Our Team

We got together in early 2020 and started to talk about building a product that would enable people to work and live together, rather than just offering a direct 1:1 connection that tends to be transactional. Alas, we had no money and decided to solve a small problem first that would generate some money. We settled on a platform for booking wedding photographers called 'Marrily'. It was a ton of fun and the metrics were looking good when COVID hit.

We still didn't have any money but the project we'd initially set out to work on became much more relevant. Everyone started talking about 'our' problem. So we hacked together a prototype based on a concept that Leonard had developed 5 years ago at university. The idea was to have a space where people see who else is speaking to whom and could move around and join conversations freely (see

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Our Product

) The whole thing had to be browser-based to allow people to jump in immediately.

Leonard testing one of the first prototypes late at night

Fundraising and moving to our first office

We ran a few user tests and the feedback was clear. Yotribe (as it was called back then) felt different, exciting and fresh. So we ditched our other jobs, focused on our project and went fundraising (see

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Funding & Investors

). We raised our first round in July 2020, added our first team-member (Andrey) and moved into our first office.