Quick Information
Name of Startup: MakeBetterMe
Year Founded: 2021
Website: Makebetter.me
Type of company: B2C, NFT shared-revenue
Startup Founders:
Vladislav Lesnoy https://www.linkedin.com/in/hhh0pe
Startup one-liner:
MakeBetterMe is an application that gives personalized NFT for all users who complete a challenge to do more than 10k steps per 30 days and shares part of the NFT’s profit to all finishers every time NFT sells.
Problem the startup solves:
MakeBetterMe is a Move-To-Earn challenge platform, that will help people move more. We want to help people increase their activity and motivate them with money from the sale of NFT. Our target audience is people working from home (office jobs and everyone who sits a lot) and the NFT community
Progress and current status:
We’re from Ukraine and we planned to launch on 1 of March with chat-bot, but then war began.. So after some time we decided to go worldwide, created web-app via Bubble and translated it into English. Now we’re launching and would be happy to see new users. Our next steps – make iOS/Android app from web-app. And sell first collective NFT.
What is a crazy story about the startup?:
A few years ago, this startup was named BankOfProductivity and had a completely different idea. The idea was to develop software that tracks all time you spend on the computer and helps you stay productive and not procrastinate. Shortly, for every productive minute, the user receives about 20-30 seconds of free time, that you can spend on anything non-productive.
If your free time is up, BankOfProductivity blocks every non-productive application and website. It was working on Windows so blocking was implemented by auto-minimizing the window. To give some time to understand how it works user receives 1 hour of free time right after installation. It was challenging because there were a lot of ways to cheat on the app, but after about a year of development I’ve covered all cases and even I, the author of this app, hadn’t a chance to cheat. And once a time I decided to go to a people and tell about my great application. I’ve posted on Reddit and nobody answered. But after a day I received a comment like “guys! it’s a virus! don’t use it! I’ve installed the application and couldn’t delete it for an hour! I was unable to open any application and even Start the menu”.
I was like o______0
After a quick investigation, I found, that there was some bug in the code and 1 hour of free time wasn’t given to this new users… And without setting up all applications are non-productive by default. And everything on Windows is a window, even the Start menu and Context menu. So user installed my great software and.. it started to minimize every application, every menu on the computer. The user tried to kill the application – but I’ve built great protection from cheating, remember? So the application had been restarting quickly after the killing. There are a few seconds between application open and application minimizing by BankOfProductivity, and it was the only option for the user to uninstall it somehow. I apologized to the user and fixed a bug. I’ve made the application more friendly and less strict.
But after a few months, I understood that I’ve built a monster… and I made a pivot, took a general concept and ideas, and made a new startup called MakeBetterMe. And now I’m launching MakeBetterMe. It is a much more friendly application and doesn’t block anything… I swear))
What is a company the startup looks up to, and why?:
SweatCoin, StepN, Walken – there are our competitors, who have similar ideas but different realizations. It’s an exciting time when new models are building, like rewarding by crypto for steps.
The company in four years will be…
A big community of healthy and active people, with offline events, regular marathons all over the world, murals on buildings all over the world, and NFT that sells for millions of dollars.
