As you know, there’s no such thing as a startup without a pitchdeck, and we are a startup because we have built something from scratch that has global potential and solves a significant problem. We need a pitchdeck.

A pitchdeck has a practical dimension – it’s a tool for collecting energy for survival, i.e. money, from the market. However, from our perspective, it’s primarily a valuable exercise. The task is: tell me in a few minutes about what you do and convince me that it makes sense. It sounds like the requirements for an advertising spot. We have much more to say than we can fit in these few minutes, so we make a painstaking selection. This boiling down of content to its pure essence is of great value. It allows you to really understand what you do and how to talk about it, which always pays off. We then put together a story from the selected facts. The last stage is to present it in a clever way.

Essentially, it’s hard to deliver a mixture of facts and emotions to spark enthusiasm. However, after a few internal efforts, we consider the pitchdeck ready. We pitched it to people we trust and got a few suggestions for tweaking the story, but overall the feedback was generally positive. Only the visual layer remained to be finished. By the way, this is a great opportunity to test the newly created visual identity in practice. It looks like this part of the project can be considered complete.

It’s been a while since we wrote about the business model. But this is not an issue that’s been left untouched. On the contrary, we went down several different paths before we decided to choose the one, understanding its advantages and disadvantages, that will appear on our website. We’re also mentally prepared and process-ready for any pivoting here if developments take us in a different direction. One thing is a sailor, another is the ship he steers, and the third thing is the wind and the sea. Control in business is delusion, but character is everything. We have to be ready for different scenarios. After working together on the topic, it looks likely that we’re ready. What direction did we choose exactly? We’ll tell you another time!.

Empathy in the patient-doctor relationship is a fascinating topic. The issue in the context of telemedicine comes under the umbrella of our interests. We found interesting research that allows us to predict behavioral tendencies based on personality traits. These, in turn, from a physician’s perspective, should be taken into account in practice. A topic not for today or tomorrow, but a valuable discovery for us. We recommend that everyone involved in medicine reads it.

Based on the experiences of people who have gone down this path several times, working on a business model means deciding whether you want “to be or not to be” a business. The same business can be a success with the right model and a failure with the wrong model. Obvious solutions impose themselves and are dangerously convincing, because they are fixed in the heads of founders by countless examples from their surroundings. Sometimes it’s hard to escape this closed box of assumptions.

We’re lucky to work with people who have walked this path or know people who have. They see it completely differently now. So, following their advice, we can step outside of our box and change our perspective. The starting point is a model in which we sell what is our key value – the ability to give advice based on appropriate psychometric tests. We can now focus on improving the mechanism, maintain the small scale of the organization, and focus on the highest possible quality of its work. And sell it to companies that will be happy to use our black box of protected IP. With this approach, we wouldn’t have to create multiple layers in the organization.

It’s an intriguing option. However, can we maximize the features that will determine the success of such a company at the initial stage? Talks are ongoing.

The thousand word brief was transformed into pictures. We wanted Empatyzer to function as a logotype in two forms, i.e. under its full name and in a shortened version as Em. Em should therefore carry as much symbolism as possible, functioning as the brand symbol – and a replacement for a symbol in the logo, which we consciously didn’t want. After several attempts, we achieved the final effect.

The inspiration from the movie “Her” established itself in the form of a dot in front of Em. This means that in graphic form from today, Em is .em, which emphasizes its digital origin by referring to the way Internet domains are written. The lettering is stylized as a wave that refers to the brand’s slogan, i.e. “Communicate on the Same Wavelength”. At the same time, the wave from the letter “m” becomes an independent pattern, a pattern for creating various types of backgrounds and graphics. Em, as our communication coach, finally had a face – a younger version of our second, matrix inspiration, i.e. the Oracle.

