All your RnD artefacts and processes in one place!

baoRnD allows to host and manage (Research and Development) projects, update and communicate with stakeholders, publicize the work, get all sorts of support, and perform computations; while allowing the general public to follow projects.

Scientists and traditional developers (e.g. real estate developers) need repository-like products to host and organize project materials and information in one place, instead of having them scattered all over their local machines or the internet. Being able to perform processes like making payments, updating stakeholders, and engaging project followers is an added advantage, which fits the use case and is important to potential users/customers.

Some interesting possible functionalities include restricting parts of the update to specific stakeholders, access to essential data and computational models for research, on-demand and in-place analytics, and automatic report generation, all of which are crucial if you ask a researcher or developer.

Singapore, Singapore / San Francisco, United States / London, United Kingdom, Lagos, Nigeria / Schaffhausen, Switzerland.

I have completed and launched the MVP, which is currently in the private free beta stage. I hope to move to the public beta stage by mid-December, which a lot of people are signing up for. I am fixing essential bugs from the feedback I am getting, hence I have not moved on to public beta.

Honestly, my thesis and academics have limited the amount of time I can spend on baoRnD. I hope to graduate soon to work on it full-time, regardless of my YC application`s result.

I would have done a lot more (I am disappointed in the UI still) but I am a bit afraid to fail at NUS because I am more focused on baoRnD than studies. I do not want to drop out either because I like completing stuff that I have started and it would be ungrateful of me to do so when my sponsor has spent so much already.

I have been working on this project every night since I had the insight in the summer of 2022. I do internship work or studies during the day and work on baoRnD at night. Actually, I built the backend of MVP in 3 days in the summer of 2022. All I have been doing after that was just iterating on the front end and fixing bugs depending on the feedback of the beta users.

I have 10 pairs of non-paying customers/users in the beta program. 5 of them are researchers while the other five are traditional developers.

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I have worked in research and development for a long time, and I just notice the inefficiencies in my work and the work of my colleagues. Every time someone asked about my work or for updates, I had to either point them to some Google documents/drive folder, or send them local files from my computer, or in a worst-case scenario, I would spend a long time explaining it. Communicating with stakeholders (e.g. my supervisors), who already know a lot about my work is also a headache because each stakeholder uses different communication channels, all of which are not being built for R&D usage. I also have to manage communications about the same project (or different projects, sometimes) on different platforms.

Traditional developers face similar problems. My brother runs an architectural firm. He has always wished there was a solution like baoRnD because the other options are cumbersome emails or lengthy phone calls. Traditional industries would greatly benefit from having collaborative and communication tools that programmers have had for decades.

Publicizing research is another battle because scientific publications are not accessible to both young researchers and the public. I recently was studying a paper, and it interestingly was so difficult to grasp I had to contact the researcher. It would have been much different if I could follow the process as it was being undertaken or go back somewhere to relive the process. Teaching people about research with a publication is futile in my opinion. The publication might serve advanced researchers, a better method is to make it possible for people to experience the research.

Small companies and startups could also benefit from such a platform since they usually find it difficult to run R&D departments because of the high cost of running one, but it is important to have an R&D department.

The inefficiencies and problems are endless and I am not the only one who is tired of them. Hence, I have decided to work on a solution.

I recently presented the project, and surprisingly the students in the audience felt they would really love to have such a platform for their university projects, especially their theses. I had planned to just develop a B2B solution. However, I decided to make it more accessible.

My reason is not born out of moral obligation, but a strong need to solve the issues I occasionally have in my r&d life, and of course, an undying passion to change the world, and to have a lasting legacy.

I have not seen any company building such a platform as baoRnD. Online repositories (e.g. GitHub), text editors (e.g. Google docs), email solutions (e.g. yahoo mail), and messaging apps (e.g. Slack) could be competition because they are currently serving our potential users` needs, albeit inefficiently. baoRnD merges some functionalities of these platforms but is different. For example, scientists hose code on GitHub, discuss on Slack or email and store other project files on Dropbox or a local machine. This makes important aspects of our work (e.g. communication with stakeholders, etc.) inefficient and time-consuming. GitHub lets us say “here is the code. Raise an issue if you find any” when we should be saying “I just implemented this algorithm, what do you think?”. Even programmers might find baoRnD interesting, but they are not the focus.

