Age: 27
Education: Radioelectronic devices and printing technologies, Kyiv Polytechnic Institute
Profession: Designer
Did you know? When Prykhodchenko was a student, he created his first mobile app inspired by a friend’s hobby. The app helped in making friendship bracelets.
In mid-March, when the government first imposed a lockdown in Ukraine to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Kyiv resident Andrii Prykhodchenko was surfing the web looking for ways he could help.
Public transport was canceled and the doctors were searching for volunteer drivers to take them to hospitals. Prykhodchenko, a creative director and co-founder at Reprezent, a company designing presentations including for TEDx Kyiv, was happy to help and drive someone to work.
There was a problem though. Doctors and drivers failed to effectively communicate with one another.
The doctors created a chat in a messenger app, but it did not help much. The number of people there quickly grew to up to 12,000. It was overloaded with new requests for free trips and older ones were getting lost.
“I opened that chat because I am a driver. I have a car and I was able to help. But after seeing what was happening in this chat, I realized that I would not help anyone there, because it was just impossible to track who needed what,” Prykhodchenko told the Kyiv Post.
It was around 11 p. m. on March 18 when Prykhodchenko identified the problem and 3 a. m. when he fixed it. Despite not being a programmer, he managed to create the app in four hours thanks to “no code development platform,” a tool for creating software without coding.
“I dropped a line in that chat saying: ‘Folks, I made an application. It must be more convenient there. Use it. I’m going to bed,’” he said.
When he woke up, around a dozen requests for trips were already there, along with a few error reports. Prykhodchenko fixed the errors and moved on to the next task, attracting users to the app he created.
He called his app Cometa.
His girlfriend and friends helped to fund the app — it cost nearly $60 — and to spread the word about it. They negotiated free advertising on the radio and on billboards. By the end of the day of the app’s launch, over 500 people had registered on it.
According to Prykhodchenko, almost 3,900 trips to and from hospitals took place thanks to Cometa during the two months of lockdown.
After Ukraine resumed public transport on May 22, the application ceased to be in demand.
“As soon as quarantine came to an end, there was not a single request for a ride,” Prykhodchenko said.
“The biggest reward was to see how a doctor says thank you to a driver. This means that there are at least two people who are happy about it,” he said.
