Amroo — the beginning
Let me tell you a story about how one great platform was born. It all began with Pixel, our office mascot cat. He was saved from the dangerous boulevard nearby by one of our colleagues. That little rascal has brought us tons of joy and even helps us with coding. Yes, we are quite big on the stray pets topic.
Originally posted on the Cool Apps blog.
What stands behind Amroo
Amroo stands for Animal Roof and as this suggests it’s AirBnB for pets. It allows you to find a place where you can leave your pets while you are away — traveling for business or pleasure. This place could be house or apartment of another pet lover or even a pet hotel. The choice is up to you!
Moreover, our dear hope is that Amroo will help more people adopt dogs and cats from the animal rescue shelters. How? By giving them the freedom to take care of an animal, but still have the time to travel as much as they need without worrying for the roof above their pets. We do believe this is a noble cause worth fighting for!
Telerik Hackthon 2014 — tackle the challenge
The slogan of our company Cool Apps is “Crafting cool apps which make a difference!”. We are damn good at crafting mobile apps! (At least, this is what most of the people often say about us). Now we had an idea worth spreading. The whole team was thrilled about the opportunity to tackle such challenge. We just needed to kick-start this project. Perfect timing since the Telerik Hackthon in October 2014 was just around the corner.
The intensity of such contest makes you drop the small unimportant stuff and go straight for the core functionality. This way we were able to create a rough MVP for less than a weekend! In the Lean Startup world we are living, this matters.
As a matter of fact, we’ve won the first Teleric Hackathon with Amroo. It was quite an experience. You can read more about it here.
Not only our moms liked it
After having this prototype, instead of publishing it to the app stores and waiting for the magic to happen, we decided there is a better way. We showed it to different people and as you might expect they were all thrilled. Now this would be a classic rookie mistake. I mean, when you show something that you've created to others, 90% of the time they’ll tell you it’s a great idea even if they think it stinks. Anyone who’s read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick knows this. It’s a normal behavior since people don’t want to offend you. This book explains it as well as suggests what you should do instead.
The thing that got us was people actually sharing the idea and talking to their friends about. Quite a few people approached us asking whether the app is already available and if not when it will be, since they need it desperately. Now this sounds encouraging!
What do you think?
Do you like the idea and do you need such a platform?
I’m a novice writer and would really appreciate your thoughts and feedback! If you enjoyed reading this post, please click the “recommend” button. ☺
