Welcome to StartupRad.io, your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news, interviews and live events. Hello and welcome, everybody. This is Joe from StartupRate.io, your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany, as well as the world's number one tech entrepreneurship radio station, Startup.radio. I would like to welcome you today to our first interview 2025. This time, I have the winner of the local pitch competition called Cherry Pigs 2024 here with me.
Hello and welcome, Jenny. Hi. Awesome smile. Thank you very much. I would like to welcome you to StartupRate.io in cooperation with Hesham Trade and Invest and the European Enterprise Network. You can learn more about them down here in the show notes and all the services they are offering in order to help local startups and scale ups. That said, you guys are a regional startup, but I've seen in your CV you have been around quite a bit.
You studied in the lovely city of Darmstadt and you even paid a visit to Wisconsin, Wisconsin's town. Where is this? Yeah, that's right. So in Wisconsin, I was in a very, very, very, very small town with a university and a few houses. It's around One hour to drive to Go to Minneapolis Um. Yeah, I hope that was the answer for your question. Yes, and you have been there around the winter. Did you need warm socks there? Me, yes. But there were some people that were in very short trousers.
And with... Flip-flops. Yeah, exactly. And a T-shirt. And I was like my winter jacket and... Mützel? Your woolen hat, yeah. Yeah, woolen hat, thank you. And I was like, it's so cold. How can you do that? It's so crazy. And we had snow like around two meters. Two meters of snow? Yeah, maybe one and a half, two meters. Up to the waist? Like really, yes. Not everywhere, but some parts were very high. That was crazy. Sounds like an interesting experience.
Welcome to the show. Tapari is such a – so we first agreed this is Tapari because this is your English word premiere. And before we start this recording, we have been a little bit thinking about how to pronounce it, but we settled on Tapari. Tapari is such a unique and innovative concept. Could you share with our listeners the story behind Tapari and the vision that thrives your entrepreneurial journey? Yeah, of course.
So in my bachelor studies I had an elective it was called creative entrepreneurship and in this elective we had to do a business plan about anything we wanted and in this time a friend and me we had in our, friends and parents and a lot of people got children and we have seen that a lot of children are very good with smartphones and they started to swipe on some pictures like some images on the newspaper or some other images or we also had the example in our design lesson
that some children tried to zoom a fish on an aquarium and that was so crazy for us I mean, the sad part is it doesn't work. But that was so sad. And we were thinking about our own childhood. And we were looking for old toy stuff, like in the 90s. And then we have seen this old classic carpet. For children with some streets on it and some buildings and other stuff to start your own fantasy world and play, just play with a lot of figures.
And we were thinking it would be so, so cool and great if we could play a story like an interactive story or an audio story on this carpet without any screens and we were we were inspired by some concepts like some click adventures on the computer game or in computer games or like these kind of books where you can start reading and then you can you get a decision and if you want to continue this part go to page 23 and you want to continue with another part go to another page and then
we put all the thoughts together and created the idea for Teperi so that you have this carpet like a play carpet or play mat with a map on it and you have figures and you can control with these figures your story so if you have a decision part in your story you can decide how to.
Continue the story with um yeah with your figures so how you place it on the mat uh for example sarah's bike has disappeared help her to find her bike where you want to start to search won't you do you want to go to the lake or to the fire department And then the story continues depending on your decision. So it's basically an interactive picture book that you play on a play rock, where my understanding is you have like a base rock and there are a lot of sensors integrated into it.
And then the surface you can change depending on what game you want to play. Is that right? That's right. so we can just change the fabric easy peasy so it's just a fabric and you can change all the figures and then you have a new story world because every story world has its own design I mean, if you have some I don't know, 101 Delmatini and Harry Potter totally different designs so we need to change this and we have a connection with the internet so you can download new stories.
So you have the physics and the digital part. You can easy change. I see. We're discussing this with my wife and just having two little boys. One of them just today spilled, I think...
Water and apple juice over the uh carpet you could put both in a washing machine, uh the figures i guess i wouldn't recommend that um the water would be enough but the fabric you can put in the washing machine but the base mat you shouldn't do that because there's technology in it but you can uh i don't know the word like ambition wipe it off with a wet towel yeah so and also we had by Cherrypix I was answering this question with S.S.
Cotsfest I don't know how we can translate this, and the Darmstädte Esho, wrote it as our headline I don't know but yeah that's our wish for the product so it should It should be safe for every case. I see. So interactive playmats for children are an intriguing idea. What specific gap in the market did you identify and how does Tapari address it differently than traditional or tech-only based toys? So, if we look at the market, we figured out that it's like...
