Guardial emblem
Guardial
In 2020, Harish Kolli, a highschool junior from Austin, Texas, was once scrolling thru TikTok when he got here throughout a viral pattern. The viral TikTok pattern inspired ladies to save lots of movies with faux conversations to make use of when feeling unsafe (as an example: when feeling uncomfortable in an Uber). Those movies would have an individual chatting with you as though they knew you and have been anticipating to look you quickly so as to dissuade doable harassers.
Kolli later learned that what made the movies so standard and advisable was once their preventative and discreet nature. Greater than 80% of harassment crimes are dedicated via any person the recipient is aware of, so other people incessantly don’t really feel at ease calling the police or the use of deterrents corresponding to pepper spray. Working out simply how vital those underlying ideas are, Harish made up our minds to create an stepped forward, user-friendly answer that deters harassers prior to they escalate their habits. No longer lengthy after, he met his teenager co-founders, Mahi Ravi and Kaitlin Tan at a summer time entrepreneur incubator program.
They created Guardial, a personal-safety app that permits customers to cause an incoming simulated telephone name that acts as a deterrent, every time they would like. This name has a practical caller-ID computer screen, a well-recognized ringtone, and audio with discussion that deters, corresponding to “I’ve your location, see you quickly.” Moreover, color-coded buttons inside the simulated name permit customers to touch assist thru services and products corresponding to 911 and to file audio or video.
Regardless of the will for this app, the adventure to convey it to shoppers hasn’t been simple. “As highschool scholars development a startup, we didn’t have get admission to to many sources,” Kolli mentioned. ”We needed to train ourselves abilities like app construction and UI/UX design the use of equipment like InVision and Figma.” Together with a steep finding out curve, the early days required a large number of time and effort. Harish and his co-founders interviewed their target audience, younger ladies, to raised perceive ache issues and get comments from Guardial’s early adopters and testers, who mentioned they discovered the generation easy and simple to make use of.
In 2021, Kolli and Guardial skilled their first luck once they posted surveys in ladies’s on-line security boards and won overwhelming certain comments with over 350 survey responses. No longer lengthy after, the Guardial crew won $6,400 in equity-free investment from an investor who believed within the crew, their app, and the issue they have been seeking to resolve. Whilst Guardial isn’t the primary personal-safety app, its manner is to be extra proactive and deter doable harassers, fairly than just offering a solution to touch assist after issues start.
The pandemic gave Kolli extra time to paintings on Guardial. Now not wanting to wait in-person faculty, the Guardial crew had extra flexibility with their time table. Kolli made it a concern to learn articles, watch movies, and connect to different marketers to discover ways to very best function and develop Guardial.
In January 2022, the crew won nice information. They have been decided on as certainly one of 5 finalists on the SXSW EDU Pupil Startup Pageant powered via my group, WIT, which helped the finalist groups with 3 months of training. This gave them the chance to pitch their industry from a degree at one of the vital prestigious meetings on this planet. It was once a milestone second for the Guardial Workforce because it was once the primary time they’d pitched Guardial in user. The chance validated their laborious paintings and supplied them a platform to exhibit their corporate, and gave them alternatives to development their trips as marketers. The crew now not handiest benefited from the risk to pitch at SXSW EDU, however the convention supplied them networking alternatives, workshops, mentorship periods, and extra.
“We had a large number of other people come as much as us and let us know how robust our pitch was once and the way vital they concept our app was once,” Kolli mentioned in a while. “Having the ones authentic interactions with other people post-pitch made us wish to paintings even more difficult. Any other factor I discovered was once the significance of collaboration over pageant — everybody can win and really feel fulfilled if they’re interested in uplifting every different.”
Not too long ago Guardial got to work to release their new model in app shops. The overview procedure dropped at gentle technical problems that the crew is resolving to support the generation. Kolli defined, “We aren’t giving up and can proceed to iterate our app design so Guardial can be to be had for all to make use of.” The crew believes this patience will repay and save lives.
To get notified when Guardial turns into to be had in app shops, click on right here. To be told extra take a look at @guardialco on social media.
