LIFEBUTTON Made in Slovakia

How to turn an idea into a global initiative sold internationally?

I don’t have a secret manual for success, probably nobody does. Business is like a road where you never know what’s behind the next turn. The decision to start doing business and become a startup (a new innovative company with its own product or service) is very hard, but for me it’s also very interesting and instructive. The initial idea creates just 1% of a company’s success. The remaining 99% is a lot of work that cannot be summed up in any manual.

″Simple is not stupid. Simple is genius.″

Warren Buffett

I can’t describe how amazing I felt when we filled in the patent application form. When I realized that we created something new. A product that actually solves a problem and it’s so simple that it’s genius. We were becoming businessmen.

But where to start after you’ve filed the patent application? Start looking for an investor or talk to carmakers? We had nothing tangible, no prototype, we had no idea how the market would react or whether people would even be interested in the product. We had so many questions and literally no answers. We looked at our contact lists and looked for somebody who could help us make the next step. Now we know very well that it’s all about the product, people and marketing.

We’ve found our first mentor and had a vague idea what to do next. We started working on a prototype and created a support group to gather as many enthusiasts as possible. Then, we had many meetings, made many phone calls and sent many emails. We created a vision of how to develop the project. Six months after we had the initial idea, we entered the pre-production stage. We want to manufacture the product in Slovakia. Soon, we will start with homologation; we plan to start selling the product on the market in Q3 in 2018. So there’s still work to do. In April, we will attend two interesting events related to innovations – Tech Inno Day 2018 organized by the Slovak University of Technology Bratislava and FORBES 30UNDER30. We encourage you to attend both events; you will meet many interesting people who decided to take the same road as you did. We are very excited and hope that others will be excited by our idea as well.

One of our supporters is MUDr. Viliam Dobiáš, medical doctor and President of the Slovak Red Cross. We asked him to make a short statement which you can watch here: