Hey Habr! We are reopening the MySklad company techblog.
MySklad is a cloud service for trade management. In 2007, we were the first in Russia to come up with the idea of transferring trade accounting to the cloud. My Warehouse recently turned 12 years old.
While employees younger than the company itself have not yet begun to work for us, I will tell you how we started and what we came to. My name is Askar Rakhimberdiev, I am the head of the service.
First office - cafe Mu-Mu
MySklad company started in 2007 with a team of four people, interface layouts in a notebook and domain registration . Two guys quickly ran out of enthusiasm, left me and , our technical director.
At that time, I had not written code for several years, but I happily plunged into development again. We chose the most fashionable technology stack at that time: JavaEE, JBoss, Google Web Toolkit and PostgreSQL.
I had a checkered workbook where I wrote down to-do lists, decisions, and even interface layouts. It's a shame that after a few years the notebook was lost, only one photograph remained.
The first interface layouts were minimalist
At first, the office of MoegoSklad was the Mu-Mu cafe. We met once a week to discuss business. Oleg coded in the evenings and weekends, and I could work all the time, since I quit my job to take care of My Warehouse.
In the summer of 2007, the layout turned into this implementation. Please note that Internet Explorer was not something to be ashamed of back then.
Alpha version, summer 2007
November 10, 2007 saw the next major milestone: the first public announcement. We . We received a publication on the main page and a lot of comments, but the most important thing - active users on a free plan - did not appear.
First investor
For the first round of investment, at least a few real users were needed. I talked to a dozen Russian investors, but no one was willing to take the risk. The product was good, but raw. Small business in 2007 did not trust SaaS, Oleg and I had no experience in starting a business.
Out of hopelessness, I started looking for Western investors, and through LinkedIn I found one fund from Estonia. It was led by a former head of development for Skype named Toivo. At heart, Toivo was not a professional investor, but a real engineer. I suspect that the deal took place, because we did not use MySQL, like some shitcoders, but PostgreSQL (it’s immediately clear, serious guys). Postgres was then much less popular than it is now, but it was just being used in Skype itself.
February 2008, we still can't decide on the name of the service
We quickly agreed on the amount of $200 for 30% of the company and began to process the deal. I was very impressed with how e-government works in Estonia and I realized that we need to write jokes about slowness in our minds.
In February 2008, we sent out a press release and the IT media wrote about us, first of all - very authoritative then . Of course, we wrote and joyful .
After the announcement, the first customers appeared. These were small stores that were opened by former IT specialists (who else would read CNews). At heart, they were still drawn to new technologies. The very first payer unexpectedly turned out to be the godfather of my cousin's daughter.
Among the first clients was another category: CIOs in large companies who temporarily closed holes in their automation with cheap MySklad. Even the huge Rusagro holding worked with us.
I am very grateful to them, their custom modifications of several hundred thousand rubles actually helped us survive during the first years.
The first version of the site
A cloud community was gradually taking shape in the country. In 2008, the association of SaaS vendors of Russia met several times in the Shokoladnitsa cafe on Shabolovskaya. There were as many as four vendors in it: Megaplan, MoySklad and two more long-closed projects. And on April 13, 2009, the very first SaaS in Russia conference brought together 40 people.
In general, the leader of the Russian SaaS then and for the next few years was Megaplan. He was somewhat infuriated by his rollicking marketing, but he did the very right thing - he promoted the idea of \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbclouds to the people.
thank you crisis
After the first round of investments, we began to pay ourselves generous salaries of 60 thousand rubles and hired the first employees. Enough money for a year. When they ran out, I had to cut back hard: the employees left, and the founders continued to work for free. I had to move out of my small office.
I think that at that moment MySklad saved the crisis of 2009 - otherwise Oleg and I, most likely, would have returned to work for hire. But because of the crisis, there were simply no good offers on the market, so we continued to deal with the service.
The author of the meme "There is no money, but you hold on" is not Dmitry Medvedev, but the accountant of MoegoSklad
Investors still looked at us like shit without enthusiasm. Now due to slow growth. In mid-2009, we only had 40 paid accounts. For almost a year we lived in total economy mode.
But gradually, and at first not very noticeably, good things began to happen. Went cash improvements for large customers. Suddenly, in the fall of 2009, Forbes wrote an article about us. It was a good material with a beautiful photo of me and Oleg in the warehouse of one of our clients. We didn't have an office then. This publication immediately brought several dozen new accounts.
