Desenvolvimento de projetos complexos de Internet, dicas úteis

We can say that there are two types of complex Internet projects - a project for the development of an existing business or an Internet project as a new business. For the first type, the topic is predetermined, and the project itself must either supplement the offline business or transfer it entirely online. The second type, building an Internet project as a business from scratch, requires deeper study and consideration of many details. So let's consider both types in more facts:

Development of existing business

There is not a single business left that can stay away from the Internet without the risk of getting lost among competitors. Every day, any company fights to maintain and increase its market share. Therefore, the question comes down to choosing the means to achieve the goals set.

In case of a limited budget or a vertical sales model, it may not be advisable to create your complex Internet project. In this case, the primary resources are directed to brand promotion in existing social networks. Nevertheless, such companies also need products for business management. The use of self-hosted systems remains a popular solution. Still, the growing cost of maintaining high-class IT specialists and maintaining up-to-date infrastructure increasingly pushes businesses to move business processes to the cloud infrastructure. Simple and massive Drag & Drop solutions cannot help solve this problem, as they do not provide even a minimum level of confidentiality of the processed information. This fact forces companies to develop their complex Internet projects.

If the company independently sells on the Internet, services or sells goods, then promotion on social networks is indispensable. Complex business automation systems are required, which rarely exist on the market in the form of ready-made solutions. Ready-made scripts of online stores are generally suitable for small companies that still can manually or semi-automatically process online orders. When the number of orders increases, the company hires new employees, increasing user support costs. Unfortunately, sales depend on many rapidly changing external factors, such as seasonal ones. Management of staff costs is not flexible, as it is impossible to change the number of staff as quickly as possible. At such moments, companies face a dangerous decline in profitability. The right solution is to automate business processes. In this case, it is possible to manage costs when expanding or reducing sales flexibly. But more importantly, the company's expenses during expansion grow disproportionately less than in the case of an extensive increase in personnel.

Another factor that influenced the change in the approach to business development was the COVID-19 pandemic. Even commodity companies without retail businesses were forced to organize distance work of their employees. In many cases, this required a short time to modernize its own IT infrastructure and software environment to ensure the security of data transmitted via public communication channels. It does not matter that such projects are not intended to provide services over the Internet. More importantly, these are really complex Internet projects operating in the Intranet and Extranet environments.

Internet project as a new business

Any advice on building a new business on the Internet from scratch is theoretical, as it is impossible to describe all possible scenarios for their birth. Nevertheless, all successful projects have similarities. Firstly, modern production has become practical enough to provide humanity with goods and food in sufficient quantities. The highest competition in the production and sale of physical goods makes us look for new niches, and such a niche has become the economics of impressions. At first, this concept meant providing a service or selling goods with the motto "It's not important what you sell, but how you do it" related to material objects. But social networks have given rise to an entirely new segment of the impression economy, namely the sale of impressions from intangible things.

This process was not fast; some significant players failed to fine-tune communication with the user and quit the race. For example, MySpace was too self-confident in its global role and forfeited its leadership for aggressive advertising on its pages. Facebook took into account its predecessor’s mistakes, making the process of selling advertising much more intelligent. Facebook's incredible business model is based on selling targeted ads to users. But at the same time, users themselves create content that involves millions of new followers in the social network for free. Having published a new post, each user creates a new impression, which Facebook then successfully monetizes. Attracting a new user, causing him emotion and keeping his attention, showing him advertising, inspiring him to perform some action, and charging the advertiser’s account is the way of Facebook’s success. That's how all other successful social networks work. It looks simple, doesn't it?

Everything is somewhat more complicated. Facebook was the first social network to collect all its users’ data in its own Walled Garden. The main asset is information about the audience's user habits, demographics, and financial conditions. That is why global players are not in a hurry to share these treasures with anyone else. The more data can be collected, the more accurate targeted advertising works, which means that advertisers receive more responses. But, of course, marketers assess advertising campaigns' effectiveness, see their efficiency, and then increase advertising budgets. In short, it is unlikely that someone will be able to gather an audience compatible in size with Facebook. You can't shift a leader if you don't own the amount of user data multiple of competitor’s amount. It also means that it is impossible to create a monetization model like Facebook. Does this mean that it is impossible to create a new player in the economy of impressions?

There is an unambiguous answer to this - there will always be opportunities. Not only is the range of people's emotions vast, but it also transforms quickly. To see a wave of people's interest in time and offer a product that satisfies this interest is the main task of creating a successful business of impressions. An excellent example is the ClubHouse voice chat room application. Not a single significant social network didn't imply this brilliant idea before for an unknown reason.

