[Startup story] Bit&R | Fall edition of Rubik Garage Accelerator 2022
[Startup story] Bit&R | Fall edition of Rubik Garage Accelerator 2022
January 27, 2023
Bit&R is one of the 21 startups selected in the Alpha USA Startups Accelerator (fall edition of Rubik Garage 2022), tailored to startups targeting the USA market. Discover its story below.
First of all, we would like to know who’s behind the keyboard.
Tell us more about your startup. What problem do you solve? Who’s your audience?
Bit&R is a platform for kids aged 8-12 where they can build and publicly share their own games while learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript (the building blocks of the web). At the moment, the platform is available in 3 languages (Romanian, English and Deutsch) and the tutorial is free for everybody to play.
Learning how to code should be fun and Bit&R gives kids the ability to create their own projects or games in an engaging way, in their homes, at their own pace, as no size fits all when it comes to acquiring knowledge.
What motivated you to create this startup? What’s your „why”?
For the past 4 years at JSLeague we’ve taught students, young professionals and teachers web technologies as part of our community activities, so teaching kids came as a natural step. We’ve started teaching kids web with online courses at JSKids, but we needed a more scalable, global and personalized solution. This was the idea behind Bit&R, as a stand-alone product based on our experience, curricula and games we’ve developed for the kids. Bit the rabbit acts as the player and R, the robot, is the “teacher” that helps him solve challenges, write code and gives him hints.
We really believe that programming should be fun and kids should have the ability to build what they can dream of. Our mission is to invest in kids’ education and inspire them to create great things.
How is your startup different from competitors?
Kids can create and publicly share their own games for anyone to play after they’ve completed the learning levels. There is limitless creativity in terms of what you can build using web technologies.
Our next step is to make the platform adaptive and to give each user personalized coding challenges depending on his/her knowledge level. Also, our platform can be used by teachers in the classroom to help them with the Computer Science curricula, exercises and student assessment.
We’re curious to learn about your team.
- Claudia Ifrim – CTO and co-founder
- Servet Giafer – Full-stack developer
- Costin Dragomir – Game designer
- Hermann Morgennbesser – Educational Advisor
What are the biggest rewards of being a startup founder?
Having an impact on people and making their lives even a little bit better, learning a lot of different things in the process, traveling and meeting new awesome people, and in the end building real things merely from ideas.
On the contrary, what are the biggest challenges?
For me personally, while building Bit&R was to try to navigate a ton of perspectives, advice, opinions about what should I do next, what path to take, what market to address, in which country to launch, what direction to follow, what features to develop, if going for investment or not and so on.
There are a lot of product sides you have to take care of and untangle all the information you’ve been given, while not losing both yourself and the “why” of the team/product in the process.
What made you apply to our accelerator Alpha USA Startups (fall edition of Rubik Garage)?
A better understanding of how the USA market is working and product/investment know-how.
Obviously, you were selected in this accelerator because you are targeting the USA market. Why is that?
Scalability, growth and product-building know-how.
What are your top 3 learnings of the acceleration program?
- The investment process in general and US specifics
- How the US market works and what expectations to have
- The legal aspects of operating in the US
What do you like in the Rubikorns Startup Community?
People’s mindset of helping everybody succeed and the openness to give advice and help.
What message do you have for other startup founders?
Enjoy the journey, have fun and build awesome things.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
Let’s change education one block of code at a time!
We encourage you to support Bit&R and follow its journey on Linkedin.
Stay tuned to discover the story behind the other startups from our accelerator! #WeAreInThisTogether
Rubik Garage is an equity-free acceleration program aiming to support startups from CEE get to their first paying customer, raise investment or go international.
If you want to pre-apply for the next Rubik Garage edition, complete this form and be the first one to get the chance of starting their acceleration journey!
Tag:Bit&R, startup, startup story
