On 10 and 11 September, Technology Park Split held Innovate Split: two days, four stages, some fifty speakers and around three hundred people from the regional tech scene. Faar was there with two things, an entry in the pitch competition and a stand.
Faar pitched to the jury and won the Talk the Walk Award, given by Infobip Startup Tribe and worth 2000 € in Infobip products and services.
What we told the jury
The pitch opened with a recording. Split, 6:17 in the morning, and a horn that will not stop because somebody has blocked the exit again. The translation of what tends to get shouted at that hour is not for this page.
Our answer to that is the QFaar sticker. It sits on the windscreen, whoever is blocked in scans it from their phone, and the owner has the message within seconds. Nobody learns anybody’s number or name. The horn and the note under the wiper solve the same problem, only louder and by handing your details to everyone who walks past.
From there we went deeper, into the rest of the car. A car today lives in eight apps and a glovebox: insurance in one, parking in another, fuel in a third, tyres in a fourth, the service book somewhere separate. Faar is an attempt to make that one place.
The real competitor is none of those apps. The horn, the glovebox and WhatsApp are how drivers actually cope, and that is the thing genuinely worth replacing.
The rest is numbers. Croatia has 2,374,340 registered vehicles (source: CVH), Faar is being tested by 400 or more drivers, and Faar BUSINESS by a dozen companies. For drivers it’s free.
The more useful part happened at the stand
Over the two days people came up, downloaded the app on the spot and told us what they thought: what was missing, what they’d do differently, what struck them as unnecessary. Some of that is more concrete than any study we could design ourselves, because it comes from someone who opened the app thirty seconds ago and hasn’t yet built the habit that would hide something not being obvious.
The other half of the conversation was commercial. Several companies with vehicle fleets asked about the fleet side, about travel orders, vehicle tracking and per-vehicle cost records. We’re already working on those enquiries.
What’s next
We carry on building what was planned and fold in what we heard. If you were at the stand and told us something, there’s a good chance it ended up on the list.
Thanks to Technology Park Split for a well-run week, and to everyone who stopped by.