The idea of an Internet project

As already mentioned, the existing business model narrows the range of topics of the Internet project for development. For example, it makes no sense to build an information portal if the company is engaged in retail sales. However, the idea of a marketplace may be appropriate if the company considers itself competent enough in its field to attract other market participants to the platform of its marketplace.

If an Internet project is built as a new business, there are many more options. For example, here are some ideas:

• A social network can be general-purpose or specialized. It won't be easy to monetize a universal social network, as it requires gathering a large audience. Such work can take too long and not justify itself. Specialized and professional social networks focus on users' narrow interests are much more promising. It is possible to monetize them by providing additional services directly to users if such services help solve their problems.
• An information portal can aggregate news from selected authoritative sources and author's materials. They also include academic portals designed to exchange information between employees, teachers, and students of the university and platforms to share the results of scientific works.
• The dating site is not as simple as it seems at first glance. A high-speed search engine must give users relevant answers to their queries on many parameters from other users' profiles.
• A marketplace offers many suppliers to present their goods and services. Consumers can choose the most suitable offer for themselves for various parameters. Marketplaces include the sale of goods, rental housing, sale of airline tickets, sale of travel packages, etc.

Technologies of complex Internet projects

When choosing a creation platform, you should keep in mind the circumstances that can affect its creation and development in the future. These circumstances include scalability and the ability to withstand heavy loads. Scalability seems to be a dreamlike characteristic as long as the project serves a relatively small number of users. But their growth can make it impossible for the project to function normally. Many factors affect the inability of the project to carry high loads. These include incorrect use of various databases, lack of effective load balancing methods, poor server configuration, administrative restrictions on resource usage.

The most affordable solutions, the so-called Drag & Drop services, have a lot of administrative restrictions. This is a fee for the low cost of their maintenance. They are designed to create small online stores and hobby clubs but are not suitable for complex projects. There is no reason to consider them as a serious tool for business automation or social networking.

At first glance, another category of platforms, out-of-box solutions, is devoid of all the restrictions of Drag & Drop services. Using such a self-hosted platform promises complete freedom in the project’s development, but what does this freedom mean in practice? Firstly, refining the platform for a specific business task will require considerable costs and time for testing, refinement, and implementation. At the same time, no one can guarantee that the original idea will remain relevant during the project’s development. Also, it is unlikely that competitors on the market will patiently wait for its appearance without making any effort to increase their market share. Secondly, the very idea of finalizing a ready-made boxed solution means reducing the security of the project. Information security experts but also hackers carefully investigate any mass products for vulnerabilities. For sure, hackers exploit many unresolved vulnerabilities all time. The problem is that no one knows which vulnerabilities are and what websites are already infected. And the only question is when hackers will decide to use the compromised resource for their purposes. Thirdly, the beginning of independent revision or development of an Internet project means that the company becomes a developer. If this is a business goal, you can only welcome the emergence of a new player in the IT market. Otherwise, it's more like wasting the resources necessary for the core business.

The third category is custom development based on a proprietary platform. If you are not yet familiar with X Networks, check out its QSNE platform. It is a framework, a web engine, and a tool for deploying high-load projects. Such a platform presents opportunities for building an Internet project of any complexity - social network, web portal, marketplace, payment system, business automation system. They can implement any task with a unique technology stack on this platform. The list of platform features may exceed the volume of this article, so we recommend that you read them in the source. Creating such a platform from scratch may take several years, but X Networks offers to use the experience of its engineers and implement an Internet project of any complexity.

You can often hear those custom solutions are too expensive compared to others. First, let's clarify that there are no successful and complex Internet projects built on ready-made solutions out of the box in the world. All social networks and applications you know use their platforms to develop their product. The basis of such platforms is often programming languages, libraries, and frameworks available to all developers. The combination of technologies forms a unique stack for each complex Internet project. Of course, each owner protects their technology stack as intellectual property and does not offer it as a product. Therefore, a competitor for a high-performance platform such as QSNE can be a platform created from scratch. But is it need making a new platform for one, albeit complex, Internet project? This issue should be resolved based on the budget size, available time, and the presence of an experienced development team. Your resources may allow you to take such a risk. But if there is no such certainty, it is worth contacting the company X Networks. You will save money on creating a new platform, and at the same time, get the finished product on time. In discussing the project, it is possible to find points of mutual interest, and then your project can receive co-financing.