| On March 16, Starr Barbour will have perhaps the best audience in the world for an app developer whose first project is about to hit the market. She’ll be one of 20 entrepreneurs featured at the Start-Up Showcase at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual tech, movie and music festival and conference for which some 70,000 people crowd into Austin. It’s the hottest event in high tech, the ultimate stage for entrepreneurs, the media and venture capitalists, among others.
Barbour has been invited to demonstrate STILLGOING, an app so new it doesn’t even have a website yet. It’s in beta mode now as Barbour works out the final details for an April launch.
The Start-Up Showcase is a two-night event featuring 20 emerging companies each night. What Barbour will demonstrate is a technological approach to a totally non-tech experience: guided meditation.
“A year ago, I got really, really sick and actually had to take a leave of absence at work,” Barbour says. “I started meditating as part of my therapy.”
She faced two major challenges.
- “I’m not a granola-cruncher type person, so I had a hard time meditating by myself,” she says. A couple guided meditation classes showed her a solution to that problem, but …
- Who has the time? For Barbour, “an hour out of my day is really hard to do.”
Shouldn’t there be a way for a stressed-out person to call someone to meditate with over the phone? “We’re just basically creating a platform for you to find a really good guided meditation coach anytime, anywhere,” she says.
The idea is a long way from the direction Barbour was headed when she graduated from N.C. A&T in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in finance. Her career has taken her through an array of blue-chip companies, including GE, IBM and Accenture.
Now with the consulting firm MorganFranklin, she works with advanced start-ups, companies that have issued their initial public stock offering or will do so soon. Barbour lives in Washington. Her clients are inconveniently located in Austin, Chicago and New York. She’s on planes every week. She knows what stressed-out people need because she is one.
“I really built this for myself because I’m always on the go,” she admits.
At SXSW, Barbour won’t be overly focused on the venture capitalists and angel investors. “I want to get the exposure and the feedback,” she says. “There will be people there, I’m sure, who will want to invest. But there will also be the user community and other people in the tech landscape.
“I want to get my peer-group feedback: How can I make this better? What do you think is cool about it, or what do you think isn’t? What do you think I could use the platform for, longer term?”
Barbour is thinking about STILLGOING as just her first app. With the technology, the interactive part, figured out, “there are three or four things I’m thinking longer term as offerings … basically the same application used for different things.”
The first product is almost ready. The pricing and payment process will be modeled on Uber’s. “I learned at GE that if it works for someone else, I can do it better or I can do the same thing and make it work for me.”
One remaining question is how to work out the price and the length of a session.
“The timing we’re still playing with, trying to be profitable but optimal for the user as well,” she says.
That decision will require a delicate balance, the kind you might achieve in a guided meditation. Fortunately for Barbour, that kind of help is just a phone call away. And for everyone else, it will be available in April.
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