Complete and total bullshit, based on US propaganda against Russia. I live in Russia and build my second IT business here. Most of my friends are entrepreneurs from Moscow and other cities.
Of course there is corruption, autocracy and alcoholism. It is there for several hundreds of years, and we have to deal with that. But situation is actually getting better with time. You can't change loves of millions of people in an instant.
Propaganda is an interesting point. In fact, I think it is not strong enough to counter the massive western information war against Russia. I read BBC and NY times regularly, and constantly notice biased and one-sided view.
I think that the author fall victim to the NY Times style propaganda articles about the evil Putin, connected it with his experience and decided to support it. I don'think it is a objective point of view and it does not describe reality.
I'd suggest you consider:
1. Labor costs. Ruby developers may be twice as expensive as PHP ones given the same level of tasks to be solved.
2. Labor availability. Whether it is easier for you to find PHP programmer or Ruby programmer when you need one?
For me in Russia answer is definitely PHP, Ruby guys are rare and expensive here :)
We started coding in october 2011, first pilot customer was december 2011, and active sales started february 2012, with approx linear growth ever since.
I'm in business since 2008, and this is my second business, first one was hosted PBX service.
How do you compete with Google Analytics? From the first glance, most of the features of Improvely might be implemented with GA as well... or am I getting something wrong?
$25k in revenue, ~$15k in net income (at 12-15% monthly growth) from http://jivosite.ru (English version http://jivosite.com is yet work in progress). This is online chat for e-commerce web sites sold primarily to russian-speaking audience, USA & Europe sales start in 2-3 months. Bootstrapped, no office, 2 co-founders (1 business+tech, 1 tech), 3 employees (1 marketing, 1 customer support, 1 programmer).
Of course there is corruption, autocracy and alcoholism. It is there for several hundreds of years, and we have to deal with that. But situation is actually getting better with time. You can't change loves of millions of people in an instant.
Propaganda is an interesting point. In fact, I think it is not strong enough to counter the massive western information war against Russia. I read BBC and NY times regularly, and constantly notice biased and one-sided view.
I think that the author fall victim to the NY Times style propaganda articles about the evil Putin, connected it with his experience and decided to support it. I don'think it is a objective point of view and it does not describe reality.