Penza, 20 October 2014. PenzaNews. Fail Conference devoted to the mistakes of IT specialists took place in the youth business incubator in Penza.

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The conference was organized by the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), JSC “Center of cluster development,” and “Secon” software developers association.

As Mikhail Lyashkov, general director of “Center of cluster development,” told PenzaNews agency, such an event is held in Penza for the first time.

“This is a fairly uncommon and exotic event. Its main topic is business mistakes and failed start-up attempts of IT specialists that ended up being the stepping-stones on the way to other projects. Businessmen from Moscow and Penza are taking part in the event, as well as the Internet Initiatives Development Fund representative – a federal organization that supports many online projects in their initial development. They have a financial pre-accelerator and accelerator, that carry out seed investments in the IT sphere. The format of the conference is like this: the speakers tell real stories about their mistakes and use their own example to explain how this negative experience helped them in the future,” he said.

The first to speak was Yakov Ilyin, CEO of Office Story project, who gave a presentation “Bad advice from a mobile app developer.” Dwelling on his experience, the software developer listed the actions that one should follow during development to fail a project. Among other things, he pointed out four steps leading to failure — bad idea, bad product, bad team and bad leader.

The second speaker was Vadim Shavlyukevich, product director of Query Agent service. His presentation was focused on unsuccessful collaboration with partners. Vadim Shavlyukevich shared a development story of one of his projects, in which his company lost a lot of time and money due to the wrong choice of partners.

Then the Fail Conference audience welcomed Vladimir Rozov, general director of Bit.Games Penza-based company. He spoke about a failed attempt to promote a successful Russian project in North America.

The IT company head told how his team created a game application “Domovyata,” which was designed for the Russian audience. Once the project brought great profits, they made an attempt to create a similar product aimed at the international audience. The company invested a lot of money, but the project was not as successful as expected due to several miscalculations and errors in judgement. As a result, Vladimir Rozov admitted, the profits barely covered the development expenses.

At the end of the event, Daria Shubina, regional projects director of IIDF, told about several failures that took place while working on the project directed by a fund-accelerated team: however, the project still ended up as a success.

Moreover, Daria Shubina told the audience about the business cooperation opportunities with the Internet Initiatives Development Fund.

She expressed hope that the experts who visited the event will no longer be afraid of failures in their line of work.

“We believe that any experience is much better than none at all. And even if this experience was a failure, it remains very valuable. At such conferences, we firstly try to tell the entrepreneurs or would-be businessmen about the mistakes that can be made, and also how to avoid them, because they tell not only about their blunders, but also about the conclusions they drew from ‘blundering.’ We are trying to break the stereotype of a failure as something bad. A failure is something that just happens. I hope that after the conference, many of you will begin to see that failures affect you well after all,” the IIDF regional projects director summed up.