Amelia Friedman and Param Jaggi were in a bind. They had already launched their company Hatch Technologies, a fully automated drag-and-drop app builder, when they started running out of cash. The problem was that they were not far enough along in development to take it to investors. “We needed to figure out some way, any way, to create a little more runway for ourselves,” Friedman explains. It was an election year, so they decided to create a political card game called The Election Game. Sales were slow at first, but then a video about it went viral on Facebook. Enough money came rolling in to keep their lights on.
The entrepreneurs come from wildly different backgrounds: 24-year-old Friedman had been with a company that taught languages like Swahili, Bengali, and Vietnamese, while 22-year-old Jaggi is a two-time Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree who has invented a device to convert a car’s exhaust fumes into oxygen. But they make a good team. Friedman says they knew they were on the right track when, this past November, a client needed a mobile app within a week. It sounded crazy, but the team used the technology they had built to finish it in a couple of days. “I remember thinking, ‘How did we do that so fast?’” Friedman says. “We realized that we had built out this really powerful tool for building mobile apps really quickly.”
We were at the point in our company where we had to bring in some money or get real jobs, and neither of us wanted to do that. So we had to get creative.
Amelia Friedman
Now things are moving at a breathless pace. They hired their first staffers, who are working out of their office at D.C.’s WeWork K Street. And they are looking forward to releasing their technology, which they describe as a “Squarespace for apps,” within a year.
