By Aaron London
The News-Journal, Daytona Beach, Fla.
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) The founders of “Office Divvy” have created a space-sharing calendar app. The “Office Divvy” app includes a new proprietary web calendar to schedule and manage the shared office space that is at the heart of the company’s mission.
The News-Journal, Daytona Beach, Fla.
If disruption is the foundation of entrepreneurialism, then technology is the framework disruptive entrepreneurs build on.
But in an age where there is an app for everything or a technological fix for business owners looking to do something new, what happens when the digital shoe doesn’t quite fit?
For Ky Ekinci and the team at Office Divvy, the answer is simple: disrupt the disruptors.
To that end, the business percolator in Palm Coast recently unveiled a new proprietary web calendar app to schedule and manage the shared office space that is at the heart of the company’s mission. In doing so, Ekinci, along with team members Kaitlin Taing, Bailey Granam and Trenton Moore, exemplify the idea that necessity is the mother of invention.
“Very early on, we used a third-party service to manage space but it wasn’t the ideal situation so we made it work for what we were doing,” Ekinci said.
While the off-the-shelf app was serviceable, it didn’t address all of the company’s needs and offered an opportunity to pursue some new ideas.
“We had like probably six or seven app ideas,” Ekinci said. The idea for a space-sharing calendar app was something that could be tackled relatively simply and it moved to the front of the line.
“It wasn’t the biggest pain point but it was the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of making the biggest difference to our clients as well as our internal users in terms of key performance indicators, in terms of management tasks, reporting and billing and such,” Ekinci said.
But that was only the first step. Like every entrepreneur, it starts with an idea. However, merely creating a software application to make booking office space and tracking usage wasn’t enough. It had to be something “specific, beautiful and powerful” before even attempting to move forward.
“The discipline we applied in this particular application was ‘Is this 10 times better than what is out there, because don’t even start working on it if it’s not,'” Ekinci said. “I have no doubt this is 10 times better than whatever is out there.”
In fact, the app has turned out so well that the company is looking at taking it to the next level.
“We’re thinking of phase two, asking can we take this to the market,” Ekinci said.
Creating a web-based calendar app for managing office space in and of itself is an accomplishment. But what makes the development even more significant is that it happened here in Flagler County, not in Silicon Valley or at the headquarters of some giant tech company.
And that is the essence of the idea of disruption that is so central to the entrepreneurial ethos. There is an elegance to the idea of entrepreneurship beyond the nuts-and-bolts business aspect. The idea of creating something that not only does something better and faster but does so in a manner that is completely new and different is the hallmark of the entrepreneurial landscape. It is a necessary pre-requisite for sustaining and extending entrepreneurship.
With the advent of the information technology revolution, prospective entrepreneurs no longer had to live in major metropolitan areas or even near research universities. Because of the ease of transmission of ideas via the Internet, one could use the available tools to create their own disruption anywhere in the world. And as more people who took up the mantle of entrepreneur, the community of “disruptors” grew and became something of a self-sustaining economic ecosystem.
While Office Divvy’s new calendar app is already proving to be an integral component of the business, on a larger level it adds to the environment for entrepreneurialism in Flagler County, and helps create conditions to make Palm Coast as much of an entrepreneurial hub as New York, San Francisco or whatever city Amazon chooses for its second headquarters.
