Hopefully this inspires someone to do what they love!

i maed dis

I did something I love and ended up actually following my dreams. Posting this so that hopefully it inspires someone else to do the same. :)

So a couple of summers ago, while I was going into my junior year of high school, I was getting really pissed off about passwords. I had the same few for all of my accounts and I still couldn't remember them. I wanted a way to use more secure passwords, but I didn't want to have to remember them.

I thought that maybe I could solve the problem myself, so I made... this thing. I had no idea what to call it. It typed in my usernames and passwords for me, showing up to the computer as a keyboard. And the best part is that it used a fingerprint scanner to secure all of the passwords. All of my new, randomized passwords were now securely stored on this brick sized assembly of arduinos, SD cards, buttons, and cables.

TL;DR Made a fingerprint secured thing that stores my passwords.

Joining YEA

I didn't think much of it; I threw it together with some arduinos, spare parts, some stuff from sparkfun, and a gutted hard drive casing. I showed my thing to other people, however, and I realized other people could use help remembering passwords and securing accounts too. It wasn't just for me anymore.

So I joined the Young Entrepreneur's Academy, a program for high school students that want to learn how to start a business.There, I met my now business partner, Jimmy. We decided to work together to make this thing into a business.

We decided to call our new "company" Wave and call our device Imprint. We also took on some more members to form a team and work together on this. Suddenly it was becoming more than just some extracurricular activity.

TL;DR joined a program that helps high schoolers start a business, start forming a company with a fellow student.

Success! Kinda

Jimmy and I ended up pitching Wave in front of an investor panel for the YEA program. We ended up with $1,150 in funding! Although we didn't win the pitch competition, the funding was really exciting for us.

Smaller...

We got to work making it smaller and learning as we went. We used EagleCAD to design our own prototype boards that would fit onto smaller Arduino boards for testing. It took as months to figure out how to do all of this properly.

They're alive!

Our large team was hard to manage so we shrunk in size as the people who weren't doing much left. With our smaller size, we worked together better and made our newest, smallest prototype yet!

Size matters

I'm still really proud of how much we've learned and how far we've come in terms of developing Imprint.

Big changes

After a lot of mentorship from connections we made at the YEA program, we really got down to business. We attended a whole bunch of startup events in our area, submitted a patent, trademarked, and incorporated.

...And we changed our name. Wave was too common and we needed the same name for the company and product. So we decided on Crypta.

With legal stuff out of the way, we put ourselves out there. We created a website and social media accounts, and we pitched at some tech events. He're Jimmy at the NYC Pitch Slap.

TL;DR new company name, getting legal stuff out of the way, putting ourselves out there

On TV!

One of our teachers got us into contact with a director from Fox news and they did a segment on us! We opened up our site for preorders and received almost 100.

Kickstarter!

We finally launched on Kickstarter! I've backed many projects on Kickstarter before, so this was really a dream come true. If we reach our goal in time, we'll actually create a final version and be able to mass produce it, which is incredibly exciting.

We ended up going from no experience to launching a Kickstarter in two years, and even though that might be a lot of time, it amazes me how far we've come while still in high school.

If you have any questions or want to know where to start with electronics or entrepreneurship, I'll do my best to help!

Also, dog tax below.

Dog Tax

Our programmer's dog, Mozart.

He gave me an anecdote for you guys:

"When we first got him, it was a long drive and we let him out for a bathroom break. The first thing he did was hide under an SUV and we needed the owners of the car to help us get him out."