We asked Entrytoo's founders, Ana Bibikova, Oleg Morgunov, Vadim Kotelnikov, and Paris Nesva about building an app that educates entrepreneurs and first-time founders on entrepreneurship, prototypes, teamwork, and more. Ana has a Master's in Oriental studies, while the other founders have backgrounds in banking systems, data analytics and education. They chose Bubble because the no-code platform offers unlimited features and a cost-efficient solution to building their service with speed and efficiency.
Tell us about your app and what it does.
Entrytoo is an educational system and community for first time founders. With Entrytoo you can obtain basic knowledge on entrepreneurship, test and validate your ideas, prototype, and learn principles of cooperations and teamwork. Unlike other educational platforms for founders, Entrytoo exercises wholistic approach by providing students with a roadmap and clear guidelines to follow. Upon completing a self-paced course that takes about 14 weeks, you will receive recommendations on further steps you might take and perspective partnerships to establish in order to boost your new established venture.
How does your app work?
Entrytoo features all specific tools a first-time founder might need to validate the idea and move to the next level. While completing assignments, Entrytoo students will create in-app features such as a business model canvas, personal survey (somewhat like Survey Monkey functionality), and competition map. You also get access to income forecast tools that help predict 2 years revenue, expenses and burn rate. You will also have access to Entrytoo's Co-founders’s Match section, where you are matched with other students based on your preferences. You will also have to complete a randomly assigned task together within a limited time frame. This exercise helps founders to improve their team-working and leadership skills, while offering a useful insight into basic principles of choosing a co-founder. We’re now establishing connections with Figma and Auodesk to offer students in-app experience with prototyping.
The final step for students is to create a Pitch Deck using all theoretical and practical knowledge they have acquired and present their business idea during the pitch day. We have some institutions, including Draper University that have expressed interest to take part in future Demo Days.
Tell us a little about your background and how you discovered no-code tools like Bubble.
We have a small team, but no one has a developer background. I have a Masters degree in Oriental studies, others are from banking systems, data analytics and education. How we discovered Bubble? Don’t remember exactly how it happened. Guess we were making a market research. We obviously checked on Webflow, but it’s functions are very limited to our taste. Besides, Bubble has an awesome community always eager to assist and a great number of useful plugins that can help you with almost everything you need from a web application.
Why did you build your app on Bubble?
Choosing Bubble was the only reasonable option for us. We believe that if your startup is not actually based on disruptive technology, there’s no point spending months and thousands of dollars on regular coding process. We value the speed and value-for-money efficiency that Bubble is able to offer. Besides, the best part of it is that you can implement changes really fast and have a certain degree of control over your app's features.
Whenever you hire a developer, you constantly have to argue about rating priorities of certain features, time frames, content, architecture. And being a paying customer, you still manage to loose pretty often, as developers in our experience tend to push pretty hard, advocating solutions they’re comfortable with against the right ones. We decided that our priority is to launch the product fast and get users feedback. For this task Bubble works just fine.
What have been your milestones or successes so far?
We have inspired perspective partners to become interested. It’s much easier to communicate if you have something to showcase. We also have up to 50 first users who are testing the system and sharing their feedback.
Our major success? Just think of it: we got the idea of this service in April. We started working on technical part in June. We completed it in 2 months and got down to communication part: speaking with people, showing them the service, and asking for their opinion. It’s nowo December and we already have users and partners.
I personally have an experience of working with developers on the regular application. They were building a simple two-sided platform for sharing videos. It took them over 9 months just to code the thing. The customer ended up being unhappy with the result, but we’ve already went over the budget limits and had no resources left to improve the situation. So, when I think of a possibility to have a ready-to-use complicated app in 2 months, - it sounds like magic to me. It is definitely a success.
Now we’re reaching out for educational institutions, accelerators and businesses to partner with in order to provide our students with the best follow up options. Our target is to have 5 institutions and 10 committed business partners by the end of the year.
What are your future plans for your app?
We’re also negotiating a loan with a bank. As soon as we get it, we’ll be ready for a commercial launch and start a marketing campaign to attract paying users. We’ll also be working on the “ticketing service” within Entrytoo. We want to offer users an opportunity to run their own founders’ based events and sell tickets within our platform.
The third path we will pursue is to add an enterprise subscription to the service, offering users an opportunity to build teams, assign admins and create their own tasks and quizzes and upload video lectures aimed at developing entrepreneurship skills.
Learn more about Entrytoo: Facebook| LinkedIn | Instagram
About Bubble
Bubble is a leader in the no-code movement. Bubble offers a powerful point-and-click web editor and cloud hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows, ranging from simple prototypes to complex marketplaces, SaaS products, and more. Over 500,000 users are currently building and launching businesses on Bubble - many have gone on to participate in top accelerator programs, such as Y Combinator, and even raise $365M in venture funding. Bubble is more than just a product. We are a strong community of builders and entrepreneurs that are united by the belief that everyone should be able to create technology.
Do you want your app featured by Bubble? Reach out to us and tell us about your app. In addition to this series, we sometimes select our best apps to showcase on our website.
