Community Co-Founder AMA - 2025_07_25 11_01 CDT - Recording.mp4

Note: The recording did not successfully start until 30 seconds into the AMA, so some introductory dialogue is missing

[Steph]: Nino and I are always very excited for this!

[Nino]: Yeah. Same here. I'm just super excited. I don't even know what to say. Just glad that we're able to be here and yeah. Keep the chat going. Well, I'm reading every one of them while answering some questions, so I'm just happy to be here and excited to spend the next 30 minutes with y'all.

[00:25][Jordan]: Amazing. Amazing. Okay, let's get started with some of our pre-submitted questions here. So question number one was submitted by Nora. What are your birbs' names, and why did you name them what you did?

[Nino]: I guess I can start. Uh, I mean, Steph probably wouldn't like how I name my, my birb, but I named my birb Pino, 'cause Steph has a Corgi named Pino that I really love. I take care of her like twice. I get Steph to be okay for me taking care of her dog two days in a week. Um, so I love her so much. I named my birb also Pino and, and yeah, that's why my birb is Pino.

[Steph]: Yeah, he has a lot of Pino themed things in his opportunities to name, but for me, my birb's name is Beepo. I remember when we were first designing, uh, like the self-care pet angle, I really liked thinking of either a cute name or kind of like an overly sophisticated name to juxtapose against cuteness. So the original consideration was actually Francisco. So if you look at our earliest design mocks, all of the birb's names are Francisco. But then it's just such a long name, so I just kept thinking of very cute sounds and I was thinking out loud. I remember texting to my mom like, "beep beep". And I was like, how do you shorten a sound like that? And it just became beepo. So that is the origin of Beepo's name.

[Nino]: Yeah. Also just a quick fun fact, 'cause I really loved Pino, at some point when we were thinking about like, what to name the app, I'm like, we should name it something that can make people happy and Pino makes me happy.

[Steph]: Yeah, so Pino was also a consideration for the apps name.

[Nino]: So it never happened, but it's good that we end up with something better.

[02:26][Jordan]: Amazing. I love that story. All right, our second question was submitted by Brianna. Question is: How did you come up with the idea for Finch? Classic question.

[Steph]: Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a kind of like two parts of the story. Technically, when we first set out to build something like Finch, we had no idea what we wanted to build, so we really built like, six or seven very different apps before we actually landed on this. But the idea of this self-care pet angle actually came from an old school project I had, um, in college where it wasn't like for specifically self-care or like birbs, it was like, whatever you feed yourself, you feed a Pikachu. And then that was like actually the very original idea that was always on my mind since, uh, college and we thought maybe it was too niche to have like this self-care pet angle. So it's really only, ironically until the very last idea of our first year of failed prototypes that we actually ended up saying, um, let's like go for it.

[Nino]: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, to add to Steph, but, you know, a lot of like trial and error and learning and we are very grateful that that, you know, we end up with, with Finch. Literally we, Steph and I talked about like, this is like so silly what we are doing. We gave ourselves one year to like try to make this happen and Finch is literally our last shot, like the last month on that one year. If Finch didn't work out, like if that last item didn't work out, we wouldn't have been here. And uh, I'm just filled with gratitude whenever I thought back about that moment.

[Steph]: Yeah, but I guess there is this like recurring theme throughout that year of it felt important to figure out how to rebrand self-care and mental health, because a lot of the apps in the space either felt very serious or daunting or you know, it's just like not very approachable or energizing. So our initial angles weren't really quite as fun, but we were trying to be fun. So over that year, we just kept amping up kind of like funness in a more unique way. And that actually was, um, we did get some hints that people were resonating at least with more unique angles of, uh, gamification. But how to execute on gamification effectively is definitely very difficult.

[05:05][Jordan]: Awesome. Awesome. Alright, next question was submitted by Julia: How did you guys come up with the app's name Finch? Does it hold any special meanings?

[Nino]: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because choosing names is always tricky and hard. We ran through a lot of different names—Pino was one of them. It’s kind of wild, thinking about the breadth of ideas we were exploring. At one point, I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I grew up in Indonesia, so I didn’t grow up with the same classic books most Americans read. I was catching up, and one of them was To Kill a Mockingbird. There’s a character called Atticus Finch, and I thought, “Huh, Finch is an interesting name.” And Finch is also a bird.

I looked up the meaning in different native languages, and I don’t remember exactly where this originated from, but I read that in some cultures, the Finch symbolizes happiness through togetherness or something like that. That really resonated. We’re building a self-care app, but ultimately, we want to help people take care of themselves—and when your cup is full, you can take better care of others too. So it felt symbolically meaningful. I told Steph, and this time I think she was more open to the name, compared to Pino—

[Steph]: Yeah. And for what it's worth, we were brainstorming names before we even knew what we wanted to build. We wanted one reusable name, because we knew it’s hard to make any product succeed. So the idea was: how can we choose a name that could represent our purpose, even if we changed what the product looked like?

It’s funny—we didn’t start with the idea of a self-care pet. But in the end, we went full circle, literally back to the bird, which is kind of ironic.

[Nino]: Yeah, it’s kind of crazy. A lot of the things we ended up with weren’t part of some detailed master plan. We’re just really, really grateful for how it all turned out.