Master's students in Entrepreneurship create startup project Capturest
During year 2 within the Master of Science programme Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship, teams of students are engaged in developing a business project or social entrepreneurship project in connection with their courses. These projects can be ideas generated by the students, or ideas that arise externally. GU Holding provides business coaching and additional support for these projects. Two of the students, Regina Roeper and Simon Arvidsson, have together with 3 students from Chalmers created the startup project Capturest. The project has received funding from GU holding to help finance the project.
What is Capturest?
Capturest is a startup project. Capturest wants to be the mobile application that gives back the user its private space for honest self-expression, to hold on to personally meaningful moments and allows private and secure social interaction. It is a modern, social diary. It is kind of a private and intimate Facebook.
What differs Capturest from Facebook?
Facebook has become a social media platform, where a younger user has in average more than 400 friends. It is too broad to share private information, and too broad to socially interact honest feelings, which might be frightening or do not fit the social norm.
Can you explain how the privacy issue is affecting Facebook? What are the trends in regards social media behavior?
Users are aware of them changing to friendship lists, but they do not want to be watched by Facebook. This is why new applications such as SnapChat and WhatsApp, which users feel to control the flow of information has become so popular. Most platforms have become too public. Capturest provides a platform for the user to have a private space to keep and organize their memories for their personal purpose. But we believe that moments are often experienced with others. Hence, users want to share parts of their moments with only certain people; maybe your close friends, family, partner or relatives.
So, what do you think makes you special? What is your uniqueness?
We want to give users back their private space. An environment where the user feels safe and comfortable to express him/herself, where he/she is allowed to be honest to oneself, to display the pure beauty of something, which matters to him/her, but also allow social interaction. The uniqueness comes when we approach the concept of privacy. The users own the content he is creating (unlike Facebook, Instagram, Path etc.)
How did you come up with the idea?
The birthplace of Capturest was a nice café in Majorna. It was a cold, but sunny day in February. It was the first day of sun since many grey Gothenburg days and we did a coffee hopping discovery/study for the exams tour in the neighborhood, we both live in. We wanted to hold on to this exciting special afternoon, all these different nice and cozy places, the sun, the smell of cake and freshly brewed coffee, the sound of the people chatting around us. We realized there is no proper solution to privately hold on to such a moment. This was the moment Capturest was born.
What problem do you believe Capturest will solve for customers?
Capturest will help users …
… to give the person the necessary private space and tools …
… to easily and beautifully hold on to moments of the person’s life, to reflect, and to securely interact with others.
Who is behind Capturest? Who is the team?
Currently, the core team behind Capturest consists of five people, Regina, Simon, John, Amanda and Juntima. Our backgrounds lie in the relevant fields of Mobile Internet, Internet startups, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Application, UX/UI design and Artificial Intelligence. We are passionate about this project and determined to turn this idea into something valuable for users. Exactly this passion is that what drives Capturest. We are not experts but all of us have experience within startups, mobile business and development. And we have great advisors that help us to harvest the potential of the idea.
We, Simon and Regina are attending the KBE-program at the business school in Gothenburg and one great thing about the program is that we have time to realize this idea with help from the programme. Both in terms of additional resources such as advisors and also with great academic tools that can be applied in our start-up context.
What is the vision for Capturest? How does Capturest want to position itself in the future?
Capturest wants to become the space for people
• to honestly and beautifully express themselves,
• to mirror emotions, feelings the best way possible (easy, fast, beautiful),
• and to securely interact with others.
How social is Capturest? And how do you want to turn Capturest into something social?
We believe that special moments are often experienced with others, thus requiring social interaction. This is why we include “social” in the product. How social this product will be is a decision we will leave up to the user, who decides …
• what information/thoughts to share,
• when to share,
• with whom to share it with.
When do you release your product and what is your revenue model?
Our plan is to have a demo version in September this year. When the actual liver version will be ready depends on our capacities and the progress in customer and business development. We have couple of ideas how the revenue should like. We are aiming for in-app purchases at the moment. But as we are still in the business model experimentation phase, we would like to learn more about our potential users first.
Current status and Financing from GU Holding?
We received early so-called verification financing from GU Holding, and since we got this the possibility to speed up the development of our ideas has increased. The main importance for us is to have resources that prevent potential bottle-necks so that we can grow faster. It is a great opportunity that enables us to really try out our ideas and it means a lot.