Leaky faucets and the road to entrepreneurial success
My name is Guido Marucci Blas and I am writing this blog post while waiting for the landlord of the apartment I rented for 15 weeks to fix the shower. Wait! Keep reading … the ‘where’ and the ‘why’ of this post is way more interesting than the ‘what.’ I am an Argentine software engineer and one of Sk8trakr's founders and the couch I’m sitting on and the landlord I am waiting for are in Shenzhen, China
Your're probably asking yourself what the hell am I doing in China, well, to answer that question I need to go back and tell you how we came up with the idea of Sk8trakr.
Back in 2010, during my college years, at I.T.B.A. (Buenos Aires Institute of Technology) I met Nicolás Magni. Nicolás and I would spend most every Friday afternoon riding on our skateboards and attempting trick after trick (Nicolás was the talented one and good enough to try to show me the ropes). Aside from actual skateboarding, we would play Tony Hawk and grill some Argentine Asado.
On one of those Friday nights, Sk8trakr was born. I thought “wouldn’t it be cool if we could somehow replicate the video game experience in real life; earn points every time you perform a trick.” We kicked around lots of ideas about how the app would work and what it would look like. The problem was that we were two software engineers. We didn’t have any idea on how to make a device that, attached to the deck, could interact with our cell phone. We needed more people. We needed an Electronic Engineer.
One night, I met Nicolás Tzovanis, a.k.a. Tzova, one of Nicolas’ friends from high school, who was studying electronic engineering at the same university. Tzova is a snowboarder, so he really liked the idea of attaching a device to his board that would give him information about his tricks. And, as luck would have it: he also loved to make electronic devices.
Because we were both trying to learn the basic skate tricks, we knew right away how an app that could help us—and other skaters—learn faster should be. Unfortunately we didn’t have the experience or the time to develop such a product because we were fully focused on getting our degrees, so we put Sk8trakr on hold.
Two years later, after graduating, I co-founded Wolox with Nicolas Magni and other software engineer friends from the university. We wanted to do two things with Wolox: help entrepreneurs that have an idea but needed a technical team and also have our labs to develop our own ideas. A couple of months after we founded Wolox we were alredy working with a few startups, we decided it was time to develop Sk8trakr as our first labs project.
I talked to Tzova about finally making Sk8trakr a reality and he jumped on board (pun intended!) immediately. We felt like we were covered in terms of the software engineering BUT we wanted to bring in another electronic engineer. That was when Matías Fineschi, a.k.a. Mati, joined the team. Mati is also an electronic engineer from I.T.B.A. with extensive experience and also happened to be a skater and surfer. He fell in love with the project right away.
That is how Sk8trakr got the best team for its conception: excellent engineers that love board-based action sports backed by a software company that understands startups needs. Tzova and Mati are here with me waiting for the landlord to fix our leaky faucet.
But, of course, you still want to know how three Argentines ended up in China!
After a few month working part-time in the project we managed to create an Arduino-based prototype. This prototype helped us prove that Sk8trakr was technically viable. We recorded data from various tricks including Ollie, Kickflip, Pop Shove It and Flip Varials. We recorded 200 samples for each trick and we trained our classification algorithms. The result was incredible, we were able to classify the tricks with 98% of accuracy.
After such an amazing result we decided to take the next step, design a prototype that skaters could really use. Because they were reluctant to use a skate with a huge box attached to it. By that time GoodPeople, a marketplace of action sports goods, had also joined us. Based out of Buenos Aires and San Francisco, they love action sports and technology, and were an excellent match for Sk8trakr from the start. They have been working on the XGames and organizing the interactive skate park for the last three years. We met Pablo Orlando, GoodPeople’s CEO, as semi-finalists in Desafío Intel.
With all that momentum, we decided it was time to develop the first smart-pad for skates. Within a few months, we had built a second version of the prototype and during that period we also won Buenos Aires Emprende and a contest organized by Banco de La Nación Argentina and Empretec foundation.
Everything was going pretty well and then we got more incredible news, we were selected to be part of Haxlr8r an accelerator for hardware startups. The amazing thing about that is that part of the program takes place in Shenzhen, China, where all the electronic factories and suppliers are located (including Apple's factory Foxconn). This was exactly what we needed: to be working a few blocks from the factories and suppliers (literaly the electronic market is just two blocks from the office).
And that how I ended up on this sofa, waiting for my shower to be fixed. We’ve been here for 2 weeks and we still have another 15 to go. We will be working from China, developing our final product. We already knew that we have everything it takes to create this product but with the help of Haxlr8r we are going to make sk8trakr better and faster. They have the know-how and the resources to help us make the best accessory ever created for skaters. Apart from that Shenzhen is an incredible city to skate in. Huge flats, lots of stairs, rails and planter boxes. So if you are a local skater get in touch with us!
This is just the first post. Whether you are a skater, inventor, speed freak, entrepreneur—or a combination of any of the above—we want to share this amazing experience with you. So stay tuned because Tzova and Mati will be posting!
Of course, like everywhere, there are plenty of little things we have to tackle, like leaky faucets. But at least now I can take get ready to go to the office, the landlord has fixed our shower.
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