Top ten on my birthday

By Georg Malahov

I've never had a birthday like this: today, April 30, was also the deadline — Referity's interim presentation at the accelerator.

I spent the whole week heading toward it in a regime I imposed on myself: trying to do a month's worth of work in one week. Since the last presentation the product was supposed to show progress, and the progress we picked was ambitious — voice messages now get parsed into a structure: projects, themes inside them, topics and tasks inside those. I built the database structure and access policies with tests, and the parsing itself I assembled in n8n — an automation builder where the logic is put together from blocks. Along the way it became clear that low-code is still programming: the three-level nesting bloated the workflow so much that I had to cut it into sub-parts and debug them separately. On Monday I was still worried I wouldn't make it, and consoled myself: if we don't advance — I'll catch up on sleep; if we do — there's a shot at the prizes. Either way, not bad.

This morning we were on fire. The presentation was at one o'clock, and we were still trying to deploy. My first co-founder finished the voice agent — we deployed it fifteen minutes before going on stage. Then we picked up the second co-founder and raced to the venue. To complete the picture, at the exact moment I stepped out of the house, a service at my day job went down — I had to call a developer I know from the road and ask him to look into it. He found nothing criminal, and by evening it had fixed itself just as inexplicably.

We presented well. This time the second co-founder presented — he landed exactly on time. We showed a demo stand: a clickable prototype in Figma and, next to it, the live working application. Only a couple of people looked at it, but they looked. For my taste it lacked a bit of spark, and next time we need something more vivid and alive — but after my crumpled first pitch this is a tangible step forward.

And in the evening they announced the results. Out of nineteen teams, ten were selected — and twenty-seven had started the program in the first place; over the next two months another half will be cut. The waiting is its own experience: a team is named — one, not yours. Another one — not yours. And then suddenly — yours. A fleeting but wonderful feeling. I was genuinely happy.

The ten finalist teams with their tickets to the final — ours in the frame. On my birthday. Photo: Startbahn27

I came home to a birthday dinner and a house full of guests — they arrived for a few days, and tomorrow I'm finally taking a breather. For the project, the plan for the next two months is clear: finish three things — the voice agent, incremental content parsing with partial updates, and multi-user mode. Then get the website in shape, a pricing page — and start looking for real users, not just presentation audiences.