BizConf 2010 | Presenters

Evgeny Shadchnev

Evgeny is a software developer currently working in London. He enjoys the craftsmanship in software and finds ‘agile’ an intuitive way of making his work fun and productive. With two degrees in Computer Science, Evgeny still believes that no amount of theory can ever replace hands-on experience, especially when it comes to developing software and building products.

He believes that everybody on a team should have some entrepreneurial spirit to give more context to technical work. Luckily, InvisibleHand, a money-saving browser plugin Evgeny is working on, involves a team of people who all feel the same. Originally conceived as a sideline, InvisibleHand became a full-fledged product and attracted thousands of internet shoppers since its launch.

Company: Forward Internet Group

Presentations at BizConf

From Sideline To a Business: Staying Lean and Growing Quickly
Friday, August 06, 2010 at 2:00 PM
InvisibleHand is one of the most popular money-saving browser plugins and has been growing both in number of users and in revenues since its launch. The project began as a weekend effort, something that the founders themselves needed, but it quickly gained traction and attracted over two hundred thousand happy users in the first year.

In this session, I will talk about how we became the leaders in our niche, about the key decision behind our success and challenges we had to overcome. Though we have financial support of our parent company, we stayed frugal, which gave us additional advantage. I will also talk about our failures, times when we overengineered, spent too much – or too little – money and were overconfident and naive.

We had to learn a lot along the way about building strategic partnerships, marketing the product, signing contracts, supporting users, scaling the service to support large number of users and building a team that can deliver the result.

As a founding developer of the project, I will also talk about technical challenges of the project. We have built a framework that allows writing cross platform code for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, thus covering most of the browser market. We are able to compare prices in real-time, fetching them from several retailers while your browser is still loading the page. Finally, our database contains some 40 million products, making it a challenge to work with under real-time constraints.

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