Habr services stop working under separate brands and become independent projects within the Habr brand, forming a connected line of services for IT specialists.
Habr was conceived as an industry project for those who are employed in the high-tech industry. When it started in 2006, few people imagined that over time a small industry site would turn into a market giant.
Since its inception, Habr has been a branched resource, which, in addition to the basic value - posting content - offered other opportunities. This is a job search, a service of questions and answers, a calendar of events.
Over time, it became clear that if you separate the subsections into a separate project and give them independence, untied from the Habr system that is complex and closed from the outside world, they can get a new breath. And so it happened. The section with vacancies after several moves settled on My Circle, user questions - on the Toaster. Then we launched a separate project for remote work - Freelance.
Over the past few years, we have been brewing a decision to combine Habr's projects into something more integral and interconnected. We constantly encountered a situation where some users did not associate Toaster, My Circle and Freelancing with Habr. Or, worse, associated with completely different companies.
The theme of unification became especially acute when last year we set ourselves the goal of entering the international market. Now almost 400 thousand users visit the English-language Habr every month. This is an excellent result, but it was not easy to achieve it. We realized that no one knows us and no one is waiting for us in the new market. There we develop from scratch, learn and fill bumps. In the future, we want to bring other projects to the English-speaking market. Working on the development of four different brands will be even more difficult.
We argued a lot and tried to figure out which form of unification would work best. Should projects remain separate services that communicate via APIs, each with its own user base. Or they all need to be combined in one large service, with a single user base.
On the one hand, we have long understood that projects that live autonomously as separate services focus much better on the specific needs of users, find their market niche more accurately, develop faster and monetize better. On the other hand, we would like to develop other projects with the help of a large and strong Habr brand. Transferring the popularity of one project to another is not easy if they are not connected in any way. It is even more difficult to make sure that users and clients freely, without additional costs on our part, flow from project to project.
All this time we have been thinking a lot about the meaning of Habr and our other services, drawing the future of each project separately and all projects together. And, finally, we found the unification formula that will allow us to maintain a balance between the autonomy of each product and integration into a single whole. This formula also helps us to better chart the future where we are going, set the pace for our growth as a company, and communicate that vision to our users and customers.
Here is the formula:
- Habr as a company creates and develops services for people professionally employed in the IT field. Each service covers a separate need that arises for an IT professional at certain points in his life. An IT professional in our understanding is not only a developer, as it seems to many, but also people of other professions in the IT industry: executives, product managers, designers, testers, administrators, devops, editors, marketers, salespeople and people of other professions who available in any IT company.
- All Habr services form a single ecosystem, complement and interpenetrate each other, and help the user to use the experience or reputation that he has accumulated in one project, also in another.
- Habr is the strongest and most famous brand of the company. Therefore, every project should contain this powerful word in its name. It will also show the common origin and unity of all projects. The second word in the project name should define the meaning of the need that the project helps to close, or the service that it offers to the user.
- Our current projects receive the following names and domains:
- Habr β¬
The company's flagship service that helps IT professionals share their experience and gain new knowledge. Available for Russian and English speaking audiences. - Habr Q&A β¬
Former Toaster. Service for getting answers to any questions on the topic of IT. Available for Russian-speaking users, will be localized for English-speaking users. - Habr Career β¬
Former my circle. A service that helps develop your career in the IT industry. Available for Russian-speaking applicants and employers, will be localized for English-speaking audience. - Habr Freelance β¬
Former Freelancing. Remote work exchange for IT-specialists. Available for Russian-speaking freelancers and customers, will be localized for English-speaking audience.
- Habr β¬
- Step by step, we are creating a single registration for all projects, so that with the same account the user can log in to any of our services and quickly start using them, uploading information or reputation about himself, which he left or earned on other services.
We will continue to build current products so that they fully reveal their potential in their niches, be competitive in the international market, and will soon introduce new ones that meet other needs of IT professionals and open up new markets.
There is a lot of work ahead, but we have already taken important steps by identifying the direction and formulas with which we want to turn Habr and our line of services from popular on the local market to popular and competitive internationally. This is our global plan for the coming years, our motivation and inspiration to move forward, overcoming difficulties and gaining new experience. Which we will definitely share with readers in our blog.
β (+ competition)
Source: habr.com