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 🚀

What happens when many talented people work at the same company? Right. Cool merch is designed, sourced and distributed by a DAO 🚀

Paramerch is an in-house brand. It's not just a set of usual clothing and accessories. This brand has a unique concept — it aims to shift to a more sustainable approach by designing simple and practical items.

When creating new items, we follow 3 main principles:

🧵 Sustainable materials
🌈 Diversity
🦄 Local artisans

Literally, Paramerch functions like a DAO — teammates are peers and the Paramerch team is the “DAO Committee”.

Evgeny Chaban, full stack developer, shared the architecture of the project and the stack + automations the team used.

Read the details on https://blog.paralect.com/post/paramerch-dao-delivers-sweet-gear-our-team and enjoy 🔥

NFT, Web 3.0, DAO, Tokenomics…

Sounds like a set of incomprehensible words 🤯? If you've answered "yes", then you urgently need to watch the workshop held by Vladimir Panteleev.

In the video Vova shares his knowledge with the audience, explaining how all these technologies can make our lives better and how we can use them to make amazing products.

Watch the whole video on our YouTube channel ‘Paralect Workshops’ and learn more about Web 3.0 and its value.

#nft #tocenomics #web3 #dao

Konstantin Nesterovich worked at Paralect as a developer, tech lead, and product manager. But a year ago he founded his own company.

Where did it all start? Like many of his colleagues, Kostya studied at a technical University and decided to attend a programming course. He attended several courses, but for some reason did not get the desired results.

Then Kostya applied for the Startup Summer and there his career in tech started 🚀. What impressed him there?

1) Teamwork. He understood what a real workflow in the Team looks like.

2) Full development cycle. He dove into Back End, Front End, databases and new technologies.

3) The Culture. He was impressed by the attitude of the mentors towards the students, and this motivated him to work hard and strive.

During the course Konstantin found the most interesting direction for his professional development.

“I realized that I’m fond of close and effective communication with the team rather than of deep engineering. I felt that I prefer to combine both manager’s and developer’s roles.” – Konstantin

Read the whole story and don’t afraid to change your life for the best. Even if it seems very difficult 💡

Great news for early-stage startup Founders 🔥

We've extended the deadline to apply for the Paralect Accelerator until June 1st.

We've already received 2.5x more applications than last year! That's why we decided to expand the deadline to give more founders the opportunity to apply for Batch '22.

❕Please, pay attention, that it won't affect the accelerator timeline and both winning projects will start on time 🚀

To apply for the Paralect Accelerator Program, you need to visit 🔗 accelerator.paralect.com and complete the form. Good luck!

#accelerator #acceleratorprogram #earlystage

Welcome to the new office in Poland! 🎉

The place where our teammates can work, meet each other, have team-buildings, and spend time together. This cozy Hub is located in Warsaw and we're happy to welcome all our Paralect Teammates to this place ✈️

Also, we invite all our partners to visit our new office, get together with the team and have offline meetings 🤝

BTW, if you want to join our team in this cool hub, visit join.paralect.com and apply! We're open to applicants from all over the world 🗺

What does a mentor provide?

A goal, a path, gentle correction — even a confidante when needed. We have a learning environment with no end-point. There's no finish line, only the next level.

So mentorship is an open opportunity for everyone — and simultaneously needed by everyone. Because "growth" or "expertise" is not a a set path, but rather a set of curious choices to explore one's passion.

Thanks to all the mentors who have guided our teammates so far on their way and we're eager to keep this environment of reciprocal learning flowing round our community 🙌

One of the largest conferences in the CEE region — Wolves Summit 2022 — starts next week.

This year, the Summit Team screened over 1,000 startups and chose the top 100 to pitch their ideas. It's a great opportunity for investors to explore 🔍 new promising products to invest it.

What other opportunities will investors find there?

-VC Fundraising. Meetings with senior-level Limited Partners from the VC & PE industry.

- Network expansion. Matchmaking services connect investors with solo LPs and top institutions.

- Roundtables and one-on-one meetings. A great opportunity to discuss the most important issues of private equity and venture capital formation with market professionals.

- VIP Dinner for selected speakers, investors, and LPs.

Want to join? Visit wolvessummit.com 👈🏽

📍Location: Wroclaw, Poland

🗓 Date: May 24-27th

When you watch a video, do you usually think about how much work was done to get us to see it?

📹 A beautiful setting, high-quality sound, a catchy plot — the combination of these elements is the result of the work of a passionate team.

John interviewed Paralect's videographers to find out how our video content is created and what goes behind the scenes.

Vlad & Ilya shared:

- why they changed from freelancing to creating with us

- how the issues and responsibilities are distributed within the team

- how they planned and filmed the video series for the accelerator

- what were the most memorable and most challenging moments about filming in the last few months

Interesting to learn more about our video team's workflow? Watch the full interview on YouTube and enjoy!

Before starting to design and develop a product, we need a clear vision of who it's for and who's going to buy it!

To do this, you have to find the ideal customers, how exactly the target audience will use it, and what alternative solutions they are using now.

To plan go-to-market strategies and achieve product-market fit, you have to:

✔️ Identify persona groups for research. Try not to be one-sided and look at the problem from different angles. Your pain point may differ from other one's.

✔️ Prepare the questions you will use. Learn as much qualitative and quantitative information as possible. And don't forget that you may be talking to a future user of your platform — make a good impression.

✔️ Understand the competitive landscape. What alternative solutions do they use and are there anything they don't like about these products?

✔️ Sum up the research findings. Make a report with the results you've discovered.

✔️ Build an ICP. Segment the audience and build the ICP for each one separately.

✔️ Define buyer personas for the product. It will help you build a set of criteria to find the right decision maker.

Want to know more about all these steps in detail? Read the newest article from Alena and Michael 🙌