What is your name, age, location?
Ekaterina, 25, Berlin.
What's your background?
I was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, and I have been living in Germany for almost 6 years. I finished my Masters in Communication Science last year and now I'm working on Jourvie - an app to support people with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia during their recovery period.
What inspired you to become a founder?
The vision of Jourvie is to help make eating disorder therapy easier. My motivation to start everything came from my own experience - I knew the problems and difficulties during therapy and had the idea to make an app that supports those affected during the healing process. What motivated me was the belief that this idea can have a positive impact on someone else's life. Right now I'm working with a great team and partners to achieve this vision.
Please walk me through your day, what do you do at your company?
I manage and coordinate the different aspects of the project - the development of the product, the feedback process, the communication with the partner institutions, etc. Sometimes I also do things like spending an hour on adjusting a tiny little feature on the website - but it's all part of a great journey! I work with an amazing team of very dedicated people and this makes the work a lot more easier and fun!
Can you see yourself in ten years doing the same thing you do now?
Yes! Although I hope that there will be no need of helping people with eating disorders in 2024. But I would also love to work on social causes in the future.
What is the best advice you ever received?
Focus. Focus, focus, focus.
What is the most important thing you’ve learned in the last year?
That an idea is nothing without the right people to execute it.
And what are your plans for the future?
We will launch the application in the upcoming months, and I am really looking forward to the feedback of our beta testers.
If you could do one thing differently, what would it be?
Stop wasting time and bothering about potential problems in the future which aren't actually problems yet.
Any advice for your local/global Geekettes?
A quote that helps me a lot in different situations: "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." by Benjamin Spock.
