Featured Startup on Azure - Tutorle

BizSpark:   Tell us who you are and your role in the company:

Sergiy Korzh : CEO and Founder Sergiy Korzh 

BizSpark:   What did you do before creating your company?

Sergiy Korzh : I have been running another company, Korzh.com (https://devtools.korzh.com). We create .NET components and sell them through the Internet. The most well-known is EasyQuery.NET (https://devtools.korzh.com/query-builder-net/)

BizSpark:   What is your company’s mission?

Sergiy Korzh : Our mission is to create the best set of tools for people who learn something (foreign languages, math, history, etc).

BizSpark:   In 140 characters or less, tell us what your app does:

Sergiy Korzh : Tutorle is a storage of your personal dictionaries and a set of training tools, which you can use at any time and anywhere.

BizSpark:   How did you get the idea for your app?

Sergiy Korzh : I’d been learning English for several years, now I’m learning Spanish  and this is the application I use to store new words, to revise them when it’s necessary and to memorize them faster.

BizSpark:   In 140 characters or less, tell us what your customers love most about your app:

Sergiy Korzh : They like the ability to save new words at the moment, when they met them and the ability to revise the stored words at any time.

BizSpark:   Tell us about your funding history. Are you currently looking for funding? If so, how much?

Sergiy Korzh : I am personally financing this project now. We are looking for seed funding – about 50K USD to finish the development on other platforms (Windows 7, Android) and for initial marketing activities.

BizSpark:   How many employees do you have?

Sergiy Korzh : Four

BizSpark: How many of your employees are developers?

Sergiy Korzh : 3

BizSpark:   Are you hiring?  If yes, what are you hiring for and where?

Sergiy Korzh : No

BizSpark:   Which platform are you building on?  Why?

Sergiy Korzh : We’ve started with Windows Phone app and then created Windows RT version as well. Our server part is running on Windows Azure. We use Windows stack of technologies because we believe in huge potential of this platform and we have experienced C# developers.

BizSpark:   Where do you see opportunities today in the Software/Internet area?

Sergiy Korzh : We see a great opportunity for services, which combine a mobility with cloud technologies when people can get access to their data from from any device (PC, smartphone, tablet, etc).

BizSpark:   What do you think about the BizSpark Program?

Sergiy Korzh : It’s a great opportunity for startups and small teams of developers.

BizSpark:   What specific value are you getting from BizSpark beyond the technology?

Sergiy Korzh : Knowledge. About Windows Phone and Windows 8 programming, about new services in Windows Azure platform, etc.

BizSpark: What advice do you have for young Software entrepreneurs?

Sergiy Korzh : Don’t give up. And don’t worry about the number of rivals of your product.

BizSpark:   What has been your biggest “aha” moment since founding your company?

Sergiy Korzh : The moment when our app was chosen in the “Featured” in Russian section of Windows Phone marketplace and our downloads increased 50 times.

BizSpark:  Tell us about your Azure based solution.

Sergiy Korzh : Our Tutorle web-service (running on Azure) allows our user to synchronize their dictionaries between different devices and provides them with some additional services like auto-translation, word’s associations, etc.

BizSpark:   How is Azure implemented in your solution?

Sergiy Korzh : It’s a ASP.NET MVC web service.

BizSpark:   How did you get excited about Azure?

Sergiy Korzh : The most excited thing that we do not need to care about the scalability of our service and we server configuration tasks – we can concentrate on development and providing our users with the best possible functionality

BizSpark:   What were the Azure features that prompted you to decide to build on Azure?

Sergiy Korzh : Scalability, zero-configuration

BizSpark:  What advice do you have for companies that are thinking about building in the cloud?

Sergiy Korzh : Use it – it really saves your time and don’t claim the cloud platform if your service does not work at first – in 99% of cases it will be your code which caused the problem.

BizSpark:   What is the one thing that you would like readers to take away about your Azure app?

Sergiy Korzh : We are going to build Tutorle not as simple web-service but as a platform with some kind of API, which can be used by other applications (book readers, rss aggregators, etc.). So contact us if you are interested.

Product demonstration video (In Russian):