It’s not another ‘overnight success’ kind of story of a young tech entrepreneur. It’s not even a story of success (yet). It’s about what’s before that and how important is to be persistent when following your dreams.
It’s a huge shame to admit it but the idea of Evoque has been born around 2 years ago, and only due to my bad execution the project hasn’t been launched yet.
Evoque was (and IS) meant to be a solution to the PR and Media biggest pain in the industry – news supply and demand mismatch and spammy news releases sent in non-personalised bulk by lazy PRs.
I became interested in Media & PR not because of the nature of this industry. I had no interest in becoming PR whatsoever. I do not particularly like writing anyway. But I love changes and influence. I started reading a lot of blogs and conversations between PR and Media, and I started seeing a pattern of common problems those guys face everyday: journalists’ inboxes spammed by irrelevant PR releases, CEOs of small but break-through companies trying to do DYI PR and not having enough resources to hire PR pro with established Media contacts, Media having problems in finding relevant and quality sources…The list goes on and on. I surely saw a huge opportunity.
Besides, after reading Black Swan (a N.Talim book recommended and bought for me by a random guy at the airport, while being grounded due to a weird airplane failure) I was obsessed with creating something hugely scalable, so creating web networking platform for PR & Media felt just right.
I’ve always wanted Evoque to play an important part in shaping people’s opinion and what’s the most important – I wanted to enforce information transparency and unbiased opinions.
Going single-handed in a tech startup world is a though one, even tougher if you are not a programmer and need to rely on other programmers to do the geek part of a startup. Mark Zuckenberg or David Karp had it the easy way. They had a concept, they sat on their asses, spent sleepless nights on code and there it was – a MVP ready to collect feedback.
But there I was. Girl with a dream, almost no coding experience, blurry business acumen, and pseudo-proven, revolutionary concept of networking for PR and Media. It was my first that kind of venture. I had to learn almost everything from scratch. I haven’t designed app mash-ups before (huge salute to app architects and designers!). I haven’t written app project scope before. I made some small and bigger execution mistakes, hired untrustworthy developers and wasted a lot of time on bureaucracy and paperwork such as non-necessary business plan. As if that was not enough, I became a feature creep, projecting tens of new features to each option. The design of Evoque platform has had countless pivots.
Starting a venture should have been easy. And it is, but only if you make an order in your operations, prioritise and execute with attention to details.
I learned my lesson, got the right people on board (Dennis, Patryk and Olek – big thanks!) and shared my vision with them. I took this time to better understand Media & PR needs and priorities, interviewed many industry professionals. We eliminated nice-to-have app features and focused on building those, which can give immediate benefits in PR and Media profession.
Currently, we are doing internal testing and estimate to launch in July-August (2013!).
Stay tuned.