“By designing something in advance and fully designed, you are doing a stillborn thing” - conversation with The Breakfast

In the context of the pandemic of the coronavirus, quarantines, closed borders and self-isolation, everyone bury the old-school business first of all. How to survive travel agencies, cinemas and restaurants, if everyone is sitting at home. Digital business, on the contrary, rubs its hands and fights for the attention of consumers who have sat down at home.

But in IT, the industry, which has not yet become fully mature and has just announced itself, can suffer greatly - services for offline meetings with strangers. Even before the announcement of COVID-19 as a pandemic and before the introduction of emergencies in many countries, we talked with Elizabeth Oreshkina. She, together with Eteri Saneblidze, makes The Breakfast app , which brings strangers together for breakfast and resembles a closed club only for their own.

We are with Ivan Zvyagin (baragol) discussed why people suddenly again wanted to chat offline, and how in the modern world to do a startup that does not chase a mass audience and huge numbers.



- Over the past few months, I have already learned about several startups that remove romance from the mechanics of dating. They make people just meet and talk. What's happening?

- It became possible just thanks to the dating. They removed the taboo on meeting strangers, it has already become part of life. On the other hand, the number of people we see and recognize is very much reduced, especially among those who have already grown up, graduated from high school, and college. We may accidentally meet someone at work, but work is a specific context, not everyone is ready to leave it and communicate not only about work. And where to meet people for communication? Unclear.

General events do not greatly contribute to this. Only good experience works when you are experiencing something together, and after that you have a contact. But there are very few such situations, because now we spend most of our lives at computers - and the need for contacts is very large.

- On the contrary, it seems to me that it has never been so easy to get acquainted. We have social networks, a lot of places where people gather. We are no longer wild and pose no serious danger to each other.

- I will return to the example of dating again. Today, getting up and talking with a person at a bar has become much worse than 30 years ago, because there is a Tinder for this. It protects you from a possible fail. Despite the fact that this feil, in fact, makes you alive, makes you feel brave, feel the heartbeat. This is the heartbeat that you are experiencing - it is very important, because if the contact is made, it becomes more significant - you feel yourself, overcome yourself a little.

All technologies that replace overcoming with comfort kill us a little. People feel it. More precisely, they feel a lack of something, but do not understand what. I think that the request for a new way of dating is also a desire to get this experience, communicate, feel, but with the necessary degree of comfort.

“I agree that this is a defense, but I agree that it is killing us.”

- She simplifies. You can write on Facebook to people who are interesting to you, and invite them to meet, but this is still a discomfort. First you need to add as a friend, a person should be with you in the same city. You don’t even know what kind of person this is, because he writes something cool, but in fact he can be very gloomy or not interesting. Quite often it happens. Naturally, people do not want to encounter this. On the one hand, they can be understood, on the other hand, the situation is contradictory.

It would be very cool if people just came up, talked, knew how to smile at each other in the subway, react and interact easily. But it is difficult. This is especially difficult in the post-Soviet space, we are all a little afraid of each other for a bunch of deep reasons.

I would be happy to live in a world where I can talk to anyone about anything and feel good. Then I would do something else, because such a problem would not exist. I would like the distance to be reduced, and the desire to be frank with each other, without fear, would grow.

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- We now live in the world of technology, it was created by engineers, and human interaction is reduced to a simple exchange of information. It seems that on this Facebook you will find out everything you need to know, see how people live, sort of even communicate. But this is an absolute lie. You communicate when you smell a person, when you look at each other, you see movement, reactions to words. It is very easy to confuse one with the other.

But in fact, the difference is huge. From personal communication you immediately receive a physiological feedback, you begin to feel physically different. The less such contact in life, the more stress it causes, because it is a physiological need. We can deceive ourselves that this is not necessary, that the need is closed by other means, and sometimes we may not be aware of the need at all. The number of depression is growing for a reason. A person has no way to feel. It sounds a bit arrogant, but it's physiology.

