How covid killed one of my first startups

2020 was a bit of a crazy year, and yes I know that is an understatement. I remember being at a party and people being asked “do you think this covid thing will affect your trip” and folks thinking no, no way. Then they announced the lockdown and with that everything stopped.

I was fresh into a new job and terrified that I was going to be made redundant. I had left a job in a sector that I knew would survive in the long term (education) and I now had a new dog which was a great excuse to get out and go for short enough walks at lunch time.

But I needed to fill my evenings so I developed “Kount”.

Inspirations

I started to develop Kount as some restrictions started to be lifted. I went to my local McDonalds, because it had just reopened and I was saw they were using a pen and paper in order to record the details of everyone going into the restaurant. I thought to myself, why not automate it.

Which is when I the idea came to me that got me to start developing “kount”.

The idea of kount was simple, there was an admin and a consumer application. The admin app could scan a barcode and the consumer app allowed consumers to enter their details which would be embedded into a QR Code that could be scanned by the admin app. The admin app would then record the persons data incase of a close contact issue happening.

Ok so what happened?

It went great, I took a while to develop it as I was new to some of the tech involved but I had managed to sign up a number of businesses. They were all onboarded to the system and ready to go.

Then two days before our launch…. lockdown was over.

The government announced that there would be no more restrictions, no more contact tracing and no need for businesses to keep track of the comings and goings of their customers. So there was no need for Kount anymore.

I was contacted later on that day by many of the folks asking to cancel their accounts.

But every cloud has a silver lining

But, on the upside, now I knew how to write mobile applications and I didn’t have to stay within 2km of my home anymore. So I got back to normal life, I got back to going into the office and I kept going on walks with my dog each day at lunch time.

The learnings that I have from this project have sparked a lot of new projects. One of these gymbuddy.ai uses the same underlying components that I had developed for Kount.