Siempo

Andrew Murray Dunn and his co-founders Andreas Gala and Jorge Selva connected in 2014 over a shared frustration with smartphone addiction and constant digital distraction. Jorge had experienced the clarity of using a flip phone on business trips to South America, while Andreas felt corporate burnout after testing endless smartphones as a product manager at Yahoo. They began hacking on what would become Siempo—a humane smartphone interface designed to support mental health and wellbeing.

The early team initially pursued a hardware approach, working with engineers and industrial designers on a flip phone competitor similar to The Light Phone. However, they quickly hit the steep barriers of manufacturing hardware from scratch. In summer 2016, Andrew and part-time CTO Mayank Saxena joined the team, and the group pivoted to a white-label Android device with a redesigned software interface focused on conscious user experience. They launched a Kickstarter in March 2017 and raised $50k in device sales with heavy press coverage, but discovered users perceived high switching costs for new hardware and wanted the software experience on their existing devices instead.

Acting on this feedback, Andrew and Mayank pursued the software path as a launcher/home screen application on Android. They brought on a product designer and released an Alpha in December 2017, followed by a Beta launch on the Google Play Store in March 2018. The timing felt perfect—TechCrunch featured them, broadcast TV covered the story, and they won awards with stellar ratings. The cultural moment around digital wellness was ripe.

Their primary growth driver was PR and media coverage, which generated awareness and downloads organically. The Beta launch resonated strongly with audiences concerned about digital wellbeing, and they built a community of engaged early users. However, converting this attention into paid subscriptions proved challenging—the team kept the app free during Beta and never experimented with monetization, missing early revenue signals.

What worked: exceptional product-market timing aligned with mainstream concern about smartphone addiction; strong earned media and industry recognition; a founding team deeply aligned on mission and values; strategic pivots based on user feedback; building a public benefit corporation structure reflecting their values.

What didn't work: the platform gap—being unable to build on iOS meant losing half the US market and most investor iPhones, creating perception risk; remote team structure with mixed full and part-time contributors diluted cohesion and execution; no experienced CEO leading the organization; massive time spent on fundraising with minimal results, especially after Apple and Google announced Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing features, which spooked investors who viewed the space as too early and too controlled by giants; overestimating how cultural interest would translate to investor appetite; insufficient user research and validation of core assumptions; overly complex feature set transferred from their original hardware vision rather than building simple, focused software; weak onboarding experience that caused high drop-off rates despite investment in the area.

After pausing operations in summer 2018, the team rebuilt with exceptional talent (ex-Apple, SpaceX, BCG engineers) and attempted to relaunch through equity crowdfunding (WeFunder) in 2019. Days before launch, roadblocks appeared. They delayed, then spent the summer exploring B2B models but never launched the campaign due to burnout and continued lack of resonance with investors. Despite leaving "no stone unturned" in seeking new leadership or acquisition partners, they made the difficult choice to dissolve Siempo in 2020. The digital wellness space, though culturally ascendant, remained too nascent and too constrained by platform giants for venture capital to embrace early entrants.