Anima

Trying to describe your solution in just 30 seconds is a great challenge. Escpecially when you want to say more and more. But at the end we are so happy with the result. What do you think about it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlsyhQkKc5w

Today's the first day of the Y Combinator Startup School where we were choosen as one of participants. YAY! Can't wait to see what they prepared to us :) What do you think about such initiatives? Are more into learning everything by yourself or you are looking for some help from more experienced mentors?

Do you know who is THE WORST person to build the landing page of your product? You. Just because you know to much about it. And you want to say eveything. In way you'd like to hear about it. In our case it was the same. Improving, changing, shortening, redrafting... But finally, here it is! Could you share your thoughts about it? https://youranima.com/

Location: Lisbon, Portugal. What happened? During my one semester study exchange in Portugal I had a bit too much time in my hands. Watching another beautiful sunset over the Atlantic Ocean I came up with an idea of household helper that would inform you about important stuff to do. It's really common to forget the documents before leaving your house or to forget what we planned to do after returning home, right? But is there a good solution for this problem? Apparently not. Let's-do-it-then feeling flashed through my mind. As luck would have it, my college friends came to visit me a few days later. A bottle of a good Portuguese wine on one of Lisbon's Miradouros helped us to bring to life the first vision of Anima, an electronic fox with a Bluetooth heart that would detect when you get in range and help you with everyday duties. Great! We have an idea. And we have programming skills. The only thing that we have to do now is to close ourselves into a garage for the next half a year and go out with a ready product right? Actually, not. Since the beggining, we decided to let Anima meet new people. And to let people make friends with Anima. We have shown the first prototype in Microsoft Imagine Cup, the world biggest technology contest for students where we took 2nd place in Poland. And that was a landmark for a whole project I believe. For the first time we had to think about Anima not only as a technology problem but also we had to analyze the business aspect of the whole project. It was a big and valuable lesson for us. And if there is something that I can recommend you for all of you guys is to not be shy and to look for all the opportunities to show your idea for other people. In our case showing an early prototype on a contest was a big step in our way of transforming from a pack of college fellows into the The Supervisory Board of our recently established company.