The Third Eye has had the pleasure to interview Cécilia Mzayek, Founder of TimeNinja and Winner of the 2018 Jaye StartUp Programme.
Bestowing these titles is an accomplishment on its own. Here’s what Cécilia had to say about the TimeNinja app, and her overall experience.
Interviewer: Could you briefly describe what are ‘Celuna’ and ‘TimeNinja’?
Cécilia: “Celuna is the company under which I work, and TimeNinja is the app I created.
Interviewer: What inspired you to form part of the StartUp Programme back in 2017?
Cécilia: “When I moved to Malta, I attended a JAYE presentation and at that point, I had an idea of what entrepreneurship can do. I have a family of entrepreneurs, but while they had always pushed me to do business, for me business was boring and something I did not want to do. But then in 2014, I went to Jordan in the summer for a thing called Endeavour. It is kind of like JAYE, but for adults and I went there to watch. I saw how startups were pitching ideas and how the judges proceeded and that was when I realised; OK I want to start a startup…. I realised that business is not just numbers and sales.”
Interviewer: How did you get the idea of ‘Celuna’?
Cécilia: “Brainstorming… For me, a Startup means solving a problem, and a problem for me at that time was time management.” Cécilia describes how she needed to research ways to tackle this issue, and came across what is known as the Pomodoro Technique; “this says that the brain doesn’t focus for 2 hours at a time and that it’s better to focus for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. This is how the brain will retain more information. In fact, when I went to JAYE, I remembered this technique, and how in my 5-minute breaks I used to play a game.” This is how Cécilia came up with an idea to create an app by incorporating all of the techniques that had helped her with time management.
Interviewer: Did you expect to win back in 2018?
Cécilia: “I don’t want to sound pretentious or anything, but yes I did expect to win, for the simple reason that I was a bit older than the others. I could see that I was putting a lot of work into it – I was breathing Celuna.” Cécilia describes how at a certain point, she missed 3 nights of sleep and had to sacrifice a lot for it, prioritising her JAYE deadline over studying and part-time work at certain points.
Interviewer: Do you have any ideas in store concerning future projects?
Cécilia: “Right now I am working on a project called ‘Tixtri’. It’s an online marketplace to help shops that cannot afford e-commerce of their own.” She claims that she has a couple ideas of where she’d like TimeNinja to go, specifically working to turn it into more of a “social-studying platform”, and make it more into a social media for studying rather than base it on keeping scores.
Interviewer: How has the StartUp Programme changed you?
Cécilia: “It has changed me so much. First of all – and I cannot stress enough how much JAYE has changed my life – it has shown me that I am capable of really hard work, even though I’ve always been a procrastinator. I never had to ‘force’ myself to work because I enjoyed it… It taught me a lot about empathy, and how it doesn’t matter what your background is because in the end, you can do anything.” Cécilia claims that with JAYE she found exactly what she wants to do, “I found my way.”
Interviewer: What advice would you give future participants of the StartUp Programme?
Cécilia: “Give it your all. Don’t worry about being too young to have a Startup. Take it as if it’s something you can actually do, and find solutions for all the problems you have. Take it one problem at a time.”
The Third Eye would like to thank Cécilia Mzayek for her time and wish her luck on her future endeavors!