"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

Why is it important for early-stage startup founders to do market research?🔍

The main answer is on the surface — venture funds, accelerators, incubators and angel investors won’t invest in the product without market research. They need to make sure that the product will actually sell.

But Business Analyst Michael Lapidus has no doubts that reasons go well beyond the need for funding.

Market Research helps founders:

👉🏽 Prepare for a successful product launch with minimal risks
👉🏽 Understand not only the market, but also the audience and its needs
👉🏽 Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of competitors
👉🏽 Price their solution correctly
👉🏽 Adjust the business strategy if the market changes
👉🏽 Identify trends and growth points in the market.

If you want to dive deeper into the topic and understand how to do market research and analyze the results, visit https://blog.paralect.com/post/better-market-research and read the article.

Also, on April,14 Michael will take part in the #Workshop “Data Strategy 🚀 for early-stage startups (that investors will love)”. Just follow the link, apply✔️, and learn how to grow your startup from the best.

#marketresearch #startupgrowth

"Even if you have the biggest network you can imagine, there's always room for improvement and for just entering new industries — reaching out new people" – Alexandra Cote, Growth Marketer

Sometimes startup founders have great ideas or products, but struggle to reach product-market fit. It may happen, when the team doesn't really know it's target audience.

And it's not always obvious.

If you want to understand who is your real client or customer and who you should appeal to, try to answer these questions:

❔Who is the decision maker when it comes to purchasing your product?

❔ Who has the biggest potential to become your great promoter?

❔Who is the ultimate user of your product?

After analyzing your real target audience you can build a well-designed go-to-market strategy.

Interested to learn more details? Watch the full video ▶️ with Alexandra on our YouTube channel.

Usually 4 months is enough to build and launch an MVP. Founders understand what should be released and when, and they can avoid extra unnecessary features.

But what is the best timeframe to launch an idea-stage startup?

Igor Krasnik, CTO and creator, thinks we can cut that time down to weeks 💡

“Probably the founders have great expertise in the area and they believe in something, but it’s not a validated idea for us. And for them 4 months to validate their ideas is overkill. It’s not only time, it’s money.” – Igor.

In 2022 we'll lower the product design and build phase from 4 months to 2 months. For truly high-velocity founders, we can ship prototypes in a few weeks 🚀

Follow along to see how we are going to realise these plans an improve our original offer!

https://youtu.be/X08qzubQ4cE

Does the market need a new Pet-health App?🐱

Marina Mironova, happy owner of 2 dogs, faced a problem — where to store data from vet visits and not forget or lose anything?

So she came up with the idea of creating PetsFriends — a HealthTech App for animals 🐕 that allows pet-parents to store all the data about the health of the pet and, if necessary, share it with vets.

During the idea validation, the Paralect Venture Studio team conducted market research 🔎 and concluded that the initial product idea needs to be revised.

The reasons are the following:

📉 At the market analysis phase, the team found out that competitors failed to reach product-market fit

🙅🏽 During interviews with pet owners and veterinarians, the hypotheses were not confirmed.

Nevertheless, we don’t completely dismiss the idea. There are some cool options on how to pivot it and change the direction. What are they?

Follow along for updates 🔥

6 years ago we launched our unique course for developers — Paralect Startup Summer. More than 70 engineers have graduated from this course, and many now code on product teams at Paralect 💪

This year our courses are moving to a new scale. We welcome students who want to level-up their skills and knowledge in Quality Assurance🔍.

What is the main advantage of this course? The students develop real products from scratch. They communicate with Startup Founders and work together as product teams.

"With an MVP, your main aim is efficiency. When a new feature is built, you understand that right now you need to test its functionality in the most important, positive scenarios. It makes no sense to spend more time perfecting it." – Natalya Pashko

In 2021 together with students and mentors we launched 2 products — Networking App Nudge & Immigration Platform VISXA.

Natalia Puzikova, head of QA, asked 💬 her teammates Natalya Pashko and Elena Konoplyova about their experience in working with strartups from the 1st batch of the Accelerator.

What was it like? Read in the full interview on https://blog.paralect.com/post/quality-accelerated-interview 👀

We've been building digital products for 12 years now. We prioritize technology simplicity, flexibility and speed of delivery — just what's needed for a startup.

But building scalable architecture while moving fast is not easy. You need to separate the business logic from the core architecture, so messy parts won't hurt overall app performance and growth.

To meet these requirements we live-tested a number of cutting-edge technologies on partner products. We've come up with the best solution that fits startups well and scales from the first users to multi-million ARR. Solutions that go in-line with product trends and attract great people to the team.

Today we beta launch Ship — a micro-service full-stack framework used on more than 20 live products by hundreds of engineers.

Technical founders and aspiring CTOs, use Ship to save 100s of hours on building and launch your MVP faster!
👉 ship.paralect.com 🚀