How this team of entrepreneurs turned their part-time hobby to their full-time job
- A new hobby that brought about their business idea
- A modern problem needs a modern solution and a winning team
- The new Saas and their journey to the market
The horse industry is still very old-fashioned despite its global value of 3 billion dollars. In this Spring batch 2020 at Nordic Startup School, we have a team of horse lovers whose mission is to revolutionise the Equine market using digitalisation.
It began by taking a new friend home
Some years ago, Johanna and Janne decided to start a new hobby together, horse riding.
As first-time owners, little did they know that owning a horse meant being responsible for all its documents including the paper diary, passport, notebooks, clip books and pictures.
Moreover, they had to keep constant contact through SMS with the horse’s network including a stable manager, trainer and farrier. After a simple incident made complicated by the paperwork and communication process, Janne decided to create a solution.
A team of experts
Janne started programming in his free time and made the first app EquiFarrier which help owners and farriers communicate.
They started to use the app with their horse’s farrier Jaakko and realized it needed to cater to all stakeholders around the horse not only the farrier. Janne discussed this with his friend Kari, a software/product management professional who then joined the team and built a more comprehensive app EquineIQ.
Janne, Johanna, Jaakko and Kari became the four founders of Kaukalo Solutions Ltd. At that point, the four of them still kept their day job and worked on this startup as a hobby on the side. In January 2019, Janne decided to be the first one to work fulltime for their startup followed by Kari joining in May.
Journey to the global market
Experienced in working with horses themselves, Kaukalo gave EquineIQ added value for all stakeholders which differentiated it amongst current competitors.
The startup expected to have a soft launch in Finland and a pilot project with a b2b customer for EquineIQ during the summer of 2020. Talking to NSS, Kaukalo CEO Johanna Jussila was positive about their journey:
“After 6 months we hopefully are on our way to global markets. In two years, who knows? We aim to be the number one software for horse owners.”
Despite the financial difficulty caused by Covid 19 epidemic, the team commits to publishing the app by the end of 2020. Now as they are proceeding with all the paperwork to get the app on AppStore, Kaukalo hoping to get some mentors joining them in this journey to revolutionise how human manage horses.
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