The pandemic caused businesses to change on a scale where resilience, empathy and humanism became a fundamental part of entrepreneurship. The case of Yana and Ipstori is not alien to this transformation in the way of thinking about a new business, because beyond seeking to capitalize on it, the story behind its founders suggests why Apple has paid attention to them.
On Yana’s side, Andrea Campos has suffered from depression since she was eight years old, so she decided on her own to learn to program and carry out the application project.
“After not finding options in mental health applications that will help me feel better and have a tool to deal with difficult moments, I decided to create Yana. While there are videos on the internet that can help, many of these are not in Spanish, which gave me to understand that people who needed help like me could have challenges finding support, ”Campos said.
Yana started out as a personal project, but as she spoke to more people, Campos realized that many people could also benefit from the system she was creating. So he created an application to provide access to mental health tools for Spanish-speaking people and began testing it with a small group.
Now, Campos’ platform is about to reach 5 million users, according to a Techcrunch report.
The story of Ipstori is just as inspiring as it is an application where Ruth Resendiz identified a new reading and distribution model.
When the pandemic hit, the Mexican book market experienced a drop in print sales during the first half of February 2020. In April it had plummeted 88.2%, according to Nielsen Bookscan Mexico.
Before this Resendiz wanted to break with several prejudices. “I am a woman, I am older and I am not an expert in technology, however I know about literature and sought to support not only authors, but also small publishers that are starting in the publishing world.”
The mission is also to encourage the habit of reading in a country where almost no books are consumed, because according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), the average number of books read in a year is 3.7 copies per year, without However, something that Inegi highlights is that it is read more in digital.
Between 2016 and 2021, the percentage of the population reading books in digital format went from 6.8% to 21.5%.
Even with the challenge, Resendiz decided to undertake at age 52 and launched Ipstori in October 2019 with the support of a team made up of his children and a team specialized in technology.
Now both businesswomen are under the attention of Apple and are of its outstanding developers in 2021.
