Two business students, by presenting at first a completely different project at the IE Venture Labs, end up inventing new phone application
At first, Khan Mohd Eshtiaque (Eshti) and Naye Moussa, business students, presented at this year's IE Venture Lab an idea that failed. Nevertheless, after hitting that wall they got back up on their feet...and strong! Eshti and Naye turned all the feedback and criticism they received into something positive. And that's how Scramblr was born!
Scramblr is a phone app. "It is your personalized tool for discovering one of a kind places to eat, shop and lounge at. All businesses you see are tailor made to your interests, giving you a customized discovery experience."
Skype between the Scramblr Team in Madrid, and Valentina (Savvy Youth) in Brussels.
Q: Do you have any competitors? What do you bring new to the market they don’t offer?
Eshti: Scramblr’s biggest competitor is FourSquare. When we were developing Scramblr we first of all didn’t want to create something just competitive to FourSquare, we did research on where FourSquare is not doing very well and where it is losing all of its users from. We took all those ideas and then we came up will all our new ideas, and created a user experience that is completely brand new. I think it would almost be wrong of me to say that Scramblr is like FourSquare. We have been thinking about it for a while, and I think the best way to describe Scramblr is that it is the StumbleUpon for discovering new businesses.
Eshti: We are in such a stage right now that if we go for a funding round from investors, they will be asking for so much equity and we will, in the long run, end up losing control of our own company. For this reason it is not a good option, because it will really suppress us, whereas if we can bootstrap it and have crowdfunding and other sources of funding we can actually keep control of the company’s stricter mission and goal. When the company is bigger, hopefully, then we can go for money growing investors who can help us accelerate the whole process and help us expand even more.
Q: Are you going to make profit?
Eshti: Yes, we have a business model behind Scramblr; it will make money. In our first year we will be having a very tough time with the cash flow, especially with all our expansion strategies. If we can make it through the first year, then we are looking to make money.
Naye: The money won’t come through the users, it will come from the businesses.
Q: What are your prospects for the future?
Eshti: Go global.
Naye: FourSquare for example, the competitor that everybody compares us to, has billions of users and check-ins a year. The fact that an App like this has gone global and people love it, shows that there is a lot of interest. Other people that do the same thing like us have been acquired by Google and so, hopefully, one day… :)
Q: How did you/will you obtain an initial financing?
Naye: We first asked friends and family, so we already raised some money through the ‘tripple F’ round. Just this week we had a couple of meetings with investors, because they saw us in the news articles of El Mundo and Expansión, so they called us up. But we don’t think we are ready yet to get into deals like this, we think it is better to raise our own money first. Soon we will be on Indiegogo and raise funding through there.
