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appsky is a software development company here in omaha and we specialize in design software and consulting on mobile app and web app projects we also work on full stack applications cloud implementations api integrations and we're moving into app modernization as well i was inspired to start apski while i was still a student at uno i had been able to work on a few side projects as a freelancer and kind of got exposed to that earlier than maybe most would while i was still a student i got to

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work on some cool mobile app projects and things like that and eventually kind of started leaning towards you know what does it look like to start building a team or having some additional support and help and also at the time i was working on my it innovation capstone my senior year there for the full year and apski labs at the time is what it was called snapchat sapski now was my capstone project so i use that to interview current ceos in the space of companies that do similar things to what apsk does i also

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interviewed a lot of students because i kind of wanted to take this in a direction of allowing students to get involved earlier allowing uno students to get involved earlier in their careers and and then you know do more things like i was able to experience when i was freelancing as a student so i kind of took that student design development shop approach and really identified that there was a niche kind of gap in the market for mobile specifically at the time and that was kind of what i was really interested in so

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i just kind of naturally became app and karensky is my last name so that's where we got apski [Music] well we've been around for four years um as of this november so it's a great milestone um you know obviously i'd like to to keep the doors open here for as long as we possibly can i think that um you know we set out for at least a five-year journey and so we're coming up on that in the next year here and we want to hit some good milestones i think the the long-term vision for

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apsk itself is to kind of be one of the go-to uh midwestern development shops for design development and consulting and in product market fit product market launch strategies lean canvas agile those kinds of things is what we focus on with our customers so i'd like to grow to a team of potentially 20 to 30 i think is sustainable here in the region there are quite a few other companies in the area that are indirect competitors they offer similar services but different technology stacks and a lot of those companies have grown

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to similar sizes so that's kind of my my long-term vision for apski and then kind of related to similar stuff that maverick venture fund is doing and we've actually started launching a new company called apsky ventures and that's really been my personal focus the last year about a year of what we're trying to do is create a venture studio that partners with entrepreneurs or individuals or businesses to help develop their product from napkin concept all the way to kind of their their seed round or even their

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exit so it'd be more of a long-term involvement with uh with partners rather than clients and um we've got a couple of those here in the works and hope to gain some more cool opportunities in the next couple of years um that will not be a high volume venture so we'll be very choosy as to the to the deals that we want to do and we're obviously we're not in a in a spot to provide capital investment but a lot of it will be sweat equity and kind of our expertise around product market launch

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and digital strategy and kind of knowing the steps in the pipeline and the right people to talk to in the community so that's been my big focus and hopefully the two will kind of uh absolute absolute ventures will wrap into each other over the next couple of years maverick venture fund one was an extremely great opportunity to to learn so we were at kind of a growth stage in our company we were dealing with some some pivots some financial ups and downs and it gave our partners and myself an opportunity to

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help kind of bolster that gap which actually came in handy right on time when we needed it which is which was great and so it helped us kind of keep people on the team and push through a gap that we had experienced in project you know workload so that that was extremely valuable and then being able to then participate throughout the year with the maverick venture fund and the students involved there and allow them to kind of see into a view of how how that had affected our company and and you know what happened over the year

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that they had been involved in that investment and i think it was a great rewarding experience um would absolutely do it again with another venture or or even apsk if we have the opportunity but we have definitely kept it in mind for some of our upcoming projects with apsk ventures and i think um you know we try to work with a lot of people here in the community and it seems like that's what uh mvf does as well well one if it's not your own money then i mean heck yeah that makes it even better but i think

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it's a it's an amazing opportunity for these students to get a really good look at what it actually takes to run a business a lot of people have you know kind of a grandiose vision of what an entrepreneur life looks like and at the end of the day it's a lot of hard work it's a lot of grind a lot of ups and downs a lot of personal victories and failures and it's very cool that that students which is a big passion of mine getting students involved earlier get the opportunity to make actual

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investments that will impact companies that are related to either uno or our community over the next couple of years and hopefully we can see that fund grow to to allow students to make even bigger investments to help you know startups and scalable technologies and things like that so generally i think it's uh it's fantastic and i'm really it exemplifies our our motto which is my way to be great yep great question um abski is all over the internet so apsky appsky.io is our website we have a

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facebook page instagram we try to keep pretty active on linkedin i think that's probably one of our more engaged online social communities we also participate in some of the local tech groups and entrepreneur groups and that's been a little tricky with kovid but you know we're trying to stay involved there otherwise uh my email is just taylor apsky dot io and feel free to reach out i'm happy to help however i can [Music] you