We found a character that’s impossible not to like. She exudes positive energy, and is confident and stable at the same time. Other elements of identification, such as the color palette, revolve around the symbolism of agreement and conversation. We’re satisfied. It’s interesting that good identification, in addition to purely strategic assumptions, should also take into account the aesthetic needs of the people who are responsible for the brand. This makes identification easier.

We know what Empatyzer is and who Em is, but we don’t know what either look like. That’s why we started working on a visual identification brief. We have a fairly good understanding of the word-to-image process and our supplier is proven. The brief is only two pages long and it seems to have served its purpose. Now we are waiting for the results. We realize that creative work requires time for incubation, but without time pressure, incubation sometimes simply doesn’t happen :-). Apparently, for a creative reaction to take place, pressure is necessary. We deliver it delicately.

In order to contribute to improving the quality of education of young people, we also read materials that combine psychometrics with education. The topic is very broad and will require a separate subproject from us. Advice about horizontal relationships, i.e. student-student, may be the same or very similar to what takes place in business relationships, but in the student-teacher, student-educator, or student-school psychologist relationship, such advice should contain slightly different information. These are the types of clues we look for in scientific research.

We started looking for software suppliers among people we worked with many years ago. Most of them are fully booked. They either have their own companies or work for software houses. We are going around in circles. Finally, a friend calls. It turns out there are people who can do it – and they can start right away. This is very good information. We briefly tell them about the project. It seems that everything is within their abilities. Our requirement for a fixed budget was accepted with a caveat that we deliver documentation. This, we have.

Just one final point. We treat documentation as marking out a path, but the project is already building a road. We determine that there may be a 20% difference between the documentation and the final solution, and we will determine deviations on an ongoing basis, in short sprints. It went fast. Estimation, conditional boundaries, contract. We’re taking off. The first meeting is next week. We’re back on track.

Everyone is interested in psychology – until you have to say something about Cronbach’s alpha. Then, the masks fall off and the people we actually want to talk stick around. It turns out that there are people who have excellent knowledge of psychometrics, but walking in other people’s shoes is not one of their strong points. In this way, we realize that psychology – which suddenly becomes so obvious that we are surprised ourselves – just like any other field, has its own specializations. Some are good at one thing and some are good at something else.

We won’t find a unicorn, but we need one, so we have to create it ourselves. We gather people with a solid foundation of psychological knowledge and various talents. So far, we’re doing well, but time pressure comes at a cost. This cost is that when establishing new contacts, we are responsible for such long breaks in communication that the threads start to break off. This weighs heavily on us, because we would like the relationship to have a beginning, a development and an end. We have a problem with the last two. We have to work on this.

We’re still at the stage of looking for a supplier. The second candidate is also a small company. Everything seems to be right. “We can do it. It makes sense”. We send the documentation. “You have to break it down into microservices. AWS. Fully flexible. Microservices aren’t bad, but are you sure for a project of this size? A monolith would probably make more sense.

We chat with friends. At this stage, they recommend a monolith that can be broken down further into more burdensome and demanding fragments as we progress. We receive a quote and a schedule. The end is nowhere in sight. Time & materials. We really like working in agile models and we understand it quite well. IT projects are nothing new to us. The problem is perhaps the difference in scale. Size matters. We part ways.

We had the opportunity to meet Irek in person; our copy has his own personal dedication. It’s a collection of stories from the author’s professional life, each of them carefully selected and compiled. You get the impression when reading it that both you and the author are experiencing cultural differences together. Everything is cleverly intertwined with theoretical knowledge, which, in fact, is a very positive thing. The practical dimension is much more interesting. The book also had to be embellished many times with notes and excessive underlining. The whole thing has been meticulously prepared and you feel almost privileged to be reading it.

We’re working on texts for the website. The language is flexible, so it opens up a lot of possibilities. But the more possibilities, the greater the risk of errors. It’s not even about typos, spelling or punctuation errors, but about errors in the messaging. How can you succinctly say what is most important? What is most important? And for whom? What’s the pain point of this particular persona? What do they want to hear about? What are they looking for? Questions, lots of questions. And few answers so far.