Judging by Tinder’s analytics, the main goal of about a third of its users is simply to get a match and see that someone likes them. Then they turn on the telly and fall asleep happy under the series. It is simply a satisfaction of vanity, and you can go no further. We don’t want that, we want to get people to go out to meetings. This is a very difficult task, because laziness comes out, but on the other hand, we communicate with our users and see that they are, that not everyone is lazy.

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- Firstly, it’s definitely not worth talking about all the people. People are very different, someone really does not need a lot of friends and they will be fine. Another thing, this “I'm fine” is also a complex concept. People are very inclined to deceive themselves. If they are put in a different situation, they will say "damn it, what didn’t you say before ?!" Even if you know that a person is deceiving himself, you can’t tell him that.

There is a stereotype that only those who don’t succeed do not want to communicate, it has a certain logic. This is such an instrument of psychological defense: if you are not successful in society, then you will most likely decide that you don’t need communication - you save yourself from this situation by avoiding it. Or you accept this challenge and start to do something with it.

There is another stereotype that successful people need to communicate less than unsuccessful. But I was amazed when people in whom something happened in life and it turns out began to come to us. This is a very interesting phenomenon. If you have achieved something, then most likely you are different in something. You could build a life, you could develop professionally, but apparently there are no people around you like you. Basically, you are surrounded by people whom you hired to work or the family that you started. And you are very much short of people who have faced the same problems.

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— (baragol) You got an idea, you developed a design. How long did the development take?

- The product is not made in the spirit of "guys, here are the layouts, make them." You come up with something, collect, look, it turns out garbage, redo it. This is all a long process with a wild number of iterations.

A little over a year ago, we started without development. We launched the landing, looked at the reaction, collected the first set of comers - it took three days, because we can do it. Cool, cool and fast. It was nice to get 3000 instead of 300 people. Then you correct the concept, and then it becomes overgrown with details, development begins, then everything changes, and this is an ongoing process. You do, change, introduce, cut, return again.

This fall, we started and immediately heavily sawed through the mechanics. We called the first users and immediately realized that we created a tinder-like monster, which still does not work. They began to remodel. It was a rather painful process, which took two months. Now everything is fine. We are getting ready for scaling.

- Are you not afraid that you are in a hurry with the exit? In reviews, people complain about mistakes and underestimate.

- There are 20 ratings, and that’s not something that you should worry about. People complain about the problem with downloading the photo, and I have a suspicion that it is wrong with it. Perhaps the photo is too large, we process it in the background, and the person should wait a little longer than he used to. At some point, he gets angry and goes to write a review, believing that the photo has not been uploaded. This is normal and it is easily repaired.

In general, I will not say that everything is so unstable here. In some places, the application is dumb. For example, it’s very annoying how the chat works, but at least it’s clear what to do with it. A new version will be released in a couple of weeks, and it will be a little better. A month ago, we tested the load. With the volume that we need now, the application works fine. At the maximum, it slows down a little, but not much.

If suddenly in one day several thousand people register, then we will withstand - this has already happened. Inside, after registration, a large number of invited users will be more difficult to withstand. But there isn’t much going on right now, we’re not in a hurry with this. In addition, users are divided by city, this also facilitates the situation.

One of the guys who advised us on the load, said that he had two friends of the project, who at the start could not withstand the load and died. In fact, I suspect that they died before the launch, because for two years they could not start, they were wildly tired, burned out and did not want anything. Naturally, when they fell, they immediately decided, "Oh, I’ll probably go to work and get a job."

- I also heard many stories about startups that made a prototype the night before the presentation, received investments, started up and died, because they spent all their money on rewriting and solving problems on the go, instead of growing and adding new features.

- Any project that has just started is always in a state where something needs to be done constantly. There is no such thing that we will design, blind and it will just start working. Ten years ago, they came to me with the idea of ​​products, and I wrote technical assignments for them. I thought, now I’ll clearly write everything, and it will be cool. This is the worst thing I could offer. Developing something in advance and fully designed, you make a stillborn thing.

Without feedback, without the ability to fix and change something on a living, a good product cannot be made. The task of any small project is to make sure that you have the opportunity to tuning. If we see that a lot of changes are being made with crutches, then I understand that it is necessary to take time, otherwise it will be impossible to change later. This is a question of the process and how you organize everything.

