‘The Goal is Not to Win, But to Gain Experience’

In October, entrepreneurship acceleration programmes Demo Day took place in Moscow: there were SberZ for school students and SberStudent for university students, postgraduates and researchers (carried out in cooperation with the Stanford Centre for Professional Development). The key event of the night was a series of 20 presentations by the start-up teams. The five finalists were all HSE students and HSE Lyceum students. The Demo Day was a result of an eight-months accelerator by the HSE Business Incubator, which helped the HSE and Lyceum students work on their project ideas, offered teaching and support, and prepared them for the final contest.

First place went to Domapteka – an app for managing one's home medicine cabinet. One of the seven project founders is Sergey Samoylenko, an HSE Lyceum student responsible for the UX/UI design of the app.

Sergey Samoylenko
HSE Lyceum student

Our project ‘Domapteka’ was created to help manage medicines effectively. Imagine that you are sick and go to your medicine cabinet to look for something to help you. You find what you need, but realise that the box is empty or it’s out of date. Our app can help prevent these situations. It registers all the medicines in your medicine cupboard; you can see all the expiration dates and the number of pills left. The idea of the app came from my colleague, Maria. She, like many of us, has many medicines at home, and it can be difficult to find the necessary one, and often it’s missing. The app sends a notification if the supply becomes low, and there is also the option of auto-ordering from partner drugstores.

What makes us different to our competitors is that our app has a complete range of functions related to medicines: categorization, instructions for use, expiry date, reminders to take the medicine, and auto-ordering from online drugstores.

Or team evolved during the accelerator. I was one of the last to join in. I heard about the project during an online conference at one of the stages. I liked the idea of the project, and felt enthusiastic about going further with the other participants, and developing the project. I contacted the team leader, wrote about myself and said I wanted to be the presentation designer.

We did a lot of work. Throughout the whole summer, we were meetin online to finalize the project together with a tracker (an expert who is responsible for organizational support of the start-up team as part of the acceleration process). As a result, from a simple presentation designer I grew into the designer of the app responsible for the whole visual identity of it. I noticed that by the end of the second stage, many teams had dropped out, but not ours. This is because we were working hard and were very organized; we met the deadlines and completed the tasks. As a result, I learned to design mobile apps and expanded my experience in graphic design.

Our team, which came first in the accelerator, had a few more advantages over some of the other teams. We had funding from Sber and interest from many investors. But actually, each of the 26,000 participants in the whole project gained some incredible and invaluable experience: starting from lectures and video conferences, clear instructions on how to start your business, on how to become an entrepreneur, to mentorship during the second stage, and to lots of contacts with incredibly motivated people who are as enthusiastic about it as all of us. We had the opportunity to talk to experienced start-uppers, as well as to the participants of the first accelerator about their successes and failures.

On the eve of the Demo Day, many teams were anxious. But for me, it was a festival with lots of guests, where everyone felt happy and was smiling. It was the pinnacle of our work. No matter the result, I was happy to be there.

---

The following projects by HSE students also made it to the finals:

• QFit — a service that allows users to pay for fitness workouts by the minute;
• TalkNow — an audiodating app; 
• Smart Board — production of smart colourful longboards for those who love riding the streets;
• Sort&Search —  a dating website with a smart, AI-based matching developed by Andrey Illarionov’s team.

Andrey Illarionov
HSE University student, founder of Sort&Searh, a website with smart matching

Our project is a dating website with precision selection of partners. Today, in almost all dating apps, the users see random people, whom we can assess only by appearance at the first glance, and only by chatting with them can we learn about their interests, views, and attitudes. It turns out that a lot of time is spent chatting with each person you like. On our website, the user sees selected people, with whom they are on the same wavelength, in order to skip the part with long correspondence back and forth. We were able to achieve this through detailed registration questionnaires: we provide our users with a long survey that includes questions on tastes and preferences, life attitudes and many other aspects.

We started to participate in the accelerator when we all were classmates. I discussed my idea with my friends, and they agreed. Since we had known each other for many years, the work progressed smoothly, without any major conflicts. Over this time, we got a lot of important experience of teamwork and product development.

Participation in the accelerator also gave us some theoretical and practical knowledge in terms of project promotion and development. The accelerator was divided into three stages: during the first stage, we were studying educational videos on market assessment, competition, hypothesis formulation etc; at the second stage, we were working with the trackers who supervised our development and the project; and the third stage had the Demo Day.

Participating in such projects definitely makes sense since it is a unique opportunity: at such a young age, you already get an idea of the project structure, development and design and you are developing some important soft skills. Participation in such events will also undoubtedly be an advantage for potential employers.

At the Demo Day, we were convinced that our eight months of work were not in vain. Expert evaluation was important to us. Of course, we were upset that we didn’t win, but the goal of participating in such competitions is not to win, but to gain experience.

October 29, 2021