So we start work on the layout of the solutions elements. For now, we’re focusing on the home page. This is the most predictable (because it’s also the most practiced) element of the whole project. We’re supposedly working on a wireframe, lo-fi, so that everything can be designed and then evaluated – but it would be good if we knew what we wanted to say. Ideally, at this stage, there would already be texts. Maybe not final versions, but at least a good starting point and foundation for further work.

The first supplier. A pleasant IT company recommended by someone we trust. The right size for us – which is of great importance and not only from the budgetary perspective. They are sensible people. First meeting. We want to do this and that. “There’s a problem. We don’t do stuff like that.” We wonder together whether it’s really all that difficult. After all, it looks like a 3/10 when it comes to actual difficulty level. However, we hear from them that specialist companies deal with this type of project. Really? “We can offer you workshops where we can explore whether or not you really need this kind of solution.” It’s just that we don’t so much think we need this solution but we’re convinced it’s foundational for us, and besides, we’ve been doing research. Lots of research. We broke up before we even got together. It was for the best.

This is the kind of heavy book you can easily knock someone out with, or use to make a very solid base for anything. Nearly 700 pages of small print A4 format may discourage you from reading it, which would be a pity.

It’s not a novel, so you don’t have to read it cover to cover. This is a really great study of a topic that is clearly presented in the title. It’s true that it’s not directly related to our project, but it’s close enough to make it very relevant. Particularly interesting are the fragments that show which areas of the brain are responsible for which intellectual abilities. Knowing that psychometrics can measure some of them, we realize that psychometrics in the world of computers and processors would be an attempt to read the characteristics of a given processor by means of test tasks.

After reading selected chapters and fragments, it’s easier to understand who we are as people and what basic functions determine our behavior. For anyone who wants to understand the basics of how the human mind works and why it is the way it is, this book will be a real pleasure to read.

“So go do it” doesn’t work. In the IT industry in particular. Especially when there’s a limited budget – you can only be agile for so long. What exactly needs to be done should be clearly outlined. Establish a timeframe and boundaries. Once you have the vision for the project, with as much detail as possible, you’ve found all obvious conflicts and consequences, and everything is starting to look reasonable – this is a good start to working agile. Short sprints of several days. Quick identification of potential problems. But above all, documentation first.

When you start a project, it seems simple. Once you start describing it, the pages fly by like crazy. At page fifty, we’re three-quarters through. It looks like a book. There were a lot of problems along the way that we hadn’t thought of. Documentation writing is a great exercise – it allows you to create a mental picture of the entire project or product. You can identify obvious and sometimes not so obvious problems before a single line of code is written. You begin to understand the structure, dependencies, and limitations. Coding will be a journey along a well-trodden route, not through a hedge.

At page seventy, we come to a point where the solution starts to get unexpectedly complicated. We are still working on the documentation. We give ourselves two days to think about it. Several attempts are made to approach the topic. It’s all pointless, you need to create new documentation. Most of it will be useful, but the whole thing needs to be rewritten with different assumptions. This time it works: sixty pages. The end – the path has been cleared. But we know well that it is one thing to make a path through the mountains, and another to make your way there. We have a road ahead of us. But now we feel more confident. We are there.

After research, it’s time for UX. First of all, we try to understand the expectations of our users. A lot became clear during the in-depth interviews and we’re now making considerable use of these findings. One by one, we create scenarios for each group separately, and we work out the details. We’re stepping into the shoes of other types of users. Account Administrators, Regular Users, System Administrators, Team Leaders, HR Employees, Teachers and School Psychologists. The situation is starting to clarify and we’re getting to the point where we can see the bigger picture. This is a great moment because it gives us a sense of control over the entire project. We’re beginning to understand our users’ needs and frustrations in much greater detail.

