Priyaa and Purvanshi are the co-founders of Lica, a content creation platform that lets anyone create videos with a single click.
Priyaa is a former product manager at Microsoft, Snapchat, and Waymo who recently decided to become a full-time startup founder. At the Craft Ventures AI Hackathon in early 2023, Priyaa had a clear vision. She wanted to build a tool to make content creation and consumption fun and effortless, but couldn’t find anyone to join her team. She took this challenge in stride and participated as a solo hacker, with Replit and AI as her engineering team.
In 48 hours, Priyaa created DocuTok, an app that makes boring documents fun, and won the $10,000 grand prize. Her development approach was methodical: writing specs, breaking the app down into executable units, and using Replit AI to write the code. Her project drew significant attention and laid the foundation for what would become Lica.
However, Priyaa wasn’t convinced that DocuTok was the exact idea she wanted to build a business around. Before going all in on a startup, she wanted to explore more of her ideas to make it easy for anyone to express themselves. She used the momentum from the hackathon to build more, going from idea to software repeatedly, deploying many apps on Replit, and getting direct feedback from users.
"Replit made my life easier by eliminating the need for a complex setup. I could focus on coding and iterating my idea, rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure."
Priyaa’s streamlined approach allowed her to rapidly prototype and test her ideas, leading to the evolution of DocuTok into Lica. Priyaa and Purvanshi were introduced by a mutual friend who saw the potential in their combined expertise and common vision. Their initial discussions revealed a common observation: content consumption preferences vary widely, yet they are often constrained by the format chosen by the content creator.
In their own words:
“We recognize the unique power of videos in engagingly conveying information. With the latest advancements in AI, particularly in multimodal models, we believe that everyone should have the freedom to choose their preferred content consumption format, whether it be audio, short or long-form videos, or text. Creators should concentrate on crafting their narratives, while our platform, Lica, can handle the rest.”
"Replit felt like the easiest way to get things done," so they built and hosted Lica on Replit. With its recent pre-seed fundraising round, Lica is poised to make a significant impact on how we communicate and share our stories.
Experience the magic of Lica for yourself. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a creative, or just someone with a story to tell, Lica offers an unparalleled platform to bring your narratives to life. Join the waitlist at lica.world, and follow Priyaa and Purvanshi’s journey on social media.
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