Meet Onvey - The Devoted Startup Lovers
A few months ago, right before our Co-Christmas party, I was running around and trying to get everything ready for the big night. One of the crazier days in the coworking had just finished and I was on my way to meet a friend for a beer when my phone rang. A guy was calling to tell me he is in front of the office with his partner and would very much like to check it out. Problem 1 - I wasn't in the office. Problem 2 - It was past 20:00, so chances were nobody else was either. After a few phone calls (I'll never ever again text or talk while driving.) it turned out Alex was still procrastinating in the office, so he took upon the task of showing Maxime and Wilfried around.
A few days later I met with them in person and before you know it they were setting up their laptops in The Factory. Since then they've been working on their project in turbo focus mode staying relatively quiet, but there are quite a few fascinating things about them, which I want to share with you.
The team
Boys and girls (or whatever you decide to identify as), allow me to introduce Wilfried, Maxime and Kristian, and their startup project - Onvey!
Wilfried, 31, is the CEO and the head of Strategy and Product Development. He co-founded Mailjet in 2010 as the product manager and scaled up the support and account management teams for 6 years as COO - also being the “metric guy”. (@wilfried)
Maxime, 30, is the community guy. He is in charge of marketing, communication and business development. He met Wilfried in Mailjet where he had taken upon project management, technical, account management and, business responsibilities.
Maxime is currently exploring the opportunity to start a Ruby bootcamp in Sofia, so if you’re reading this and you’re a Ruby developer, you may want to contact him and share some ideas. (@maxime_onvey)
Kristian, 25, joined the team right when they moved to Puzl CowOrKing as a UI/UX designer. He has been doing UI/UX design, branding, graphics and all other kinds of ‘design’ stuff that you can think of since 2007. (@krist)
Chatting with Onvey
The trio is currently working on Onvey with the tough mission to “build creative tools driving engagement.” To learn more I ambushed Wilfried in the kitchen on the 4th floor. Here's what he had to say.
Hey Wilfried, I know you’re traveling to London soon, but before that could you share more details about Onvey and tell us what the team is doing now?
We are SaaS builders and startup lovers. We launched our company Onvey as a Startup Lab in July 2016, with the purpose to help online companies deliver a better online experience to their customers. Since then, we've been offering consultancy to a few web companies about their online customer experience, but we dedicate most of our time on building SaaS products for UX optimization.
In addition, we bring our experience as Advisors to some startups, and occasionally act as Business Angels. In Bulgaria, we invested in iGreet and ScanAR’s AR technology. We are also in ongoing discussions for a participation in a second startup before this summer.
What’s happening now with Onvey and what’s coming next?
We are getting closer to our first year of activity. Alongside our product development efforts, we had a kind of a "discovery" year, during which we stepped in Sofia's local ecosystem and tried to confirm and refine our personal and product values for the market. We will soon release our first product PageScreen.io. It is born as a fork of a core part of Onbrowse.io, the “big thing” we work on, which is currently in Alpha for a limited stack of testers.
From there, the logical plan is to hustle hard, grow and scale both our activities and team.
Do you think the community here could help you somehow? How would you benefit?
We are close to our objective of 200 companies registered for the beta of Onbrowse.io. Any help reaching this milestone would be appreciated considering we, in Puzl, are all pretty much building SaaS, e-commerce or mobile services, and that our services address a transversal set of concerns of everyone in online businesses - from the Product Manager, through the Designer to the Marketing Manager. Help us build our product, and we’ll help make yours better!
You can show your support and follow our activities via our Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn pages. There we mostly post weekly articles about UX, Product Management, and Customer Success, but intend to share more and more inside news. Stay tuned!
We’d like this to go both ways and to play a supporting role in the community as well. Feel free to connect with us - we make ourselves available to bring our knowledge to anyone’s business around. We also may have connections with businesses in France you’d like to be in contact with, and simply will be happy to know what is being built in the community.
Last but not least, we’d like to send a warm thank you to those of you who have been helping us so far with small or bigger things, from legal advice to network introductions - things really do happen here! The community around Puzl CowOrKing is amazing and promising. It is one of the strong assets for Sofia to become a larger place for startups.
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