The Idea

I was lucky that someone, that I met in September of 2023 (later on became a weird friend, that always feels distant emotionally but close with ideas and the general life path) had an actual need, a problem that I could solve. He needed a solution that would help him serve his clients, win a Telekom tender for a big job (400k worth contract on the period of 4 years) and help him manage his team - with excitement i jumped on the opportunity to build something new.

Buildup

A couple of weeks later, I turned a bunch of ideas we had into an MVP (a supper buggy MVP that could serve most of his needs), at the time I was really hopeful that finally I have managed to make a product that actually solves a problem, everything was going great I gained a grant from the Found of Innovations of Montenegro and I managed to find more team-members to help me out, we even managed to sell the product subscription to some people - we were being praised for our ability to present and explain this magical database wrapper - now when i look back at it i know that we were laying to ourselves we didn't build anything amazing or great, we were not solving problems we were just masking them with a nice interface.

The crash

The building process was great, we even started doing some marketing - but we were not moving forward at least it didn't feel like it. We as a team were not trying as hard as we could, and this is no coincidence we lacked direction, we didn't find a problem that we were solving, we were not setting an example that a startup could be made - we felt like we are becoming one of those wannabe companies that is rallying on government grants and fake PR narrative to sustain itself (even tho no one new who we are).

We got accepted into multiple startup programs (FoundersInstitute and BoostmeUp) where we finally started doing what we needed to do in the beginning - just talk with a bunch of people and only talk about what's painful to them but to the point where the frustration and the pain is becoming unbearable (We are still working on this one), and the more we talked the more we realised that we didn't build anything unique or sophisticated, we realised that we have essentially built nothing and sold nothing (even if we had almost 20 customers at the time).

That's when it happened a crash - our first crash that would make us start at ground zero - we needed to start over.

This was so frustrating the fact that what We have been building for the past several months has been a perfect waste, the reality hit hard, building a company is no simple task.

In the moment of this realisation It felt like someone gave me a gigantic punch right in the stomach I stud frozen and my mind just started iterating and reflecting on the conversations we had with users, mentors, friends and other good willed individuals and then, a snap. Finally I have realised what we were lacking, we had no values, we had no good goals we didn't focus on one thing, I was leading the team thro the void by running circles around my own taught instead of advancing them forward, instead of showing them that the void is just there because we have a lot more to discover and to keep on discovering we needed to get rid of our own closed mindsets that were not allowing us to see anything outside of what we already now.

The Beginning

Now we are starting over, stronger, better, faster and more importantly focused. This journey keeps giving me even more courage that the stark reality is whatever is happening you need to have courage to keep moving forward even against the barriers that your own mind is placing in order to keep you still and alive.

Part 00

Values

Even more than before I believe that the constant evolution is the purpose of life and that in the essence of everything is to always keep braking your own shell, and these are what the first and most important values of our company are going to be:

Always go beyond yourself in order to be one step closer to knowing the unknown.

We want everyone to always keep looking above in the ceiling of their current ability and to have a smile, because they are just about to brake thro them. This also means that a mind needs to be open to feedback and new knowledge as this is the core of evolving the realisation that something is unknown.

Kind hearths and honesty are the ones that inspire.

We believe that all people in there essence have a bright and amazing seed of goodness, that they are full of light, and to fully make it shine and bring it forward, you need to show them that you care that you truly love them - this means that we need to always be honest in the way we provide feedback, that we need to be free to criticise and that only from honesty something amazing can be born.

Speed is necessary.

We are just starting, but sometimes you need to start running before you can even think of walking. This means that we value action and execution on the ideas that we propose, we want to execute as fast as possible. We believe in building a habit of urgency we want to always feel like we are not moving fast enough.

Motivation is never there when you need it, so really on the possible outcome

The motivation is alway there just the night before we would take an action, and then in the morning it's not usually there and this is exactly why we want to believe that it doesn't exist by itself, motivation comes with excellence and discipline the more you strive for it the sooner that rush of motivation will emerge.

Part 01

Goals

"Starko streamlines customer support and product development by unifying support channels and resolving issues with AI-driven workflows integrated into the development process."

Thus our goal with Starko is to speed up the processes of customer support and product development through a system of plugins that aggregate multiple support channels into a single place from which we directly resolve these issues with AI agent-ic workflows and integrate them with the product development process.

Everything is integrated

One of our primary goals is to integrate all support communication channels into a single place (this includes in-product forms, chats and similar products), but this is not the end of it, we want to also integrate all product development tools as well - we believe that the future is in between all of the tools we use, as a lot of teams use different tooling raging from Jira, Linear, ClickUp we want all teams to utilise Starko without any limits.

Starko is designed to work within the existing ecosystem, we don't want to replace your existing tools, Linear, Jira and ClickUp are amazing we don't wish to replace them.

Easy to use and setup

All processes in Starko should be easy to setup, a tool should make the path smooth and straight without puting up road barriers.

Fast, responsive available

The support system needs to be extremely fast as customers can't be left waiting, it also needs to be available on any device at any moment.

Everything should be automatic without distractions

The AI agent should resolve most of the issues and customer requests automatically without escalating the issue further up the lather if the answer is available and possible, this is necessary in order to give the team more time to improve and focus on business goals. We want to clear users inboxes and make notifications easily manageable.

Controll and metrics

The system will keep track of important SLA metrics and suggest further improvements in order to optimise the workflow.

No paywall for important features

Our goal is to keep pricing and features fair and right, everything is available on any plan and it should be usage based, if you have 10 customers the product should help you get started and later on when you grow to a hundred you can think about paying.

Secure

Data security and encryption are top priority no one should have access to your and your clients conversations