A Little Help, Please

Startups are sometimes seen as magical things with crazy money flying around, boys and girls from all over the world in hoodies with their own buzz words. Term sheets, VCs, runway, angel investors, pre-seed, churn-rate, bootstrap, and all that jazz. At a certain point, Catswoppr may also walk the walk and talk the talk in tech land. But for now, we just do it a bit differently.

First. Our focus is on our feline fellow. Who in heaven’s name is concerned about that in the startup world? You might say that we embody the feline’s own will and headstrong character. Cats lead people and people don’t lead cats, which makes the convincing case that apps for cats are not abundant.

Secondly, we have been working without any investment so far. Yes, Catswoppr has no runway – a term that refers to the amount of time a business can keep operating before it's out of cash. Catswoppr never had a runway either. Instead, you might say, Catswoppr has its helipad. When our team stops flapping, the show will be over. Only sickness could throw sand in our chopper engine. The deepfelt urgency to give back to cats is what feeds us from inside to keep on moving.

Yes, working for Catswoppr means working for cats and cat people. Giving back to feline companions and feline lovers is our way of adding value to this planet. You might discuss whether cats themselves would endorse our mission. As Indian Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda once said: “Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution.” But let’s not digress.

Although our team’s love for cats is endless, and thus also the rotating of our chopper blades, a little bit of money certainly won’t hurt us. The reason why, is because we not only give back to cats, we also strive to give back to our intern, volunteer, and pupil team members.

Currently, we have one team member who is a startup volunteer from Cyprus. Another team member, by coincidence also from Cyprus, is doing her internship for her Business and Marketing study. And we have three strongly bicultural teams of Calandlyceum Technasium a pre-university education focused on research and design.

What Catswoppr provides our team members is a lot of soft value. Having a track record of achieved goals is often a must-have for further growth in startups and scale-ups. Starters fresh from a university may not always get the chance or be able to show what they have in store. At Catswoppr we give young culturally diverse starting professionals that unique chance to build this track record of measurable output.

Our team members have the freedom to move around the building blocks of the cat-related products we aim to develop. They can choose which of their skills they like to sharpen, whether it is on designing and executing a Go-To-Community strategy, defining revenue models on the business development side, or fiddling with tech on the back-end to get databases straight and running smoothly.

Of course, in the future when any profit is made, we will remunerate with team members receiving their fair share. But for now, to equal a better fair practice, we ideally need a sponsor who likes to support our team philosophy and way of working.

Sponsorship of our team members would improve our ability to better open up to a larger inclusive talent pool. It will provide more youngsters, especially also bicultural pupils who are on the brink of going to a technical university, a chance to build their skillset and track record. And sponsorship could also help turn prototypes that the pupils built for their R&D class into fully operating MVPs.

Do you know someone who can introduce us to a generous sponsor, whether company or individual?

Let us know! Thanks in advance,

Yours furrly,

suki

CEO (Cat Executive Officer) Catswoppr