Probably, you’ve already seen our new BA Michail — our latest guest on Ship it and Sip it 🍻 — and heard about his versatile background.

He started his career as a business analyst at an American Venture Fund. He was researching the market and determining which startups are worth investing in. He's also been a team leader and PM.

But working with startups is not Misha's whole life!

He is a big fan of “The Lord of the Rings” 🧝🏼‍♂️. and even plans to celebrate his birthday in New Zealand!

Also, Michail is fond of games 🎮. If you also enjoy it but have never played God of War yet, be sure to give it a try. Michail highly recommends it.

Despite playing computer games, he enjoys doing sports. Especially, snowboarding 🏂 and cross-fit. In the future, he plans to master surfing + kite surfing.

“I am a very open and positive person, and always glad to meet new people and try everything new.” – Michail.

Welcome to our Paralect Community🎉 Thank you for joining our BA team!

Paralect Team has a new goal — #BuildInPublic. But how can we keep that creative fire burning?✨

Our Head of Content, John McTavish, is inspired by nature! He usually finds ideas while riding a bike🚴🏼‍♂️, running🏃, or simply walking the dog 🐶

For him, morning is the perfect time to get thoughts together.

"If I'm working on a blog post or some other piece of content that I'm kind of stuck on, then that time in the morning is when I can mentally solve problems" – John.

What other tips does he have for creators✔️? Watch the full interview with John McTavish on the ⏯ Paralect YouTube channel and develop your creativity.

Lyubov Dementyuk — Planning better together

The previous year was full of great ideas, insights, and initiatives. And the strategic planning session was a nice opportunity to discuss all that.

During planning, the Paralect leaders shared their experiences, achievements, and even failures of 2021 and create a vision for this year 🚀

"When a group of people are sitting and brainstorming about one topic, people usually start thinking 'out of the box'. And this is basically when the creativity starts working." − Lyubov Dementyuk, Managing Director at Paralect.

But how to make this plan work?

1️⃣ Prioritize the goals
2️⃣ Assign the execution team
3️⃣ Define how to measure the results

"Based on the results that we've got, I believe this format worked really great." − Lyubov

https://youtu.be/lBXsFUfH4E4

Running the company as a DAO, dachas on a blockchain and new creative communities — this is the 2022 Igor's keen to bring to life 🚀

During the strategic planning, John McTavish interviewed 💬 our CTO, Igor Krasnik, about how we'll embrace these new opportunities.

He shares:

👉🏻 Why simplifying tech is so important and how this tendency will affect the future of product development;
👉🏻 How Paralect will drive innovation in Web3 and the creator economy together with DEIP - Creator Economy Protocol;
👉🏻 How the R&D team will help us make the company stronger;
👉🏻 What conclusions were made after Batch 1 of the Paralect Accelerator, and how we can improve Batch 2.

▶️Watch the interview with Igor's answers and read his article about simplifying technologies on igor.paralect.com 👀

https://youtu.be/jYAD4yjJ_SY

We celebrated Paralect’s Birthday a month ago — but the memories are bright enough to propel us through another year ahead 🔥

Celebrating our 12 years of cosmic collaboration was a great opportunity to get everyone together, have fun, and discover we're not only professional developers, testers, business analysts, etc.

We are also talented dancers, singers, musicians, and even actors✨

Just watch the video to see how it was. And if you want to celebrate 🍹 the next Paralect Birthday together with our creative community, visit join.paralect.com and apply 👈🏽

https://youtu.be/UcQKcsGNB0U

Agatha Rudko is a graduate of Startup Summer 2020. She spent two summer months studying 📚 front-end and back-end under the sensitive guidance of mentors. And for good reason!

After finishing the courses, joined our team full-time 🤝

Agatha was really impressed by the atmosphere and the possibility to express her opinion and be heard. BTW, at Paralect she not only found a lot of friends, but even met her boyfriend ❤️

The end? Happily ever after? Not so fast…

In 2021 her progress was so rapid that she was invited to be a lecturer at the next Startup Summer to teach the students about React Native 👩🏻‍🏫.

“I think that it’s a perfect initiative to involve current teammates in the learning process.

All the participants benefit from it — the company upgrades its developers and grows a new generation of professionals, we get a chance to develop our soft skills by teaching in public, and the students get a bunch of new knowledge. Either way, total win-win.” – Agatha

Read the full story about the power of motivation and willingness to grow as a professional developer at 👉🏽 blog.paralect.com ✔️  

https://youtu.be/KENWbf8WgRk

"You should understand the target audience, their psychology — how they see you and look at you as a brand." – Helen, Designer at Paralect

No matter what your startup or small business or established company sells, compelling visual design is a must-have.

This week on Ship it and Sip it, John and Helen explore the challenges and opportunities in modern brand design — find out:

🤩 Where she finds inspiration when creativity lags

💡 How new startups should create an engaging visual presence

👏 Which brands she thinks get their design right consistently

And which of today's trends she's not a fan of 👎

Helen's creativity can be seen all over our feed and her latest Bëhance project with Cinema 4D highlights the progress she's made just over the last few months 💪

Find out what drives her passion for design in the full interview on YouTube https://youtu.be/saiAmc9g3gM

What technologies will be popular this year? Igor Krasnik, CTO at Paralect, shared his expectations for 2022.

