2017 SVP Startup Profile: Quonvo
Mitchell Troyanovsky ’19 of Quonvo
Founder:
Mitchell Troyanovsky ’19: CEO and Founder
What’s Quonvo?
Quonvo is a mobile and web app that connects people looking for questions directly with other users for 1 on 1 chats. We take a user’s question and match them with another user to chat about the question.
What is the story behind your startup?
I noticed a couple years back that while there were many forums with thousands of users offering tons of helpful advice, there was no place that I could go and at the click of a button just chat with someone about a question I had. For example, I could go to the Fitness subreddit, see there were 2000 people online, but have no way of directly engaging with those users. It became a mission of mine to build a platform where you could go and ask a question and then discuss that question in a 1 on 1 chat with someone.
What’s been a big milestone/accomplishment you’ve made since Summer Venture Program started?
We had our first pilot test on July 19th!!!!!!!
What’s been a big obstacle/surprise that you faced?
I think just balancing trying to make a good product with trying to get it out as fast as possible. It’s very difficult figuring out when a product is good enough to throw at users, because if you spend too much time perfecting, you’re wasting time, but you also don’t want to give something that is unusable to users.
Any tips for aspiring entrepreneurs that you want to share?
- Never ever build anything before you have somehow delivered the value you expect the product to deliver to your end user. You can always find ways to deliver value without actually having a prototype even built. Fake the product, and learn from your users/customers so when you actually build the product, you are building it to fix pain points of real users, not pain points you THINK users have.
- I started this company solo, I don’t recommend it. Get a co-founder.
Meet Quonvo at the Summer Venture Showcase on Thursday July 27. Register now! >>