Pre-Accelerator Teams 2019: Meet Visavis
Ever found yourself spending too much time on dating apps but not progressing to real life meets? Visavis is a newly released dating app helping you to “beat textual frustration”. Read on to find out more about their Ignite journey.
The Visavis team is made up of co-founders Michalis and Marwan. Both are Newcastle University graduates and make up a formidable team. Michalis taking care of business development and Marwan looking after the product.
Visavis is trying to tackle a fundamental problem in the dating industry. Currently the interests of dating apps are misaligned with the interests of their users. With apps focusing on keeping users online and locked within their virtual ecosystems.
Solving the problem
Visavis deviates away from the freemium model and operates as a multi-sided platform connecting people who want to meet in real-life with nearby venues in a streamlined and safe way. Dating is an incredibly complicated process encapsulating a plethora of variables that can not realistically be portrayed within a digital environment — variables such as confidence, humour, chemistry and compatibility. Visavis is not about swiping. It’s about experiencing real connection!
Visavis’ experience on Ignite
Michalis highlights the way Ignite acted as a catalyst for his team’s personal and entrepreneurial development.
“The nature of the programme pushed us to obtain the data and insights that we needed to stress-test our hypotheses and further develop our product while maintaining a “bootstrapping” mindset. For example, Wil & Gabi advised us to avoid spending any money on user-acquisition, and this constraint elevated our levels of creativity. We ended up running a series of creative experiments that helped us acquire our first 300 users, all with a zero marketing budget.”
Of course this in addition to all of the mentoring and program content helped Visavis to build towards an exciting showcase pitch. The Visavis teams’ favourite moment from the Pre-Accelerator came from the morning of the showcase — going out into Newcastle and pitching to the public by Grey’s monument in the snow was truly a magical moment.
Check out the Visavis pitch below:
How can you keep up to date and help Visavis?
Check out the website: https://www.getvisavis.com/. If you are a current Newcastle University student then download the app to help you on your dating journey.
Applications for the 2019 pre-accelerator will open in April. You can read more about what the programme can do for you and your startup on the Ignite website and, in the meantime, feel free to contact us to talk through how Ignite can help you get started!
For more information, please contact the Ignite programme team:
Gabriela Matic — gabi@ignite.io | linkedin.com/in/gabrielamatic
Wil Benton — wil@ignite.io | linkedin.com/in/fatkidonfire
Alexis Long — alexis@ignite.io | linkedin.com/in/alexisjlong