OSSci (https://opensource.science/), and NASA’s open source science initiative (https://science.nasa.gov/open-science-overview) are also potential competition. OSSci champions open-source science as a repository/catalog of materials and tools. While this might be a correct solution, we believe baoRnD’s approach is the right one because of our networking effect - a sort of social media for scientific research and traditional project development. People feel good sharing their work. We just need to make it easy for them to do what they love and to feel good sharing it. This presents an opportunity for governments to engage their citizens in development projects through baoRnD.

OSSci and NASA seem to be more focused on gathering scientific knowledge (like arxiv.org) and building partnerships with research institutes, universities, etc. We believe such partnerships and knowledge-base would manifest organically if the platform serves the users an important purpose.

Scientific analytics products like Elsevier (https://www.elsevier.com/en-xs) and SIT ROLOS (https://rolos.com/) are also in the research market, however, analytics is not baoRnD`s mainstay. It will be used to increase UX and keep users coming back. Hence baoRnD`s embedded analytics will be seamless. E.g., you can analyze data that is part of an update while reading the update. I call this analytics in-place. There are domain-specific repositories for managing research projects, such as the megafluidics (https://metafluidics.org/) fluidic repos built by MIT. They are either mostly in-house projects or too domain-tied.

There are blockchain protocols/projects (talentDAO, PolygonDAO) trying to build decentralized community-reviewed publication protocols for the sciences. While this is an interesting concept, using blockchain is overkill in my opinion. Even still, nothing is stopping us from adding decentralization functionality to baoRnD to cater to the crypto community, since I also have experience building blockchain solutions.

I am not afraid of healthy competition, but I fear that competitors might try to build similar platforms like baoRnD, especially if they find it gaining users, and since their founders are either well-funded or former successful entrepreneurs with large networks, we might lose the opportunity to build something great if we do not find investments, support, and right partnerships. We also need to move very fast. Hence we want to join YC.

The good thing is it would be very difficult for any competitor to quickly build a platform like baoRnd.

1. Freemium model ($5/month for individuals, $25/month for companies and institutions)
2. Pay for full encryption for projects and updates, atop the standard platform privacy functionalities ($25/month)
3. Commissions on transactions (.1-.5% per transaction)
4. Others (unknown, new monetization channels might show up)

I want the company to be a global by default company with me as the CEO and my cofounder as the CTO. Although I have spoken to many interested individuals, I have not found someone with the abilities and experience I seek because I am looking for someone who is technically as good as me or better. Business acumen is a good addition. I do not want to settle for mediocrity. I believe a good candidate will come along eventually.

I do not mind being the CTO if the cofounder I find is better than me in business. In fact, I am ready to give up any executive position for a team member who is better at it if it means the success of the startup. However, I have very high trust in myself and my ability to achieve anything I set my mind to.

I want to set up the company`s first office in Singapore, but the employees will work remotely by default. They will work intensively for 4 days a week, with an option to either take the 5th day off or take a company-sponsored course of choice or do company-sponsored personal research. Tasks must be completed at the end of every week, and failure to complete weekly tasks 5 times in a row without any cogent reason means you have to leave the team, even if you are the CEO. The employees can choose any 4 days of choice to work as long as their choice does not hinder the company`s ability to achieve its goals and grow.

I wish to work with the $500K YC investment if we are accepted. However, if we raise any new money during YC demo day, I do not want it to exceed $2M.

No

I (Aliyu Alege) do the technical work on baoRnD. None of the work on baoRnD so far has been done by anyone other than me.

Yes, If I decide to work for my sponsor (to NUS) as per our contract, then yes I have a commitment from Jan 2023 - March 2023. However, I have decided to work on baoRnD instead. A full explanation is given in my profile. I will work on this startup full-time regardless of my YC application`s results.

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No mentally healthy person is actually stupid (i.e., not smart). The genius-ness of a person lies in the intersection of what the person is good at, what the person loves doing, and what gives the person some kind of reward that is very important to the person. Thus, a leader`s main job is to help subordinates find that sweet genius spot where they are happiest, most fulfilled, and most comfortable.

Someone at Entrepreneur First (EF) had contacted me to join their program in Singapore and we happened to discuss YC in our first meeting. Although some of my secondary schoolmates are at EF, and they encouraged me to accept the EF invite, I compared them with YC and felt YC is a better option because of YC`s track record, network, and investment terms. The final push was after I spoke with a YC alumnus who offered to give a recommendation and strongly encouraged me to apply.

Mostly through YC alumni posting stuff about YC online. I have known about YC since 2016 or 2017 as an undergraduate. However, I was in Russia then and I was in discussion with a Russian VC to fund my project, which crashed, unfortunately.