First development, first fail and meeting @lehard

In this post I am going to tell you how I spent 700 thousand rubles on programmers. And after all, without any idea how to make a website, I did everything by myself.

In the middle of 2015, I finally had a concept of MapalaNet project. I didn't know anything about designing websites, so I found a contractor for the first version of mapala.net – studio divone.ru. I put my own investments for the project. While the programmers worked, the new ideas were coming, we tried to implement them immediately adding functionality to our website. That is why we always had a lot of things to add or fix, so our budget was growing.

The first sketches

I decided not to wait until the design is done and started to gather people around: I wrote to all my friends, I was testing the idea and receiving the first reviews. And once I wrote to @lehard. I knew him for a long time, about six years, I guess. And the answer I got from him was unexpected, he told me that he was doing something similar, and I chose the right time to text him. And after that, I realized that I did everything right. I stopped being on my own from that moment.

We made a list of our first plans, created a small advertising campaign on VK to attract people to "work" in travel sphere. The response we had was crazy)) Few adverts we posted had brought us 3 hundred people. We spoke almost to everyone about our project, created a chat in Skype and added people there.

It is better to ask @lehard about how we organized our work with people and what exactly we did. Let me tell you about the problem-solving-experience I had.

During the design of the project, I'd been dealing with the director of the studio. He seemed to be a normal pal, he wasn't a coder, he was a manager. The project was half way done, and we had plenty of people in the Skype chat waiting since forever for the project release version to get launched...

Every day the manager kept promising me that everything would be done by the next day. When I managed to reach the coder, it turned out that he was a freelancer, he got tired from our project and had a diploma to work on. In the end he just told me to go to hell and refused to continue working on the project.

So, I just paid money, got nothing in return and had no idea what to do! All we had was the code that nobody wanted to work with. Moreover, we didn't have any money, we even ran out of borrowed money. So I had to design the project myself no matter how angry I was.

It took me about 3 weeks to learn PHP, and after that I started finishing our abandoned website. What you see on mapala.ru is my work. The programmers gave me nothing else. But I don't regret, no one could design the project better than me. ;)

Stay tuned, in the next article @lehard will share our first experience of starting the project in Russia and tell you what outcomes we had.