Emily Chen bags startup success

Beedie alumna Emily Chen has parlayed her entrepreneurial talents into a new startup venture that provides working parents with the means to spend some quality time with their young children.

Chen is part of the team that won the UBC Startup Weekend competition with their venture Pony Pony Dog, a trans-generational gaming platform that allows parents to bond with their three to six year-old children through a series of mini-games, regardless of their physical location.

The Startup Weekend competition was held at the University of British Columbia in March. The competition aims to empower individuals to explore problems in the world and create solutions through the launch of a startup.

The competition spans an entire weekend, with participants pitching their ideas on the Friday evening before forming teams to take their ideas forward. Chen and her teammates, Jack Chevalier, Rongxin Zhang, Eric Rannaud and SFU undergraduate statistics student Daniel Tsui spent two days working on their venture before presenting to the judges on the Sunday evening.

The team originally came up with the concept of a secure chat application for children, which evolved into a gaming application over the course of the weekend. The game requires parents to play with their children online in a cooperative environment designed to appeal to younger children.

“The Startup Weekend competition requires participants to think on their feet – not every idea will come to fruition and it is important to be able to roll with it and change your pitch as necessary,” says Chen. “There are so many things that get between a parent’s relationship with their children these days that it is important for parents to spend time with them whenever they can, and Pony Pony Dog allows them to do this in a way that would otherwise not be possible.”

Over the course of the weekend, the team members carried out different functions according to their own skillset, with some conducting marketing research and refining their pitch, while others concentrated on programming a working demo of the product.

“One of the strengths of Startup Weekend is that it forces you to think on your feet,” says Tsui, who is also a client of SFU’s Venture Connection. “You only have 54 hours to develop your entire venture and pitch, so have to work smart to combat the time constraints. Through the mixing pot of the skills of our team members and mentors we were able to create a viable solution for a real-world problem.”

Chen presented the final pitch to the judges, which included the Beedie School’s Dr. Sarah Lubik, who were impressed by the team’s ability to use the short space of time available to them to create a working demo of one of the mini-games that would be included in the final version of their venture. The demo received applause from the audience, as they witnessed the titular pony and dog on screen being controlled on screen.

“It was great to receive such positive feedback from the judges but the weekend is only the beginning – whatever anybody says to you is just a piece of advice, and the only thing that matters is customer validation,” says Chen. “The onus is now on us to produce great products that engage our audience.”

Pony Pony Dog is now looking for parents who are interested in acting as beta testers as they move into the final design stages. For more information on Pony Pony Dog, visit www.ponyponydog.com.