Hello!
Welcome to our blog. Since this is our very first post, we wanted to start with the most important thing of all: how Narratica came to life.
Narratica isn't just another app to us. It's something we care about way too much. A slightly chaotic, very emotional, late-night fueled project that is slowly turning into reality. So let's rewind a bit and tell you how it all started.
The first spark
I had just come back from a two-month trip abroad. A friend dragged me out one evening and showed me an app where she was chatting with characters from Hazbin Hotel.
And I was instantly hooked.
As someone who grew up playing TRPGs, roleplaying in chat rooms, and falling in love with fictional characters on paper, this felt like magic.
An AI that's always ready to play? No need to wait for a partner? Instant replies? Any world, any character, anytime?
Yes. Please.
…and then the big, fat buts
The honeymoon phase didn't last long.
I spent hours defining characters and setting up stories, but the experience started falling apart really fast:
- Amnesia - after ~10 messages, the AI forgot major story beats
- Hallucinations - suddenly inventing events that never happened
- Out of character replies - flat, generic, or just plain wrong
- Multi-character chaos - add more characters and everything broke completely
What started as excitement turned into frustration.
So naturally… I got angry.
From frustration to foundation
And that anger turned into action.
One evening, annoyed and disappointed, I turned to my boyfriend and asked, “Could we do this better?”
At the time, he was looking for a project to devote his soul to. He doesn't really do things halfway. Once something grabs him, it becomes his focus. He smiled at me and said, “Yes. We can.”
As we started listing everything the app should be able to do, it became obvious we couldn't do it alone. We needed backup. That same evening, we messaged a mutual friend - his high school classmate and my uni peer - pitched the idea, and waited. He didn't hesitate.
And just like that, on a random September evening in 2024, the Narratica team was born.
The faces behind the code
The humans currently turning caffeine, ideas, and mild existential dread into Narratica:
The very steep learning curve
By pure coincidence, the same week we started Narratica, our university opened a course called Business in Practice. We all signed up, full of optimism.
Looking back… if we hadn't, Narratica might already be finished. But hey, we did make some contacts. Time will tell if they matter.
The beginning was exciting, though. David managed to get us tickets to a two-day workshop at a local startup incubator. Thanks to the university course, we even got them reimbursed. We had our first consultation and a tiny peek into how the startup world actually works.
Then communication slowly died out. And we were back on our own.
Since none of us are marketing experts, we did what felt natural: we buried ourselves in code and design (which, honestly, we're still doing).
The marketing problem™
Because we focused almost exclusively on building the product, only a handful of people even know Narratica exists. If we launched today, the release would probably be… very quiet.
That's exactly why this blog exists. To finally say: Hey. We're here.
Eventually, the university course turned into endless A4 pages, documentation, and formal presentations just to pass. We looked at each other and decided our time was better spent actually building Narratica.
So… we dropped the course.
The 3-minute pitch
Even after dropping the course, a lot happened that first year.
We got in touch with another incubator in a neighboring city (still in contact!), and through them we were invited to an investor event to pitch Narratica.
We had three minutes to pitch our project.
Summarizing a three months of full time work in 180 seconds should honestly be an Olympic discipline.
I stood there, repeatedly mentioning how nervous I was, and confidently claimed that Narratica would make trillions of dollars (no shame).
Meanwhile, David - who had been stressing about this for weeks while I pretended to be chill - absolutely saved the presentation.
And the result?
Third place - TOP Innovative Student Project! 🎉
Huge win for us.
We also walked away with a contact for yet another incubator, so fingers crossed at least one of them sticks.
As for the technical side of Narratica… I'll leave that story to the guys in a future post.
I'd probably butcher half the details anyway.
So stay tuned 💜
More stories coming soon.
— KeyQlin