First of all, he believes that usage of no-code tools will grow.🔝

“We’ll see more tools that will come to the areas that are associated with the typical engineering and programming skills.” – Igor.

What other predictions does he have🤔

👉🏽 React will be a leader as the most commonly used and documented framework. But it will have some competition.
👉🏽 Svelte will become more wide-spread
👉🏽 Databases will go to the cloud and become easier to integrate
👉🏽 Web3 will go live
👉🏽 There will be more products in the creative economy. New solutions will help creators monetize their knowledge and art.
👉🏽 A lot of educational programs will be focused on online education that's outcome-oriented.

Watch the full video with Igor’s prediction for 2022🔮. And do not forget to watch it once again in a year and check which of Igor's predictions came true.

https://youtu.be/ZBivmhEw87E

How to level-up our mentorship process – Sergey Lukashov

Startup Summer shows that our teammates are open and ready to share their knowledge! But that helpful spirit of collaboration doesn't end at demo day.

Therefore, in 2022 we're going to make the mentoring process even better and more effective 💪

"We have a whole bunch of improvements, but basically we want to revamp it and bump it to the next level and make it more efficient and smooth." – Sergey Lukashov, Vice Head of Engineering.

This means a lot of workshops, lectures, and other activities to inspire ✨ our teammates to #BuildInPublic. Our mentors and creators will share their expertise and knowledge not only with the Paralect Community, but also with the wider product world.

To build MVPs faster and bring the most performant tech into our product studio — that's the mission of our new Research and Development team 🚀

“It should be like really a team of tigers and superheroes who is able to build these products in a really fast and quick way with superior technologies that we have now at Paralect.” – Vladimir Panteleev, Head of R&D team.

But the tech and speed are just tools to meet the main goal — to turn founders into millionaires with the products we build together 🤩

https://youtu.be/-OEKiTOXfRQ

How can we attract new entrepreneurs and fill this community with thriving startups? Here are some tips Kate Novoselova has gained through her experience with founders:

💪🏽 Grow product expertise
🚀 Grow the community of Founders and run Product Labs
📍 Increase the presence in the United States and Europe
🧑🏽‍💻 Create new departments that can bring value
💎 Attract investors and invest in early-stage products
📈 Build up our track record of wins

What other tips can be useful? Write your ideas in the comments below👇🏽

https://youtu.be/-OZFsewb4Os

How can we make our partners happier? First of all, make the process of building products simpler.

Meet the new team — Research and Development — who make the process faster and more efficient. So founders can focus their time and energy on the results instead of the process 🔝

“We’re going to help our founders not just with the development of MVPs but trying to find the approach that will help them quickly.” – Vladimir Panteleev, Head of R&D

What are the main goals of the R&D team?

🚀 Speed up the product discovery and project launch cycle for new ideas in the Paralect founder community.

📲 Build developer proficiency with new technologies via these new products.

🤝 Support engagement across product teams with events and internal product developments

BTW, the R&D community announced their first event — the Future Odyssey Hackathon next month!

Want to know more about it? Visit 👉🏼 https://blog.paralect.com/post/forward-thinking-product-creators-RnD 👈🏼 and read all the details about the R&D community and their plans

"This team will be experts who can do everything on their own — essentially, founders are getting a cool service that is working better and faster." – Art Garadecki

Better and faster is Art's thing. This week on Ship it and Sip it, he and John dive into:

🤖 Sales and lead-gen automation

💡 Improving the problem and idea validation process

🛠 Building skills on internal products for our community

And what he's learned about effective outreach across a variety of channels and contexts.

"The most important part for me is understanding your target audience, why they're interested in your product. It's hard at the beginning when you have just an idea — I think it's all about the people and their use cases."

Catch the full show on youtube.com/paralect 🎙

https://youtu.be/U5tBApaUw7A

How can we make partnerships with founders more valuable?

Konstantin Kariapin, Head of Business Development, sees several ways to achieve this goal:
- Validate ideas faster with the help of R&D team
- Provide product marketing and management services
- Build a network of investors ready to back our founders

"It will also help to understand if your product has product-market fit much faster — not spending too much time, not spending too much money on this process." - Konstantin.

What are the best ways to realize these ideas? Watch the video to find out 🔍

https://youtu.be/oDjwpiuQL0Q

Inspiring our creators with Alena Timofeeva

“I’ve met a lot of people with cool experience in product development from top to bottom. But the issue they face is they don’t understand how their knowledge and experience is valuable to others.”

Here’s Alena Timofeeva with her plan to further inspire our creator community.

If everyone is aligned around the goal of sharing their expertise, how can we channel that enthusiasm 🤔

Watch the interview to find out — and join us soon for more live events and webinars Alena and the team are bringing to the community 🤝

More than 80 teammates joined the Paralect community in 2021. Daria Lyapko, Recruitment Team Coordinator, plans to increase this number and is already off to a cracking start this year🔝

She believes only a people-first approach to hiring talent can help our team achieve this goal.

