Lessons From Entrepreneurs: Svetlana Gladkova
By Steve Spalding March 18th, 2008
Under: interview
Svetlana Gladkova is a part of the team behind the blogging platform Profy. What’s especially interesting about this company is that it’s based out of Siberia. Svetlana was kind enough to share some insights about development, networking and reaching international markets.
Here is what she had to say.
First of all, I need to point out that we only launched Profy
blogging platform in private alpha back in January so this is a very
early stage project – thus the early-stage lessons I can share with
your audience. So my tips are focused on the development and launch
stages of the web project.
Development is your focus until your product is perfect
As a marketing person I used to think that success of any project depends mainly on marketing, publicity, and public relations. Now I know that no PR can actually make any project a success. Now I know that when you prepare to launch a web product, almost everything depends on the development process and this is what any web entrepreneur should focus on. You can believe your over-optimistic team and expect the development to be completed in 6 months (and have the development budget for this period as well) and you can easily end up with over a year in development.
Such situations can easily crash even the best of ideas so it is extremely important to have a good architect to plan the development process and set deadlines. And even if you are 100% sure in how your team will perform and know that your product will not have any single bug, it is still wise to add a couple of months to your plan to be absolutely sure you have at least some time allowance to have the product ready.
You are the leader, your enthusiasm is crucial
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This really sounds like a very reasonable list of tools used for web research. It's just that some people use them on the daily basis while the others simply make a choice once (like choosing Hakia over Google once and for all) and stick to it instead of experimenting constantly with other tools - after all, when you are 100% satisfied, you don't feel the necessity to find something better.
As for the Bloglines, this is a great tool, no doubts about that - but I feel it is a little outdated already. Technology is moving very fast and new standards for usability and user interface emerge equally fast. As for the cleaner interface, I am talking Google first of all and then Profy feed reader (I think the two have equally clear interfaces and I have migrated to Profy from Google Reader myself - though I can not be objective here, obviously).
And thanks for pointing the multiple-tags search feature again, I will discuss it with the guys here to make a decision how this could be implemented to meet your requirements.
Svetlana
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