- What is your application written on?

- React native and Ruby on Rails

- (baragol) And who chose them? Why not native?

- This is what many scare us. But while it’s hard to scare. Essentially, this is to make it faster.

- When people choose React Native, they speak not only about speed, but also that the application is everywhere - desktop, android.

- We didn’t have fast and everywhere, because the pool of the audience on which we set were primarily people with iPhones. We were not going to cover everyone at once, and we generally do not have the task of being accessible to everyone with basic registration. We have a complicated registration. It is necessary to torment to pass it. Our task now is to check some key things, do them well, and then it’s logical to develop where it is logical to develop.

- Why ROR? We once had an article about whether Ruby died, and people decided they kind of died.

- Interesting. It is rather a coincidence. I did the previous Ruby project, so the choice is more likely connected with the expertise of the developer, with whom we have been working together for a long time. But realizing that now - in such a configuration - this works fine, and then everything will change in any case, then what's the difference? The main thing is that it works now, it is stable and brings value.

- (baragol) Do you think there will be a stage when you have to rewrite everything cleanly?

- I think yes. I will be very surprised if this does not happen. It will be cool if we can develop sequentially, but there is also the issue of scaling the team. I’m still not a developer, and I have never been one, so I understand that I won’t take such decisions without a strong, versatile development team. But the application works, people have breakfast and are happy, now this is enough for us. But in general, I do not know of a single project that would not correspond in the second or third year of existence. This is normal.

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- (baragol) I will tell about my experience of use. Everything was super until the moment when the magic began [selection of a couple for a joint breakfast]

- Magic ruined everything.

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- Not everything is perfect, it is true, and we understand that. Now you are given one chance in 24 hours. Two scenarios come out of here. Or you regularly throw announcements until you find someone you are going to have breakfast with. Or you liked the person, you quickly agreed on breakfast, and you can immediately get a new chance after that. An ideal scenario when you use the application as you wish. You understand that in the next three days I’m ready to have breakfast with someone, you press the button, you come across a person who also pressed it. We do not account for all the people that we have, we only connect those who also pressed the button and are also ready to have breakfast in the coming days. That is, we do not use the entire user pool, but a much smaller part of it.

Our task is to select people who are truly motivated. Now companies are a bit corrupted by the need to grow rapidly and grow their audience. They come to them just to try, and normal, average companies are happy about this.

And we are not happy, we want people who are ready to invest in themselves and really go to breakfast with someone unfamiliar. Accordingly, such people are much fewer. So in your case there is a chance that you would simply not get into the application yourself, this is first. But of course we have people who just want to try and don’t know what will happen next. We need to learn how to better direct these people, to tell that on the other end of the wire is also a living person - and he wants to have breakfast.

- And how are couples selected?

- We do not select people according to their interests or according to any one parameter. We are interested in a story about how to build a human community at the level of informative trust. Our life experience suggests that people like something simply because they like it. People may not have anything in common on an objective level, but together they are interested.

It’s quite difficult to create compatibility by matching rough parameters like a general profession. There is still a question of goals. Some people have no idea why they should communicate if they cannot discuss something at work. We really want this to change globally. But since now 85% of people do not know how to interact with their emotions, auxiliary tools are needed. So far, we rely on the fact that almost all of the members of Brekfast are cool. Since all people came from a waiting list or at the personal invitation of those who are already inside, everyone is at least normal with everyone, because they are already at a certain level of maturity and are able to have a good time with one another, one and a half or four (this is also It was).

Obviously, with development we will have to clarify some things. We will have both a sphere of professional interests and finer things, which I will not talk about so far. But in general, attempts to predict human behavior and thoughts have always failed. The whole system of human relations boils down to the fact that we like people who know how to negotiate, and who freak out less - that's all.

Curation of the waiting list is a way to select people who have already done at least something in their lives, have gained life experiences that can be shared. That is why they are interested in communicating with people not from their industry. In their own way, they know everyone they need, and they feel confident. They are interested in something beyond this.

“But when a community grows, problems always begin.”

