The (Dreamfora) Office EP 7: Q&A with the Founders (Part 2) - Paul

Paul is the co-founder and head of strategy & operation at Dreamfora. He came up with the idea for this company in 2015. Since the app’s official launch at the beginning of this year, he has been hard at work to lead Dreamfora on an upward trajectory. Today, we sit with Paul to discuss the road that led Dreamfora to this day, and the road to the future Paul envisions for the company. 

The first question is one we’re asking all Dreamfora employees. Can you describe your average day at the office? Do you have a daily routine?

First, I grab a cup of coffee - sometimes Nespresso, sometimes instant mix. My mornings consist of a series of habitual tasks: reading and responding to emails and Slack messages from our teams, making note of our users’ reviews and feedback, and checking Dreamfora’s development roadmap to make sure all teams at the office are in sync. Then, I check for any suggestions sent to us by our users.

Another crucial part of my mornings is reviewing our app’s real-time performance data, including the number of new downloads, user retention rates, and so on forth. Analyzing these statistics and engaging with our users help me connect with our users to better understand their service needs, preferences, and behaviors. Ultimately, it’s these insights that I use to determine the overall strategic direction of Dreamfora, including content creation and marketing/branding strategies. 

Then, I make a to-do list of tasks for the day and start more work.

Dreamfora is your brainchild. How did you come to think of creating a goal setting app? 

I came up with the idea for Dreamfora because none of the planner or goal-setting apps in the market provided a step-by-step list of tasks and milestones to reach a goal. They either offered only a simple template or an endless list of goal examples, but no indication of how to achieve them, through what steps and in which order. 

I wanted goal setting and planning to be made easy and intuitive on Dreamfora, similar to looking at a recipe in a cookbook. The goal-setting process on our app is structured in a way so that our users can gain a better understanding of their goals and set relevant, attainable and time-bound tasks. By providing examples of tasks, habits and milestones recommended by experts of the corresponding field, I wanted provide our users with a content-rich experience available only on Dreamfora. 

It wasn’t easy quitting my former job as a management consultant - a career I had pursued for over ten years - but Dreamfora was a project far too big and meaningful for me to pass up on. 

Did you face any problems during the ideation phase?

I imagined Dreamfora as not only an app, but also a community of dreamers to share their goal setting journeys and reach their goals together - put differently, a platform for anyone with a dream to freely communicate with like-minded people and create this massive, shared online dreamboard. For this reason, I initially faced a “chicken-and-egg” problem. For a platform to attract people, it would need to provide content and value, but this would be impossible to do without people. 

For the time being, we are only providing app services, but we plan to create a built-in social media-based platform for our users to gain a fuller experience with Dreamfora. 

That sounds like a plan worth looking forward to! So, where do you (or would you like to) see Dreamfora in a year, and in five years? 

I hope that, in a year’s time, we can turn Dreamfora into an app loved by all our users worldwide. It would simply be a dream come true if Dreamfora could turn into a brand many people recognize and look for, even without our excessive advertising efforts. It’s always an enriching moment when we receive positive reviews and feedback from our users who take time out of their day to send us their thoughts. We would definitely like to see more positive reviews as well. 

In five years, the plan is to build a strong and engaged community and motivated dreamers and grow into an app that delivers differentiated value and top-notch customer service to our users. 

This is the last of the questions. Do you have any words of advice for people starting their own businesses? 

My advice for them would be to start when you are fully prepared to jump into a startup life. This will guarantee the best possible chance of success in a tough environment where 8 out of 10 startups fail. Ask yourself whether you’ll be able to deal with the many uncertainties and difficulties waiting down the road. Will you be able to take bold risks and embrace possible failures? Are you passionate enough? If the answer to all of the above questions is “yes,” then make that decision and stick to it. 

Thank you so much for answering our questions!