Outfit7

Outfit7 is the first Slovenian start-up to achieve the so-called “unicorn” status: it has become worth more than a billion dollars. Outfit7 co-founder Rok Zorko and Luka Renko, the former director for technological development at the company, explained how the company managed to do this.

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Outfit7 was founded by Samo Login with seven co-founders in 2009. He financed the start-up of the company himself, with the purchase price he received from the sale of a stake in the company that developed the online search engine Najdi.si.

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The idea of the co-founders was to raise at least one hundred million euros by selling their own company. With this money we could then dedicate ourselves to charity.

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Since the financial crisis was just beginning at that time, the founders made the decision to develop a product for consumers and not a product for other companies. Since at the same time the rise of smartphones began, they saw the best opportunity for a successful business in the development of simple mobile applications.

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They developed several applications in the first year, but none really caught on. The breakthrough came with the development of an application with Talking Tom talking cat. The founders got the idea from a similar app called Talking Carl. While Carl was a talking box, Tom was a more elaborate product with more interesting animations. Talking Tom was launched in July 2010 and earned around a quarter of a million euros in its first month, which was the amount they had spent on the company's operations until then.

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By the end of that year, they released even more paid applications with other characters, which then brought them multimillion-dollar earnings every year.

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The next big turning point came in the fall of 2013, when they released the My Talking Tom app. The application played the character of the talking cat, the user took care of its growth and development following the example of the popular Japanese digital pet Tamagotchi. With the My Talking Tom app, the company tallied its annual earnings. Among the more successful products in the coming years was the arcade game Talking Tom Gold Run.

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Outfit7 was sold by the founders for $1 billion in 2017. At the time, the company already had an annual income of hundreds of millions of euros. Some of the founders then invested part of the purchase price in the venture capital fund Silicon Gardens, thereby encouraging the emergence of new startups based on Slovenian knowledge. Many new start-up entrepreneurs today draw inspiration from the success of Outfita7.

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