ANA Avenue: Get Inspired By Recommendations You Will Love

Describe ANA Avenue in 50 words or less.

ANA Avenue is an online inspiration platform from friends for friends with a sustainable lifestyle and offers recommendations of websites with high value. Based to the motto: „First choice, not second best!“ ANA Avenue offers a wide range of tips to the ANA community.

What’s your story? How did you come up with the name for your startup and how is it connected to what you offer?

We believe that everyone has an “ANA”: a best friend who you call when you need tips on a certain topic. This may be a different person for travelling, reading, fashion, sports or kids. On ANA Avenue you can now find all those tips in your friends avenues which makes life much easier and you don’t only get tips from your friends but also from friends of your friends which may also have a very good recommendation for you.

This is what ANA Avenue offers. You can find tips from many categories which were suggested by friends or like-minded people. This makes it much easier to find the right thing than compared to big search engines where the right result for you could be on page 147. Users can build their own avenues by suggesting a tip or by just hearting a tip they like. This way you always have your favorites ready to click through. Every user can choose whether they want to stroll through the avenue or click through the list.

Why did you decide to pursue your own dreams rather than someone else’s?

We are both entrepreneurs and already know about success and disappointment when you start a new project. But it was clear to us that we want to realize our idea ourselves. When we started we had a concrete idea about how ANA Avenue should look like – of course during the last months we changed a lot but the idea is still the same it was in the beginning. We didn’t know where this project will lead us to but now we have a great team and are still convinced that this was the right decision to make.

What were the biggest challenges you faced building ANA Avenue?

As for every startup the financing was a big challenge – and still is. As it is an online platform and we are both no developpers, we had to find an external partner for this who we can trust but which is also a company we can afford. After having found this company we had to learn – and this was a big challenge – that programming may take very long until all functionalities really work and also look like we wanted them to look like.

Also to keep on going after every setback ist not always easy but we know that we need to keep on going if we want to realize our idea. And that is what we really want. ANA Avenue is such a great project.

In what ways do you measure your success and how do you make sure you don’t lose track?

In the beginning it was hard to measure any success as we were “only” programming the basic idea. We had many more ideas but this costs time and money and were only realizable at a later time. We had no real users in the beginning as during programming phase 1 we were not online, so of course there was no milestone really to define as “success”. Later, when we enlarged our team this was partly success as we could convince people to work with us on our project. Now that we are online with www.anaavenue.com we can see that users increase and people actually use our platform. Also we found bloggers who are interest in a cooperation with us. This is what confirms us in continuing with our project.

Already pivoted? Did customers use the platform like you imagined it in the beginning?

We always wanted an online avenue where every shop is our favorite shop. As we are only online for a few months now we cannot clearly answer this with yes or no. For the moment it seems that users like ANA Avenue and use it as we intended them to use it. We are still working on more functionalities to give our users more flexibility in presenting themselves to the community, conneting to Facebook and also to increase user experience on mobile phones and tablets.

What’s the benefit for people who sign up on your page?

Every internet user who is fed up with scrolling through endless lists without finding a good result or without knowing if the search result is good or not will benefit from ANA Avenue as he or she will find recommended websites from friends, like-minded people or other users. Users who just want to stroll through the avenue and want to get inspired by the recommendations will love it. We want to become THE social bookmarking community which focuses on sustainability and slow movement.

With ferocious competition and a booming trend to build new companies: How do you make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle?

When you start your own company to realize your own idea feels exciting but also you are quite aware that this is a risky action. There were many challenges on our way but we always tried to stay focused and also to keep an eye on the market and the competition. We were convinced that our idea is good and got positive feedback but we also had to learn to adapt the concept according to the feedback. This was sometimes hard but worth it.

Tell us a bit about your team: who’s behind ANA Avenue and how did you find these talents?

We have a team of 5 people now. We are the founders and responsible for strategy and marketing. Vera is already working for us for 2 years now and is a fix member of our team for more than one year. She has experience in online marketing and design. Valerie joined us in July 2015. Clara knows her because they were working together some years ago. Valerie quit her job which she was doing for more than 10 years and decided to join us to build up ANA Avenue. David, our programmer just joined us a few months ago. We are very happy to have a developper on board. We had a talk with a buiness consultant last year and during the following talks we got the contact to David.

What was your most memorable moment so far?

When we started programming the site we didn’t know how long it would take to have a version which we can show to friends and family. Finally we got there and were of course curious and nervous what feedback we’ll get. There was positive and critical feedback (which is good!) but the most memorable feedback was that some test users said they would rather scroll through ANA Avenue before going to bed than through Facebook.

What advice would you give fellow founders for their startup?

When you think about building up your own startup think twice before you really start the project and never do it on your own. It is all about the right team to share all ups and downs but also to get inspired and motivated. Think in small steps but always have the big picture in mind. Be patient – building up a startup takes time! – and go networking with other founders to share experiences and maybe to find ways to cooperate. Talk to people about your idea to get open feedback.

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