A New Name in the Morning, the First Pitch That Evening
In the morning — a new name and the Referity.ai domain with a redirect from the old Speech Journal; in the evening — the first offline presentation at the accelerator. A B grade: one thought slipped my mind and the ending got crumpled.
By Georg Malahov
The day came in two halves: in the morning the project got a new name, in the evening — its first public pitch.
About the name. The project is now called Referity. In the morning, after dropping the kids off at school, I sat down to update the landing page, add an about page, change the logo — and set up the new domain Referity.ai with an automatic redirect from the old Speech Journal. Speech Journal was the name of a diary for myself; into the accelerator we're going as a team with a product — so let the name be a product name too.
We're three now, by the way: a second co-founder has joined — design and product vision are on him, and I wrote to the accelerator organizer that the team has grown. On Monday there was the kick-off on Zoom — we met everyone: 27 teams. The schedule goes like this: April 30 is the interim presentation where you have to show progress, after the semifinal eight teams remain, the final is in June, and four winners get cash prizes: five thousand, three thousand, and one thousand each.
Now about the evening. We survived the presentation. I presented alone — the second co-founder only made it in time for the second part. In my view, it earned a B. The main slip: one thought flew out of my head at the worst possible moment, it threw me off, and the ending came out crumpled. And it was a good thought — that we came to the accelerator partly to test the product and get feedback, not just for all the standard things every other presenter was saying. The lesson is right on the surface: I didn't rehearse at all, and that's just not how it's done. For the second presentation I'll prepare properly.
Still, the overall feeling is positive. There were a lot of projects, maybe eight strong ones — and we seem to be in the good part of the field. The app drew interest, though the networking was sluggish: nobody mobbed me or buried me in questions. One curious thing — two other teams are also building solutions on AI agents. I quizzed one of them on the mechanics: an observer agent breaks the user's question into types, picks several prompts from a prepared set, they run as sub-agents, and the observer merges their answers into one. Neatly designed, but to my eye too simple — you can do more interesting things these days, and our ambitions run more complex.
I came home tired, head buzzing — it was loud there, and I was already worn out from retelling everyone how it went. Today: rest, if the kids allow it. And then Referity has a month and a half until the interim presentation, and what we bring there has to be progress, not a story.