And since a few years, there's like a kind of a new market category. It's called Connected Audio Toys. In this area, you find the Tony box, if you know this, for example. And there are a lot of interactive toys coming up without any kind of screen. So it's kind of a trend and parents are searching for alternative plays and games for children, especially if a game is helping or supporting the development of their children.
Children so but one thing we didn't find because the tony books for example is a very passive product uh so you can just listen and that's a cool cool thing um but uh our product combine a lot different cases and different uh features um because you have the listening part we have no screen but we are digital and you can decide what will happen and what will happening but you don't need any kind of screen so you have kind of a video game but without a video game and yeah
the last two years or honestly I had the idea 2017 so all the years in the past we I didn't find anything that combined this kind of format, like this carpet you can start this play world in a physical area. So the fantasy world and the physical world are like melting together. And it combined with this audio story part. And then we were thinking we need something like this. So we started.
We started and we got a lot of good feedback from parents and kindergartens, etc. And we see a lot of potential in this product also to have fun on the one part, but also on the other part to learn stuff, help them to develop with doing other things than swiping so we can improve the motor skills or active listening. Maybe we can help to grow the attention span a little bit more because we all got lost a little bit of that.
I see. So basically, you saw a product gap in interactive toys, meaning a larger scale than Tony's box. Yeah, yeah, I think so. So the Tony box is very passive. It's a good thing, but we are interactive. And so... Yeah, we can include the users more in the game. So it's more a game and not just listening. Okay. You are planning storytelling with interactive play. Can you walk us through how the technology works and what sets you apart from the typical screen-based education tools?
Mm-hmm so we have different components in our concept like the figure um then we have the mat itself and on the mat is a kind of a sound box so um we try to have so the most technology in the sound box. So like a microcontroller and sound speaker, sorry. And the sensor in the playmat are only sensors and LEDs.
So if you have a decision point, you get some LEDs, you can see some LEDs where the options are, and then you can just put the figure on the sensor and the sensor will figure out which figure it is we have five figures we can see which one is on the carpet and which one not so we have more interaction possibilities it's also physical plus you i i assume you you're four or five kids when you have like five different play figures
um i assume you you have five kids and they have to agree and they have to walk work together and walk literally on the mat with a play figure all together, right? Yeah, they should play together. We would like that. I mean... This scenario is also a part we can control, honestly, because they are children. They have to learn some social skills and it will be a part of it that children will battle who can do the next decision, of course. But they have to learn that too.
And some kids do that very, very well, honestly. I see. I'm talking about kids and customer feedback. What kind of response have you received from like parents, educators and children about Tapari and any surprising feedback like that shaped the development of your product? So except for finding out it's pure proof. The most parents are very delightful of the product. We have a lot of parents. They are telling us they will be the first customers.
So we have to tell them if we're ready to sell or some parents, especially some dads, are like if you include like the like a very German audio story. If we can include this, they will play with the match more than the children We may add for our audience the three question marks is like a typical audio story collection of, I believe, above 100 formerly audio cassettes that even I heard. I think that the target market is something like between 8 and, let's say, 12, 14 years old, mostly boys.
I've seen now in the shelves of the toy stores that there are three exclamation marks, which is apparently the girls' version of that. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we will, yeah, convince them to be part of our Taperi world. That would be very cool.
So a lot of parents would like that, and they are searching for alternative games for their children that have no screens, and also some educators like the kindergartens are interested in it because we have some pedagogic materials because we have like a project partner. They're doing stuff like learning through storytelling and they want to improve the school and the kindergarten concept a little bit. So we have like this cooperation. and um.
You can show the children with this concept, like with Tapari, that if you do a decision, there will be consequences. And you have to think about what you want to do. And you can also learn what is good, what is bad, and what kind of values do we have in our community.
Very easy topics so so easy that some parents are like me we wouldn't think about it if we wouldn't do the story for them because it's like the basics of the basics um but that's very interesting because you can put it in a story world and in the game and then it's more like fun or they can they don't just listen to it they will feel it because they have like this immersive audio play they can, I mean it's they are part of it because they do the decision in this audio story
and it's a different kind of listening because we have audio plays and not like just an audio book, so they have the different voices and sound effects, so it's a kind of immersive to learn about some special situations. Talked about you, Tapari, as a startup. Every startup has its ups and downs. What have been the biggest challenges you have faced while building Tapari and how have you overcome them? Um...
Yeah, ups and downs is a good part. I would say you have like every day, some days you have like more ups and downs at one day. But one of the biggest, I think honestly, the most time it's hard with money.
