Graphlings

📣 To all the aspiring founders out there, don't get attached to an idea, get attached to a mission. Alex and I co-founded Playlearn in 2017 with the mission of upgrading learning to the 21st century through play. 📌 We started off as an importing company, bringing board games and tools for trainers from the US & Sweden to Romania. 📌 We then created custom learning games for enterprises. I love the rawness of the first picture of us assembling an early prototype in a maker space. This is what our early days looked like. If anyone told me back then that we would end up building a tech startup in Silicon Valley, I would've wholeheartedly said it was impossible. When 2020 hit, we lost all our contracts in 2 days 😳😵. We buried 5 other business attempts in the following months. Then we built a very basic wireframe of what would eventually become Chambr (Techstars '23). We were running experiments and we were ready to burry it as well if the data told us so. Only we landed our first customer and we kept going. 🎊 🤩 Our graphic designer Sergiu came up with the name Chambr and we loved it. It was modular, we could build a world on top of it. Chambr was the digital room where people came to learn & play. 🏗 We built everything super fast. We wanted to put the product in the hands of customers as soon as possible and get feedback. 📚 We were targeting the Learning & Development market and we were promising increased content retention during training sessions. 🔬 We kept running experiments, we had some early revenue, we stayed close to learning managers and kept iterating. 🛠 While going through Techstars Oakland , we pivoted to Sales Enablement. We learned how to apply 'Jobs to be Done' from Neal and the team and we ended up building a completely new AI product from scratch. 📌 Chambr now helps sales teams close more deals through AI-powered simulations. Accelerating and upgrading learning is still at the core of what we do. Our mission has remained the same, only we changed the 'how', 'what', 'for whom' and value proposition multiple times. Whatever idea you have, start building and putting it in the hands of users. They will show you the way. Be ready to burn through tons of ideas. Fail as fast as possible. Keep your feedback loops short and sharp. The last picture is the evolution of our logo through our journey. At first, we didn't put much thought into it. It didn't matter how Chambr looked, we wanted to see if it brought value and if people were willing to pay for it. Our graphic designers (Graphlings) were rightfully questioning our lack of care for our looks. 🤣🤣 If users are willing to pay for something when it's ugly, they will be even more willing to pay for it when it looks pretty. There will be days when you'll look like me in the 3rd picture. There will be days when you can't see where you're headed or if it's ever going to work. Keep swimming. That's really (almost) all it takes. 🐠🐟