We started off by searching for the fewest number of words that get to the heart of what we wanted to convey about Empatyzer.

The path was bumpy. “Let your words work.” “Fix your internal communication.” “Understand your colleagues’ language.” “Communication in any team is possible.” “Communication in a diverse team is difficult but possible.” “Good Communication is Finally Possible.” “Em makes real talk possible.” “Understand Each Other Better.” Be Your Better Self. Communicate better. “Teams on the Same Wavelength Perform Better.” “Tune in to Your Team”; “Tune your team to the Same Wavelength” and finally “Communicate on the Same Wavelength.”

Sounds good. It expresses what we mean, and what’s even better, the slogan also works in Polish.

An essential book for understanding psychometrics and what a particular test measures is the NEO-PI-R. From our perspective, this is a must-read. Like its twin publication (borrowed from a psychologist unrelated to the project): the NEO-PI-R Personality Inventory by Paul T. Costa Jr. and Robert R. McCrae. Both books have been heavily underlined in pencil with plenty of notes scribbled in the margins. Although the psychologists on our team had read them before, they revisited them. Knowledge retention always leaves a lot to be desired, so revisiting a title from time to time is key.

By the way, Empatyzer has just such a function. Repeating practical knowledge thanks to specific advice allows you to significantly increase knowledge retention from traditional interpersonal communication training courses.

Our Em must inhabit a specific place in our heads and in the minds of future users. Is it supposed to be a solution for B2C and support communication, e.g. within families or between partners? Or should we focus on education and propose a solution for schools? After all, the ability to communicate in adolescence is a major problem, especially in an increasingly diverse environment.

Can it be turned into a B2B solution for sales reps? They are the ones who, if they want to be effective at their jobs, need advice on how to better sell to people through knowing and understanding their specific character traits. This may be true but it also raises some ethical concerns. Besides, both parties would have to answer exactly the same set of questions. If they don’t, we’d run the risk of having a horoscope-quality solution instead of professional high-resolution psychometrics – irregardless of how much we claimed to have the magical AI ingredient. It just doesn’t work that way. So no.

What about doctors? Research shows that the relationship between patients and doctors is very important, and this topic is much neglected in medical studies. Perhaps them?

So what is our motivation in all this? We want to solve a global problem for all organizations: to enable good communication between people regardless of their age, gender, origin, experience and character. The advice and knowledge built into our system should facilitate this. We want every employee to be able to build good relationships on their own, at all times. Empatyzer is simply a virtual communication trainer. A digital, private communications coach for teams and businesses of all sizes. Let’s stick with that.

When we came up with the initial idea of a communication coach that would be a caring and attentive assistant who helps people communicate using his or her in-depth knowledge of human nature, we had two movie characters in mind. On the one hand we thought of the Oracle from “The Matrix”, and on the other, Samantha from the movie “Her” – who was a virtual assistant. This rather intriguing mix perfectly matched our ideas about the persona behind Empatyzer.

We are constantly designing and improving our Em, whom we ultimately hope will help people get along, regardless of how different their characters are and how big their cultural differences are.

Em is part of the name Empatyzer. She is the face, the main employee of Empatyzer and the world’s first digital communication trainer for teams and companies of all sizes :-). Although she’s only a few months old, she possesses skills that are beyond human capabilities.

After all, who could possibly know the personality traits and cultural preferences of all the people in a team? Who could immediately identify risk areas and recommend appropriate behavior? Em is designed to be extremely attentive to the positive energy of others and their conscientiousness. She is constantly acquiring new skills under the supervision of our developers and psychologists.

We’ve been gathering business, marketing and technological knowledge for years in both theory and practice, but we only studied the psychological issue and personality differences either during corporate trainings, coaching and mentoring programs, or when they came up as a topic of discussion when reading about something else. In short, we have a lot of catching up to do. We’re not starting from the beginning, middle or end, but wherever we feel the project could benefit or when we’re guided by questions we ask ourselves.