So we have we got some scholarships in the past what was very good but the time in between was a little bit shreddy so yeah it was difficult, because you start to think about should I search a job or should I continue right now we have another scholarship so that's good and another thing, Our product is a very complex thing, honestly, because we combine technology like hardware and also software. Then we have content in form of the stories.
So we need people who write down the stories. Then we need the voice actors. We need a play concept, like a game concept. And we need the whole design. How should it look like? So put all the things together and make an interactive, immersive experience out of it. That's like a special challenge and very, very interesting because we learn a lot when we are testing our idea.
But that's not like if you design a card game. You can learn a lot of stuff from people who already did this, but what we are doing, nobody did it before, and that's the challenge. I see. So you're discovering completely new challenges every day. Uh-huh. That actually brings me to my next question, because every startup is big about growing and scaling. We already know your product is not ready for, like, mass market yet, but maybe hopefully next Christmas.
I was wondering, what plans do you have for scaling? Are you looking to expand to international markets or perhaps explore partnerships with educational institutions? So we hope so that one day we are international, which right now we try to keep our focus on the product so we get ready for the German market. And we have a huge list with a lot of idea how we can expand the idea, like to include more features or other kind of stories.
And also, because we can change the fabric and the whole design, we are thinking maybe also to go to a different market, like tabletop. So for not only parents, but every adult, like seniors. We got some people telling us it would be so, so interesting for senior people. So, we have a lot of possibilities, but right now we are in the area for the children and want to learn with them, and in the best case, we can grow with the children, and also we can have a lot of new content.
And we are planning that we have not only German content, also like English, learning English and German. And then it should grow also to go more and more international in, I don't know, five to 10 years. Okay, I see. Sustainability is always important in children products and is increasingly important. How do you align with eco-friendly and ethical production practices?
It's very important to us so currently we are in the development phase and we are selecting materials for the playmat and we have to learn a lot about the production process because in the next months we want to plan all the production stuff like production chain, and we try as good as we can that it's sustainable.
And also I think or I got, like a vision from my design studies that everything we are doing and everything we decide how should something be, is a kind of design so we are also a part to design our world or shape our world a little bit and so So we are thinking it's very important what we decide for the materials and everything what has to do with the production and also our content. So what kind of topics will we bring to the children with the stories?
What kind of role models will be there? And so on. I have a question if now an independent author for example from children's book listens to this or watches this would you be would you be willing to work with them as well. If we're fit, then yes, of course.
We plan in around like two or three months, maybe four, to search more authors and people or project partners in this area of stories, children's stories, interactive audio stories, who is interested to write a story for us so that we can get more content on the carpet. So, yeah, of course, everyone is welcome who wants to dream with us to make a very, very cool product. We usually end with a handful of normal questions.
Usually our question is about HR. usually questions only are you open to talk to new potential employees but I would also like to do you get a feeling how many people are currently at the party and are you open to talk to new potential employees because that's like a little gap in our team right now we are two people on the team like an informatic guy and me from Interactive Media. But we would be very happy if we can welcome someone in the area of sales.
And also for the future I would dream about it that we have a little team to do all the stuff for this project because Because we have such a lot of different topics from some writing the stories and technology and marketing and a lot of things. Funding and investment. We know you have different scholarships, including Exist. Are you also willing and able to talk to new investors?
Yes, we start to prepare ourselves for these kind of dogs because we know that if the product is in the phase we can produce it, we wouldn't have the money to start. So we want to prepare everything that we have, the product way and the whole concept and the first stories and games, and then we just need someone who support us to... Press this one button to produce a lot of carpets and sell it. So basically, you need some kickoff investment for mass production. Exactly.
The last question, since this is in cooperation with the European Enterprise Network and hasn't traded in Vest, thank you for sponsoring this, by the way. You have the opportunity to address like one question, one concern, one wish to the political decision makers. What would you like to address? Because we know they're listening. That's a good question and very spontaneous. That's why we are asking them. I don't know if they can do some stuff for the schools.
But I think a good friend of mine is a teacher. And I know a lot of teachers. And I think we need a little work to improve our school concepts and learning what means learning. How can we include more fun in learning stuff so that the children don't lose this curious part in their soul? I actually do believe that's very important and they've been actually very good closing words. And let me guess, you would also like Tapari to be part of this further education, right?
Of course, that would be great if we can help there. And I love, and I think we all, so the whole team, we'll love to help if we can. Okay, great. Jenny, thank you very much. It was a real pleasure talking to you.
Best of luck with Tapari and as soon as you get into mass production just let us know and we will talk about it again, thank you thank you very much, it was a pleasure have a good day and happy new year everybody have a good day and happy new year bye bye bye, that's all folks find more news streams events and interviews at w www.startuprad.io Remember, sharing is caring. Music.