Fact: children can improve (and solve) specific language impairment by doing exercises. Reality: they don’t

In October 2015 I took part to my first Startup Weekend, an 56-hour hackathon to build a prototype from scratch in a weekend.

I joined that competition bringing my own idea of a kick-ass platform to revolutionize the internet and the way people learn and solve tech-related issues (read more about Experiency) but my initial 60-second pitch was a disaster: super energetic, super fast, super ‘I know what I’m saying’, but not sharing any concrete message.

So what did I do then? In the Startup Weekend, the super cool thing is that those who don’t make it with their own idea, have to join one of the others and form a team to work on it for the full weekend. That is how I met Sara, a speech therapist who wanted to use digital tools to save her time preparing paper games for her little patients.

We figured out that by digitizing the games and tools children use during their therapy, not only we help Sara’s colleagues saving a huge amount of time, but also we allow children to replicate at home what they usually do in class dramatically extending their training exposure. Think this: the average therapy duration for children is 2 hours per week – can you imagine how much more time a might child spend on an iPad playing (SLI-helping) games and how much more effective could the therapy be?

That was the first time I was actually working not only to build a cool tech project, but to directly improve lives – children in particular.

We won the competition and got shortlisted for a bigger startup competition called Univentures. Five energized graduates came to help us in the team and again we were among the winners of that competition – rewarded with a 6-month acceleration program at the Polo Tecnologico di Pavia.

I left the company when I moved to Melbourne, but Sara went on finally launching the first version of the app on the app stores. Yes, I cried for joy when I saw the teaser video of Sara announcing the launch.

Lessons learned

• If you really devote to something and work for that, you end up creating your own chance to emerge
• Working to bring a meaningful contribution and directly improve people’s lives is inspiring and keeps the team cohesive
• Sometimes simple problems have simple answers, the complexity comes in finding it