How it started
From the beginning...
Our journey began back in 2004 when we first met. Jokubas and I (Kazys, hi!) were good friends from a pretty early age. During our years at high school, we were especially interested in a healthy lifestyle and medicine; you could have called us some sort of geeks at the time, always into books and magazines. It’s no surprise that this interest quickly grew into friendly challenges between the two of us where we’d monitor ourselves and how different factors influenced response to certain events: our productivity, decision-making, mood, even illnesses – you name it. It was a pure interest turned into a game for us.
The amount of tools and time spent tracking those factors was crazy, starting from collecting notes to 50-page excel sheets. Although things were going well at first, the tracking wasn’t consistent enough, we’d forget to log something or remind each other about a specific step, making us realize that we basically needed a collective platform. By monitoring each other and giving constant advice on self-improvement healthwise, we came to the conclusion that simple advice just wasn’t enough. The best and quickest way to break harmful habits and improve overall well-being was a clear self-analysis and detailed statistics.
Exploring the potential
The notion continued to grow among us until we both began our medical studies in 2016 and noticed there was a massive demand for such a collective platform since we found out that lots of people used similar health tracking techniques to no avail. Seeing some of our loved ones suffer from chronic diseases and being fanatics of self-improvement ourselves, our passion for research never stopped. With a shared enthusiasm for healthcare, we joined several healthcare organizations and attended numerous conferences, observing the health and wellness sector from all angles. Yeah, it was a little tedious, but in the end – totally worth it.
That's when we discovered that we, like everyone else, are always striving to reach our full potential, either physically or mentally, we might just struggle a bit without the right tools.
Everyone does things that irritate them, reduce their energy, productivity, or otherwise affect their overall well-being. So we started thinking:
There has to be a method to carefully learn about ourselves in order to improve, while also helping as many people as possible, whether it is chronic conditions or simple self-betterment.
Soon, we realized that it’s a common issue among tons of people. And we wanted a tool that would help everyone, no matter their background or condition. So we connected the dots, and the equation was pretty clear.
We saw great potential in such an idea, an app that could be the cornerstone for health tracking and self-betterment. We knew it would take time and research, but we really believed in it and were ready to make the change. And that’s exactly what we did.
Making a difference
Taking matters into our own hands, we started our journey towards Effecto that same year. We already had a little entrepreneurial experience but still a long way ahead of us. We basically started from scratch, going back to our old routines of notes and excel sheets, consulting our friends, colleagues, and healthcare professionals. After we settled in and were more confident about our app, we wanted someone who could offer additional help business-wise, having expertise in analyzing user demand.
As a result, our team added a third member Tomas – a talented marketing specialist and data analyst. And so the testing and development continued, carefully creating and studying various user cases so that our app would be useful to everyone: from completely healthy, physically active people to habit trackers and self-analyzers to those who might have chronic conditions to control.