Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Ida Josefiina, Co-Founder of Sane, an app for building your personal network of knowledge, incorporated in London, operated remotely from Europe.
If you think someone else should read this too, feel free to let them know!
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Here’s what Sane is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
It's very difficult for people to break into the world of academia. If you don't already have strong foundational knowledge about a certain academic field it's very difficult to access. Research papers are long and full of jargon, hidden deep within university websites, inaccessible to many of us. Additionally, most people don't have the time to read the full works, or even know which paper to read in the first place.
The Solution:
Our purpose is to bridge this gap and make the ideas and research from the world's greatest thinkers available outside of institutions. Through our app, users receive a daily summary of theory and ideas in a digestible format. Sane helps users build their personal network of knowledge. This is supported by features that allow folks to highlight key ideas, make notes, and see additional terminology layers for further context.
The Team:
We're a team of three. I'm the CEO, Tiina Peuna is our CPO, and Ivan Ruiz is our CTO and we're all working remotely out of Europe.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I've always loved reading and going down deep rabbit holes of new and different ideas and experiences. This can be very difficult to do these days with the way our relationship to technology has developed into addictive habits and short dopamine releases.
To test Sane, we first created a newsletter as proof of concept, sharing various ideas and theories in a simple and understandable way and seeing if people would be interested to learn more. We really want people to use Sane as a way to discover ideas and then go and actually find the author or book and dig deeper and get inspired. That's why we're building Sane.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
While information is everywhere, the research and theory that shape our societies is inaccessible to most of us. Academia exists in a bubble, in publications tucked away behind the walls of institutions. Few of us have time to read as much as we'd like, or a way to discover what we might be interested in in the first place.
With everything going on in the world, it's important to start building a future where thoughts are valued over things and where technology serves us instead of us serving technology.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We recently launched our app in private beta and just seeing the excitement around this and the positive early user data has been very encouraging.
Sane is giving our readers access to test the app in private beta (available only on iOS at the moment). You can find Sane in the App Store (here) or by searching for Sane -- New ideas daily. The invite code when registering is Newideas.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Founding a startup is incredibly hard. Each day includes some challenges and some wins, and every day is different. Highs are really high, and lows are really low -- but that's just how startup life is and I wouldn't change it for the world.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
It would definitely have been a perk to know how to prioritise as ruthlessly as required from day 1. Our team is definitely better at that now. We have a specific and limited number of goals, and if a task doesn't directly contribute to achieving one of them, then it's deprioritised.
Of course, I wish I had known all the learning curves we went through with product development, knowing what works and what doesn't, but that's just a journey we had to go through. There are no shortcuts to founding a startup.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Remember that you know your business, your product, and all the little nuances about what you're building better than anyone else. Internalise this, and don't forget it.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Put yourself in a position where you can safely allow yourself to experiment and even fail, without it affecting your personal life. Make sure you have that playground to be able to build the company. That kind of mindset and headspace will make it 100 times easier to move forward, take risks, and make those daily decisions.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Nothing ever goes the way you think it will, ever. That sounds scary, but once you accept it, it helps manage expectations and it's not that scary.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
Noam Chomsky, because of his persistent contribution to public discourse. Sam Harris for making ideas, discussion, and debates from academia accessible to millions of people. And Richard Price for building a platform that hosts 22% of the world's research papers on it.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning - Martin Rees