- Of course. This is inevitable, but I do not think that we will refuse curation. Most likely, we just technology it. Perhaps, with a large amount of data, the machine will be able to create the best breakfast possible, but it is also possible that it cannot. Here no one knows, we must try.

In general, people have the expectation that they will now slip the perfect person, and they will be happy with him until the end of life. The problem is that when any relationship is built, the question is not “what are you”, but the question, “how do we relate to each other” - what are we doing for each other. I don’t want to think about it, because it’s work, and everyone wants fairy tales to make it happen.

And in fact, the solution is simple - go for breakfast with a person, but with some good mood. Even if we do not do anything from the point of view of segmentation, I think that this may well work if everything is served correctly. We have a bunch of hypotheses, including non-trivial and slightly secret ones. We really want to try and break them in.

- Who is currently looking at profiles to issue an invite?

- We are watching, with our hands. Obviously, we can make a mistake, and that we do not perfectly convey to people how everything works. For example, an invite is not a viral mechanic in order to make a lot of people, but, on the contrary, to have few people, and to make everyone cool. People are not used to this.

A person who is ready to tell about himself understands that the other needs to see with whom he is communicating. Therefore, he tries to formulate something about himself. And if a person puts only a smiley in his profile, then it is clear that he does not think about it. People are not accustomed to thinking about others. This is a big problem for all current applications - we are distant, we don’t understand anything about each other. This is a sick thing that we are gradually changing.

- If a person told about himself, can you still not give him an invite?

“Yes, it can be, and it is obvious that we can be wrong.” We see that a person is from creative industries, that he creates something, and that he identifies with this. We have a small percentage of people who write about their height, about the fact that they like to travel and have breakfast. This is a description that does not characterize them in any way. Either the person did not fully understand the idea of ​​Brekfast, or he has nothing more to say about himself.

Now we invite somewhere 5-10%, another 10% we doubt, and all the other people are simply not worn out. And if you are not tired, what will you do at breakfast?

- (baragol) On your landing page for the press it is directly written that English proficiency is a selection criterion. In Moscow, St. Petersburg and maybe in Lisbon, this falls into the right group. But what about New York?

- It’s hard to talk about New York specifically, because we haven’t felt it right yet. Americans even have different social media profiles. In Russia there is a cult of social vanity, with us any person thinks about a personal brand. In the West it is not, people live their own lives, for them Facebook is just Facebook. It is rather personal communication with friends. Good question, how will our curation be arranged there.

- (baragol) In general, what is the weight of this criterion - English?

- Small. And it works rather poorly: to press the button - you do not need to know English. Some people cope with the interface, but what we asked them to do is simply ignored. And of course, they think that they should get invites in any case, despite the fact that they have been written to them many times how everything works. For us, this is just one of the selection criteria.

- (baragol) If this one has a minimum weight, then why is there no bilingualism? Just easier to maintain?

“And that too.”

- (baragol) Or do you immediately mark there?

- Yes, we just won’t be able to start simultaneously everywhere. We have changed the mechanics very much while we work in Moscow. Therefore, we launch a city in the country. And it is absolutely certain that the mechanics will continue to change. We try to be as flexible as possible while we manage to do it.

Of course, I would like the people who are in The Breakfast to get everywhere a similar experience: in Paris, Los Angeles or St. Petersburg. For example, I’m doing the application here, at the same time I have customers in the aircraft, and I live in general it is not clear where the last 4 years. And this is a pretty relevant situation for many people from our audience. I want to combine them. English for them is just a way of communication and work. This is vital.

- (baragol) And what is the base on the waiting list?

If we talk about the waiting list, then a total of 6000, we collected it in two stages. Of those who received an invite, which is 5-10% of the waiting list plus invited by users, about half of the people subscribe and use, which is pretty cool.

- (baragol) What do you earn? Or are you planning to earn? Because if you multiply, 200 pieces per month is not money.

- Of course, not money, but we just started - in the current form we started three months ago. And a year ago they published the first announcement, just to look at the reaction of people.

Now our task is to configure all the basic processes within the product - this is the earliest stage, but it is very exciting and we manage to make it fun. We value quality, product style, our audience, its reality - we focus on this. We really bother now and naturally believe that the contribution to the project is long-term.