe's leading private insolvency auctioning platform. We’ve been representing Miyagami, an enterprise ready applications builder. 

More information on Miyagami can be found following this link: 

🖥 https://www.miyagami.com/en

The situation is such that for the last couple of years, there has been a lack of transparency regarding insolvencies. The process has been often a bit obstructed. Finally it was time for that to change. 

👉🏻 We’ve helped to create a stable and robust web-platform that is able to handle a large number of concurrent users and transactions. As a result of superb management of the overhead and data structure, the platform has shown a very high performance.

Stack: Next.us, Strapi, Kubernetes, AWS.

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1. Retro party 🎉

Online team building might sound like something from a sci-fi movie. But it’s today’s reality. Trust us, it can be very fun 🥳

 Actually, there are more and more startups that focus on precisely online team building. So what is it and how do you do it❓

Our team has always worked remotely, even before the whole pandemic thing. Worked from home before it became mainstream 😂

It’s difficult to always remain in the work-mode, and it was difficult to keep in touch with all the coworkers. ☝🏻Especially because we are pretty much all over Europe.

We started thinking if we can somehow spice up our weekly meetings where we  discuss how everything is going 🤔

It was our CFO who came up with ideas of retro-parties. We brainstormed the format of such an event and decided on a monthly occurrence. There’s also now a separate budget on food and drinks 🍹 

We gather up in Hangouts (our platform for work communication too) to play some board games. Alias, Cluedo, you name it. After the first party we got really good feedback from everyone, so it became a genuine tradition 👌🏻

Once we tried out an agency that specialises in online team building to play some retro games, but we’ve since returned to organising it ourselves, as we got the hang of it. It’s a really fun and creative way to encourage communication, build trust within the team and generally engage our employees. 

👀 So while everyone else was discovering the world of online corporate culture, we’ve already been acing it!

1. A checklist for starting a startup 📝

So, you’ve decided to develop a startup. Recently we’ve talked about common mistakes as early as the idea stage of development. Now let’s focus on positives. What’s the process for starting a startup❓

There are a few mandatory steps. Of course, a startup begins with an idea. However, many beginner entrepreneurs think that a unique selling point is enough to sky rocket the sales of a product, but it’s not as simple as that.

There are 7️⃣ main components to a good start:

✔️ An Idea

✔️ An Efficient Team

✔️ Starting Capital

✔️ Testing Phase

✔️ Strategy

✔️ Prototype

✔️ Launch

❗️ You have to remember that the prototyping stage is a crucial step in a product launch and it’ll help to protect you from financial exhaustion. You’ll test your hypotheses out and will know for sure whether a particular idea works or not. This way you’ll be able to find investors faster and engage your development team with a physical model of the product — not some wishy-washy assumptions.

❗️ Make a separate prototype for each idea in order to not overload the product and test each killer feature in advance. Just pick an idea with the biggest potential to launch your product and go from there.

❗️ Take your time. Develop everything gradually, don’t skip any steps, otherwise you risk turning your high-quality idea into a low-quality product.

❗️ Define your killer feature at the very beginning. What pain does it target? What problem does it solve?

❗️ Explore the IT industry. Prepare yourself by looking at the approximate prototype prices, as well as programmers, designers, the creation of MVP and marketing.

And remember to be patient! Not even Apple or SpaceX started out multi-million dollar companies.

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1. Meet our employees 🏆

Meet our team!

🧑🏻‍🦱 This is Pavel Beloyvan, a Head of Delivery Department at Voypost. During the 26 years of his life, he’s been called Pavlik and Pasha, Pal Palitch too. Surprisingly, he’s worked in management for more than 10 years. 

He’s a ‘switcher’ and came from an environment, where such a term is more insulting than anything. 

☝🏻 HoReCa seasoned Pavel and gave lots of experience. Sometimes the experience was gained the hard way. Well, he still remembers it fondly.

Pavel-Pavlik-Pasha-Pal Palitch is all about finding solutions in tough situations. He loves a challenge, truly. He also brags that he can read a book, watch a movie and play a video game simultaneously. 

Test him to see if he’s really game 😉