We need to be a conversation partner for people who deal with a subject like psychometrics, for example, so that the project can be conducted consciously and – perhaps this is the most important thing – to mix different points of view and competences into it. This is why we’ve all been reading a lot of books and scientific papers lately. From time to time, we plan to post some interesting discoveries here. Interesting because they inspire us, although they may not necessarily push us in the right direction towards our goal.

We asked our friends and acquaintances what they thought of the name Empatyzer. And so the festival of honesty began:

– “It sounds like a taser: ‘Take it, treat him with an empatyzer blast.’”
– “An automated machine for making empathy.”
– “The kind of thing that will make you go bzzz and you’re instantly somehow nicer . . . ”
– “It sounds like a cure for a lack of empathy. I can already hear an advertisement on TV: “For the relationship pain take Empatyzer”. The only question is how it can be taken. There are several options in fact (…).

In short, no one liked it. But everyone remembered it and no one wavered. What more can you ask for in a name! We loved it and so did they. They just needed a little more time :). Now over to you.

Nothing restricts the choice of a name more than the availability of domains. Especially .com domains. Despite being aware of this fact, we still ran into problems. The final name was eventually chosen because we had to exclude two other alternatives that were higher on our list and we initially thought had available.com domains. Suddenly (probably after we’d asked about them), the domains became more expensive overnight by an average of 10,000% each.

Taking into account various types of distortions in the message and the unreliability of human memory, we also bought several other similar domains. So you’ll find us at empatyzer.com, empatizer.com, empatyser.com, empatiser.com and a few others, including empatyzator.com, in case someone gets confused with the synthesizer :).

It was a long time before our idea manifested itself into a word, and that word subsequently morphed into a logotype and then transformed into programming code. Fortunately, the time was calculated asynchronously, so the lack of a name didn’t hold up work on other parts of the project.

Together with a group of several experienced copywriters, we came up with nearly 39 names that we considered to be good. I can’t remember how many we thought were bad! The main problem turned out to be domain availability. We analyzed each of them in terms of length, number of organic results, and availability. We checked how a given name is pronounced in different languages, how it sounds in a sentence and how it is inflected, what emotions it evokes, how it is remembered, whether it is easy to learn by ear, and what meanings and direct associations it has. Of course, we also subjected it to a subjective and general assessment.

Everything, in accordance with our engineering and creative nature, was included in tables with scores. Empatyzer came out on top. But when we finally showed the winning name to our friends…

What are we doing? We’ve designed the first digital communication trainer. It trains people and gives hyper-personalized advice all year round to every user and in every online conversation.

So how are we going to do it? We’ve combined modern scientific knowledge about psychometrics, vast experience working with people professionally and modern technology into one to create a unique solution to help companies manage diversity.

Why are we doing this? We believe that good communication is possible in every team, and professional personal training should be available to everyone. In every team, even the most diverse.

– Let’s create a system that will tell users what they should and shouldn’t say and do. We’ll find psychological differences and then give them advice.
“Who would it be for?” For me, for sure :).
– For B2B?

This is more or less what coming up with the idea and the target group looked like. Dozens of projects spanning a 20 year professional career were not in vain after all. We knew that we couldn’t base our final conclusions on a study of an N=2 group. We therefore wanted to talk to a few people to try to verify our idea. Eventually, this turned into regular research and it became not just a few people, but several groups of people. In total, our researchers conducted nearly 25 in-depth interviews, often lasting over an hour, as well as more than 30 short conversations with various people from company heads, through leaders, programmers, HR employees, educators, teachers, psychologists, scientists and even a few doctors.

We took every chance to ask people what they thought about the idea. At this stage, we were still keeping our emotions in check, because it could turn out that the whole idea would make no sense. N=2 is nothing more than fantasies. The final research report and a large Excel sheet containing the results opened the door for further work. The decision was made. Our idea makes sense. We immediately got to work..