Also, she is planning to cooperate with the marketing team to spread the word far and wide that Paralect is "about people" — about ambitious, creative, incredible people🙌🏽

How can we realize these plans? Watch the video to find out.

https://youtu.be/ojaXBssoEnQ

"It's normal … this imposter syndrome is never really going to go away — you just learn to dance with it better." – Jasna Klemenc Puntar.

For this episode of Ship it and Sip it, we went remote and talked with Jasna about how to make the most of e-networking and professional branding.

Any founders (or anyone) who want #BuildInPublic can learn:

👤 How to create an appealing profile and digital reputation

🚀 Why startup founders AND teammates help brand positioning

🤝 Where to meet people to grow your e-network

This is part one of our collaboration with Jasna — on March 24th she'll host a webinar with us to dive deeper into LinkedIn best practices for startups, founders, and all of us.

Get your questions ready and sign up on the Events tab of our LinkedIn page.

"If you never ship anything, if you never publish anything, you're never gonna get there. This is the trick — do it and think, do it and think. There's a lot of doing involved."

https://youtu.be/F-xzcKwMOJw

5 years ago Anton Tsapliuk, Tech Lead and Web3 explorer, submitted a test task for the Paralect Startup Summer course 5 minutes before the deadline.

And this was the moment when his path as a developer began🚀

The course was very informative and сhallenging — Anton was studying 10-11 hours per day. But his work was not in vain. In two months he got a job offer for a developer position at Paralect. And after two years he became tech lead on a new project.

Today Anton is an organizer and mentor of Paralect Startup Summer 🧑🏼‍🎓. He teaches students and guides them through MVP development.

What helped Anton upgrade his skills and grow from student to tech lead and mentor in just a few years? He has several answers other junior devs can learn from:

👉🏽 If you want to succeed, be ready to invest time in education
👉🏽 Stay patient and curious if you want to upgrade yourself
👉🏽 The internet isn't magic — just dive deeper and explore it
👉🏽 Don’t be afraid of difficult or new challenges
👉🏽 Dive deep into new projects with enthusiasm

“I’m sure that self-development isn’t about changing jobs on a regular basis. For me, it’s about working with the tasks and people that inspire you and make you feel interested. I do my job with great pleasure and see my impact in a common result. It’s fantastic.” - Anton.

Interesting to know more about Anton’s path? Read it in the article at blog.paralect.com👈🏽

https://youtu.be/HJlk8DYNebk

The R&D team got to prototype a new idea from one founder 🎥

The goal was to test a creator-friendly video app to rival the big players in this space with a more rewarding ecosystem than the traditional ads-driven model 💡

Initially, the team decided to try Progressive Web Application (or PWA). But unfortunately, this the attempt was unsuccessful because of 3 critical issues:

🙅🏽‍♂️ Gesture limits

🙅🏽‍♂️ Cross-device support

🙅🏽‍♂️ Low user adoption

So, the team decided to switch to React Native and created a working app without crunches in just a week!

What was the stack?

👉🏽 Airtable for content management

👉🏽 Tally for receiving feedback

👉🏽 Mixpanel for analytics

👉🏽 Napkin.io for the back-end.

If you want to learn more about the R&D process and see the prototype architecture, read the article on 🔗

https://blog.paralect.com/post/prototyping-video-creator-app-web3

Working with data is essential at all stages of the product. But early-stage Startup Founders have the golden opportunity to launch with a well-designed data strategy.

To measure your product growth, you need to understand how to collect data, where to store it, and, most importantly, how to evaluate and analyze it.

On April 14 we invite you to join the workshop "Data Strategy for early-stage startups (that investors will love)" that will be held by Rosi Bremec, Data Strategist, and Michael Lapidus, Business Analyst.

The Speakers will share insights on:

👉🏼 How to Launch the MVP and follow data towards Product-Market Fit
👉🏼 How to define metrics that appeal to accelerators + investors
👉🏼 How to collect user experience data
👉🏼 How to lead and iterate the data strategy through product and team growth

Follow the link https://lu.ma/data-strategy-workshop to join the event and learn how to grow your product with well-designed data-strategy 🚀

Do you remember we validated the idea of a new travel-tech 🌍 product called Hugfare?

The idea owner Yulia Bychik believes the market needs a new service for discovering the most comfortable and cheapest spot for meeting with friends and booking tickets & hotels inside this platform.

After checking hypotheses and confirming the problem we switched to validating solutions — created a no-code web page detailing the product, set up analytics & launched the ads campaign to attract users and analyze their real interest 🔍

After 10 days we got the following results: CTR was 0.34%, sign-up rate - 1.9%.

Is it good or bad?

- We found this CTR rather high for a new product in the travel space;
- Although the users were ready to click and explore a new product in most cases they didn’t sign up. It may indicate that our solution didn’t fulfill their expectations.

So, what’s the decision — to build or not to build? There's a very low probability of creating MVP for this product.

Follow along not to miss more insights