Making smart faces
We were helped by many people and companies, to which I am still very grateful. For example, sales of My Warehouse through SKB Kontur. The project was launched by Leonid Volkov, then not yet Navalny's ally, but one of the leaders of the Circuit. The joint product sold so-so, but for the integration we received significant money for that period.
For the first time at a real conference, we appeared thanks to Sergey Kotyrev from UMI. At that time we couldn't afford our own booth yet, but Sergey wrote: “Listen, we have free space on the stand at RIW, we can put your flyers”.
At the end of 2009, we again felt financial stability, began to pay ourselves salaries of 20 thousand rubles, and even rented a small office at the Research and Development Center of Moscow State University (for two people with a startup of friends).
Second investor
2010 is the most famous period of My Warehouse. We have already earned 200 thousand rubles a month on subscriptions. For this amount, we somehow rented servers, outsourced SEO, paid four employees and moved to a separate room at Moscow State University. Someday I will write a separate article “How to save money in a startup without switching to doshirak”.
Most importantly, we have grown steadily and predictably. I understood that MySklad had already established itself as a business, so I did not want to look for investors right now. It is better to wait another year for the company's valuation to grow.
Nevertheless, when at the end of 2010 we were invited to a startup competition in St. Petersburg, I agreed. MySklad reached the final of 10 participants. These 10 projects competed for six or seven prizes. We managed the almost impossible: not to win anything. It was embarrassing for the wasted time.
Before the trip back to Moscow, I stopped by the office of former colleagues. There was no whiskey. With some difficulty, I managed to get to the station and it turned out that a 1C employee, who was also at this competition, was sitting in the next chair. There is nothing special to do in Sapsan, so I, trying to breathe aside, talked about our service for four hours. The next day, Nuraliev, the director of 1C, called me.
In a month, we settled the terms and signed the Term sheet - an agreement on the terms of the transaction. The share of the Estonians was bought out by 1C, and MoySklad received solid investments for the next breakthrough.
We had big doubts about this deal. We were afraid that 1C would influence the product strategy and company management. As you can see now, everything happened the other way around - investors helped, but did not interfere. I think that working with 1C is one of our most successful decisions.
Flied
2011 has been a terrible year. We began to spend 1C investments so correctly that the number of leads and customers increased several times in a few months. Tickets in technical support lay unanswered for 3-4 days. Leads did not have time to process. To close tickers or call new registrations, we had a clean-up day once a week.
The team has grown from four to twenty people. At the same time, as usual, the company was in total chaos. We actively traveled to events and experimented a lot: for example, we tried to sell MySklad in the markets. They did it with the same success as they are now trying to talk about product labeling at Sadovod.
There were other difficult moments as well. For example, a large planned loss in 2012. The client base grew, everyone worked for 12 hours, but the money in the account became less and less. Psychologically, this is difficult not only for the tops, but for all employees.
For the second time, we reached stable profitability already in 2014. Over time, Bitrix24 and amoCRM joined the promotion of the cloud model. I think we helped each other a lot.
Okay, but better
Over the past five years, we have been steadily growing by 40-60% per year. The company employs 120 people (we are always glad to see new ones, send your resume). As far as I can see, we are a confident leader in our segment in Russia and are now trying to enter the US market.
But we have a difficult task ahead of us - not to slow down. Maintaining non-linear growth is difficult, but necessary.
Number of new customers by month
Since 2016, the Russian government has been actively helping us (I don’t think it knows about it) with projects on online cash registers and mandatory labeling of goods. We are adapting MySklad to new requirements, growing our client base on free tariffs.
Of course, during this time we could release a dozen new features that would help customers increase efficiency. But we understand that now it is important for small businesses to survive, so the legal requirements remain a priority.
Globally, the goal of MyWarehouse is to help small businesses. Therefore, the number of customers and revenue are not just numbers, but objective indicators of how much entrepreneurs need us.
Now there are more than 1 registrations in MoemSklad. Every day 300 active users create half a million new documents, generate 000 requests per second and 100TB of traffic. We use Java, Hibernate, GWT, Wildfly, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes in the backend. For developing retail desktop applications - Scala.js and Electron. Mobile applications are written in Kotlin and Swift.
In the following posts, we will talk more about the processes within the company and product development. For example, there will be an article soon about how we built the API. Write in the comments which side you would be interested in learning about My Warehouse, vote for interesting wishes.
Source: habr.com