Kyle
While things seem to be falling apart for Waterloo Canada’s biggest company RIM, a new startup wants people to grow together. Their startup Growple is all about making challenges over anything and everything and either challenging yourself, your friends or new acquaintances using Growple’s mobile platform.
The challenges can be anything from “I challenge myself to lose 30 pounds” or I challenge Mike to pick up the girls number across the bar. Challenges are more fun when their done together. Making new friends and growing socially is more fun when it’s surrounded by challenges.
The team behind Growple is frustrated about how people claim to be “social” and how they try hard to stay connected rather than actually being connected. It’s another one of those startups that takes the virtual world and brings it to the real world, bringing the online world off line.
We got a chance to interview Growple’s co-founder Kevin Kim. Check out the interview below.
What is Growple?
Growple! comes from the phrase: “Growing People Together!” It is a platform where you can challenge yourself or your friends to anything and everything! Growple helps you create meaningful moments in your daily life through these “challenges” with the people & at moments that really matter to you. Challenges could be anything from – “I challenge myself to learn a new language in 3 months” to “I challenge Sarah to get that persons number across the bar”. Growple is taking an initial step to reach its vision of doing more, having fun and making a difference with the concept of “challenges” because challenges can make you do the things that you normally wouldn’t do, bring rich moments in life and have an impact in some way.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Kevin D.H Kim (22 yrs)
Korean-Canadian Entrepreneur majoring in Economics at University of Waterloo. Currently on “leave” from school to focus on this venture.
Started his own business when he was 18 years old: Fashion retail e-commerce for Korean population in North America / Social Commerce site for minority population in Canada / Now Growple.
Creative lead (design/branding/UI/UX) + Business Dev + Marketing
Freddy Hidalgo-Monchez (24yrs)
Salvadorian Canadian Entrepreneur with a diploma in Computer Science at Vanier College, now majoring in Psychology at UW.
Started his own business when he was in highschool: Event planning for teens
Technical Lead + Business Dev
Where are you based?
We are currently based in Kitchener-Waterloo Area in Ontario, Canada
What is the problem Growple is solving?
Growple! wants you to do more, have fun and make a difference. Our startup is all about taking “social” and bringing it back to an age where conversing was a prized skill. If you’ve ever sat down in a room where everyone was on their phone, then you can see this invasion at work. There is no question about it, in the past 10 years technology has advanced at an exponential rate. Mobile broadband subscriptions are expected to grow from 900 million in 2011, to almost 5 billion subscriptions in 2016. Additionally, 57% of the world’s population speaks more online than in real life. We’re constantly trading online connections for offline physical interaction when the two can not only coexist, but also harmoniously complement one another. At Growple! we strongly believe in providing a tool that will seamlessly bridge the gap that has surfaced between online and offline interaction.
At Growple!, we believe nothing brings people together like fun activities. This is why our startup’s lead product is designed to get you off your desk and into real life through fun challenges. Our platform lets you challenge yourself & your friends to anything and everything! Whether you’re challenging the mailman to a 1-on-1-basketball game or challenging yourself to lose 20 pounds in 3 months, we’re pushing people to go out more, be healthy, be friendly, and find the time to talk to those that matter. Even if you’re not actively participating, our platform allows you to browse all the challenges your friends are taking part in and lets you cheer them on, cheer against them, upload related media, or simply drop your two cents in the comment box. The goal is for people to enjoy these challenges and to build a sense of community around these activities.
The breakdown of traditional, value based, face-to-face interaction has already started becoming a wide spread issue amongst the younger generation. 48% of 18 to 34 year olds check Facebook first thing in the morning. Early adoption to technology and social media play an important factor in this behavior. Such an issue affect individuals of all personality types, as they may find refuge on these online platforms to satisfy their extroverted or introverted personality traits. Growple! hopes to tackle such issues, not through bombarding the community with yet another generic online platform, but by providing them a means to seek out and connect with individuals
What is your secret sauce?
If we told you, it’s not a secret :P just kidding.
We belive we have a competitive edge because we can out-passion anyone with the mindset of getting out of our comfort zone to acheive our goal.
We are young, dedicated and crazy so we work faster than anyone else. We have no pressure on our backs (from investors and vcs yet) so that we can solidify our ideas and execute in the way we believe Growple is going to be best for. Another advantage is that we are diverse in terms of business experiences, skills, interests, ethnicity and age. The very important part is that we are open-minded and willing to learn. We’re never going to stop until we reach our vision.
What is one challenge you faced in the startup process?
Learning to work efficiently: We are still in a progress of coming up with the best/effective ways to work on each projects. Since this is our first software startup, we are learning while we experience it. Teamwork is very important for us so we want to get this perfect as the time goes on.
Tell us a little bit about the startup culture in Waterloo
The startup culture in Waterloo is booming. With the $30M funding from the government, Communitech just started its first cohort of its own incubator program – HyperDrive. There are many startups forming in general – students, graduates, ex-corporate etc. Since RIM is showing a wary decrease in its operations, more and more people are turning their heads to the startup scene in Waterloo. Waterloo is building its startup presence at a larger scale as well – Pebble Watch / Pair (originally from VeloCity in Waterloo -> YCombinator) and many more.
What’s next for Growple?
Growple launched a basic bare-bone facebook app out couple of weeks ago. We are currently testing/validating our main concept and gathering valuable data. We are going to study and implement different things needed to make our idea stick and be viral. After what we learn from the Facebook app, we are developing a mobile app for everyone to use on the go. This challenge concept is just a start for Growple, as we want to keep innovate and come up with different ways to reach our vision: Go out, do more and create meaningful moments
Here are some links for you:
Find out more about Growple here at their website
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