Many of us have big dreams, whether or not we admit to them. And in turn, most of us will not do anything about following those dreams. Now, however, there’s a new service which can help push you along the road to meeting your grandest ambitions.
Epiclist, the first service from Berlin-based startup EPIC, launched yesterday after several months of hard work at the Startup Wise Guys accelerator in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. It allows users to define and strive towards their dreams – with a series of DreamCards by high achievers helping to push them along the way.
When the team, which had previously been based in Berlin, arrived in Estonia, they had their eye on a completely different product. “We came here with a location-based recommendation service for local activities,” EPIC COO Stan Bugaev told Silicon Allee, “but after a while we realised that this space is just so full. So then we focused on helping people realise their small and big dreams by breaking them down into simple action steps and connecting them with people who share their goals.”
Epiclist is described as a community platform for ‘doers and achievers’ to follow epic dreams and goals by helping them to visualize what they want while harnessing the power of their friends and supporting others to make the dreams happen.
The Inspiration to Fulfill Dreams
Users can keep track of their progress by adding ideas, notes, photos and videos, with the aim of making each story a social and interactive experience on the web and on mobile. Stan added: “Imagine, every one of us has small and big dreams, ranging from learning a new language or acquiring a new skill to taking a backpacking trip to Thailand. But 99 percent of people never follow their dreams, because it is just such a stressful world we live in, such a fast-paced world. What we want to do is provide an end-to-end solution for people to get the inspiration to fulfill their dreams, to break it down into really simple action steps, and we believe one of the most important things is to connect you to people who can support you.”
Say a user’s dream is to go on a road trip around Europe with friends. He can enter it on the platform and add the friends he wants to take with him. If he also makes the dream public, then the community can help him with suggestions and advice.
“In the beginning we want to focus on the adventure travel market, so a lot of the dreams will have to do with that kind of experience. It’s a massive market, and we hope to get traction directly to this market.” To help drive that, EPIC has been talking to achievers such as Alex Barrera and Mark Turrell to create DreamCards for them to inspire others.
The business model, meanwhile, is based on sponsored content, with brands signing up to inspire and challenge users. Stan said: “So if you want to run a marathon, for example, a brand like Nike can challenge you to do that and provide you with some discounts for their products in exchange for you sharing your dream and action steps with your friends and the community.”
Another revenue stream come from social gifting with friends able to help each other out with presents, experiences and new products.
The startup is an international one, with Stan originally from St Petersburg in Russia and other team members from Germany and Kazakhstan. That meant it was no major drama to move to Estonia for the two-and-a-half-month Startup Wise Guys program earlier this year. Stan added: “Startup Wise Guys is fantastic. It’s an intensive program; we’re working here with 40 or 45 mentors from all over Europe, from SoundCloud to Russian VCs to angel investors from the Baltic region. It’s been pretty tough for us because we changed our concept a lot. We had to almost start from the beginning, that’s why we have been working 18 hours a day to code our asses off and make it really awesome.”
They are hoping all that hard work will pay off at the two upcoming demo days which are part of the program, in Tallinn on June 29 and then in London on July 7, when they hope to have reached 50,000 dreams.
After that, they are planning to return to Berlin where they were briefly based before heading off to Tallinn. “In those two months (in Berlin) we met so many really cool people. It gave us the opportunity to talk and get constant feedback. People connected us to other people; this living community in Berlin is really amazing. We talk to the guys from London (at Startup Wise Guys) and they really look up to Berlin as well because it’s so creative and innovative.”
