John Zupancic – Wriber
John Zupancic sat there at his keyboard, staring at the cursor blinking on and off at the start of a blank document.
He had been there for an hour, trying to create this report for class, but nothing was happening. Nothing popped into his mind to write.
“I remember saying something along the line of, ‘I wish this report would write itself,’ and then I took a step back for a second,” John remembers. “What if it could? What if there was a way to do something like that?”
Then a student with University of Waterloo’s Master’s of Business Entrepreneurship and Technology program, John had been pursuing a startup called Unfound.com. It worked like this: See Beyonce’s shoes or Tony Stark’s watch? Unfound was going to track them down so you could purchase them.
But he ran into a couple of hurdles. The first was sourcing the merchandise, but the second was a deal-breaker. “I’m not actually a fashion person. I’m the last person you want to take shopping with you,” says John. “I buy clothes for utility over looks, is the best way to put it.”
When he realized that Unfound.com wasn’t working for him, he had to pivot – quickly. And that’s what led him to that blank screen that started Wriber, a platform that uses AI to help research and structure content as you write it.
Now, one thing you should know about John: he does not give up, especially when things don’t go as planned. Which happened. A lot.
With the encouragement and support of one of his professors, he first started talking about Wriber – then called WriteInsight – to another faculty member at the University. But he was told, “There’s no market for it, you’re not going to build a business around it,” he says. “It was like he tore my heart out and threw it on the ground and stomped on it.”
Still, John believed in his idea. So he took it to the National Business and Technology Conference in Toronto. Mind you, at this point there was a lot left to figure out around Wriber’s true value proposition, sales model… all that good stuff. But again, the idea was “completely butchered” by the judges.
“If you’ve ever been to the Convention Centre in Toronto, there’s a ton of escalators there. And I just remember going down this escalator. The metaphor right now is just exactly what it is: it sucked,” says John.
But he knew he had something. His professor kept up the encouragement, and with that he entered another competition, this time at the University of Waterloo. “When I went up to pitch, I felt like I was on my last legs in that room,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen after this because if I get ripped apart one more time by everybody, I think I’m going to have to kill this.”
Never mind that his presentation broke down before he even got started (“Somewhere I have a video of this,” he says). Bracing for impact, he wasn’t expecting what he heard next.
“The first thing from the judge was, ‘you know, I have to write a blog all the time for my company and I hate it. This would be perfect for me.’”
Wriber ended up winning the competition.
After that, John made the finals for other competitions through GTAN, Communitech and from the next year’s National Business and Technology Conference – the very same one that butchered his pitch before. While they placed second in that conference overall, Wriber took the prize for an IP award, which allowed John to get his first provisional patent on one of his algorithms.
So what kept him going through it all? On top of the support he’s received from his professor, family and girlfriend, he’s not one to give up when the solution to a problem seems so close. “I’ve been down before and I can get back up,” he says. “Just having that self-awareness, that’s really just been helpful.”
And that’s what’s taken John from a struggle with writer’s block in university to helping the world write better, more impactful, content.
Learn more at:
https://www.wriber.com/