After reaching #13 on the Canadian App Store in the Social Networking category while touching rounded corners with the likes of Google+, POF, Twitter, Skype, Facebook and Tumblr, we may be lucky enough to share with you what could be our favorite Canadian startup of the year. Founded by a team of four from Quebec, YourExtraLife is a place for endless opportunities, exploration, discoveries, and challenges.
Built as a game for real life, YourExtraLife is all about venturing out of your self-generated comfort block and enabling everyone to dive into new things or activities, inspiring friends, and discovering inventive people. You complete creative real-life challenges by taking pictures, and unlock harder and harder ones as the community validates your photos. 125 challenges for 5 different themes (romance, culture, nightlife, altruism and gourmet) are currently available.
YourExtraLife is one of the few apps that actually gets its community to DO things, and not be passive on their phones. The app reaches out to creative people and photo-addicts to venture out of their comfort zone and live meaningful moments. To help make that possible, the challenges have been thought out by a team of highly trained internal staff members. They begin by gathering a group of people who are deeply interested in a certain theme and brainstorm hundreds of challenge ideas. The founding team then filters through them to only present the best of the best and most accessible challenges. The challenges are rated by difficulty, and then affixed with an identity featuring icons, descriptions and titles. The A/B testing is then completed by sharing the “challenge tree” with another group to find places that are off-topic or awkward. In the end we’re left with challenges that are thoroughly thought out with every detail inspected and tested to accomplish in our own lives.
We asked co-founder Philip Barclay what his favorite challenges are on YourExtraLife: “I’m all about the culture challenges. I like discovering new artists, new creators and new inspirations. These challenge are easy to integrate in your routine and can make a big impact on the way you think.”
Packed with challenges in Gourmet, Nightlife, Culture, Altruism and Romance, YourExtraLife “is a very good way to get ideas on new things to do. It is a way to share unique and meaningful moments with your friends, and a community that also enjoy trying new things.” Says Philip. “Ultimately, it is about breaking the routine and get more out of life. (You’ll also have pretty cool answers when someone asks you ‘What’s up?’).”
To further share the growth, heartbreaks, successes and everything else, YourExtraLife’s team is sharing the human side of their startup life in video episodes. We all know running a startup has peaks and valleys, its interesting to finally see a well shot documentary style recap of their story as it happens to put a face behind the app. Grab YourExtraLife on the app store and follow Canada’s latest startup on their website or Vimeo. Or watch the first few episodes about the startups behind the scenes below.