Whoa Apps was founded in February of 2018 by myself, Peter Mavronicolas. I first chose to go in the direction of Augmented Reality when I was in San Francisco for Developer Week 2017. While waiting for my Uber Pool (as Developers on a budget do) I had a conversation with another Developer on his way to the conference.We struck up a conversation about Pokemon Go and I asked how it was developed. After letting me know that Niantic used Unity 3D, I instantly decided to that when I returned home, I was going to concentrate on learning Unity 3D. The rest was history. After a dozen published applications, I’m slowly progressing through my pipeline of 50+ projects I have on the back burner.
Developer
Peter Mavronicolas
Augmented Reality Develoiper
Peter Mavronicolas (that’s me) is the Founder and Developer of Whoa Apps Inc.
"Developing in Augmented Reality is about as easy as eating an ice cream cone. The hardest part is getting our wonderful users to download and understand what Augmented Reality is. Rest assured. When they find out, it’s always a jaw dropping, Whoa! experience that they always want to replicate." - Peter Mavronicolas
Founder, Whoa Apps
Company History
2015
True Story. After returning home from Medical School to study for my Medical Board Examination (NBME), I reached a crossroads in my life when I stopped to take a break from studying and stared at my phone for 5 minutes. I wondered how the icons on my iPhone were placed there and then went further to imagine how one would make such a complex application that’s rendered on such a small screen. About a week later, I downloaded Xcode and began my journey learning how to develop an application. I went from studying most of the day to learning how to teach myself to code. The tragedy of it all is that I abandoned any hopes of becoming a Medical Doctor. Yes. It stung.
2016
After studying and failing my final NBME (I think it was the 4th attempt) while living in Fairplay, CO, I finally published my first iOS application for the iPhone. Distance Rides was my very first startup that captured the attention of a few Venture Capitalists that I reached out to during Collision Conference in New Orleans, LA. It was criticized for… pretty much everything. UI/UX, functionality, overly complex logo, etc. I was learning and in the beginning you will have 99% of your competition encouraging you to quit. I did not.
2017
After a few updates of Distance Rides, I visited Silicon Valley on a number of occasions in order to obtain seed funding. Failure after failure, I returned to Denver empty handed. I abandoned all other coding languages for the time being and concentrated solely on Javascript and C# using Unity. If I was to make an impact on the World, I had no doubt it would be in Augmented Reality.
2018
I continued teaching myself Unity with the help of some great instructors posting YouTube videos along with instructional videos provided by Unity. I had published a few applications by this time and attended what would be my final conference in San Francisco. I noticed that my capabilities were sufficient for publishing applications but needed improvement in integrating databases; technologically speaking, the key element in scaling a startup. Somehow I ended up searching for my Company and CrunchBase together and discovered I was 2018 Top New Tech Companies (#39, I think) out of the entire Planet. For some oddly peculiar, instinctive, knee-jerk reaction, I decided to close the Company. The reason. It attracted too much attention.
2019
In 2019, I made a major advancement in my development capabilities by becoming a dual platform Developer for both iOS and Android. I continued publishing applications and pivoted towards the development of applications which I so vulgarly named “dumb apps”. They were applications that had no relevance in the advancement of humanity toward a greater good other than eliciting brief spikes of dopamine in the dopaminergic pathways around the synaptic clefts of the brain. Ouija Board AR was my first application published for Android and to this day I receive a monthly deposit in my bank account from Google ranging from $2 to $6. It doesn’t sound like much but replicating this process every week for 20 years and I have a decent retirement to look forward to fully funded by Alphabet Inc. I would earn approximately $5,200 per month without adjusting for inflation. Not too shabby.
2020
The pandemic struck and with it came… good fortune? Yep. I was one fo the few fortunate people that actually acquired my very first Augmented Reality Customer to develop an application for. He reached out to me because he had searched the hashtag #augmentedreality on twitter and found my postings along with links to my applications. After one very transparent discussion with my first client, he had full confidence in my abilities as a Developer. The application was published 60 days later for iOs and Android fully equipped with Authentication, furniture placement, 3D models of the Companies architecture and color-features that alter the patterns of wall canvases. Today, I’m a full time Graduate Student and continue to work on my pipeline in hopes of finding my Flappy Bird. I’m still pursuing startups as a Founder but I’m a bit more quiet these days. After all, there’s no use in making a commotion until you’ve struck Gold.
