The story of Klip officially started with winning the Garage48 Gamification hackathon in Odessa, Ukraine in May 8, 2016.
However, as with many great things, the idea of a truly great dating app was cooking in the heads of the founders already several months earlier. One discussion led to another and then another. The beast was unleashed.
Tarmo Annus, Co-founder & serial Garage48 hackathon participant says: "For me, the idea got started when I was visiting Lviv (Ukraine) last November to meet startup team who I decided to join. I met there our tech-advisor Jukka, we somehow ended up talking about dating apps and I found out that he wasn't interested in Tinder dates because often it happens that on profile there are lot of beautiful photos, but in real-life there is nothing to talk with that person. To find interesting people for dating, video would be so much better option.
Couple months later, I discussed with Niko that we could use what we learned at developing SHUUT to make video also work for a dating app. Our initial idea was that based on user's gender, who they are looking for and what are their intentions, they would have different templates to make video profiles. I also mentioned Niko that I am going to attend Garage48 hackathons in Kiev and Odessa. Niko had already planned to meet Ragnar Sass (Co-founder of Pipedrive/Clanbeat/Garage48) and after meeting him, we decided that we should go to Odessa Gamification hackathon with a dating app idea.
While living in Lviv, I tried to remember some basic Ukrainian words and I discovered that "wet" and "carrot" sound very similar - Mokra Morkva. This became a working title for our project in Slack team chat because while Googling "wet carrot", I stumbled upon a South Park episode where they used this expression to describe somebody who was popular in school just because of their looks, but later turned out to be really boring person when their look faded away. Since Mokra Morkva is quite a tongue twister, we decided to use just Morkva as a project name at the Garage48 event.
We won the event and decided to push forward, created a company named as "Morkva OY" and iOS/Android apps as "Klip - video dating".
That was back in May 2016. Already in June Klip raised around 90k EUR of seed funding and the development of the product went full steam ahead.
That was good news for all the singles out there – it meant soon everyone could try out what we initially envisioned to be the future dating - where you get to experience genuine emotions, spontaneous reactions and the smiles. Exactly what you’d expect to see when meeting up in real life.
After thousands of hours of hacking, several design iterations and testing on users – we’re out in public beta and will be focusing on launching this rocket as high as possible.
We’ll be on #Slush16 doing some real life
investor dating, so feel free to catch up with us there.
If you can’t make it to Slush, let’s catch up
on Klip ;)
Download the free Klip app and let us know
what you think
http://joinklip.com
Blogpost written by:
Andres Susi, Co-founder of Klip