Andrew Amann is co-founder and chief executive of NineTwoThree AI Studio, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Danvers, Massachusetts. A former nuclear engineer, he started the company with Pavel Kirillov out of a side project, an app called Inigo, that the two built at night for five years.
A Developer Wanted Flyer in Boston
In 2012 he was working as a project manager and earning patents and awards for work that belonged to his employer, and he decided to start a company of his own (NineTwoThree). His first idea was a wristband that would swap contact details when two people shook hands. He needed someone who could code, so on March 13, 2013, at a startup event at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Boston, Massachusetts, he walked the room handing out “Developer Wanted” flyers. Kirillov, a systems engineer who had recently moved from Israel, took one, and within ten days the two had replaced the wristbands with QR codes.
Inigo From 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.
For five years they built Inigo, a digital business card app, from 9 p.m. until as late as 3 a.m. while keeping their day jobs. Kirillov wrote the apps, and Amann taught himself to code websites, market on social media, sell and design. The company says the founders spent less than $40,000 over those years. Inigo reached 600,000 downloads and about $20,000 a month in subscription revenue by 2017, and on September 1, 2017, the Canadian company Royaltie bought Inigo’s product, code, name and customer list.
The two kept the client work they had been doing on the side since 2014 for companies such as the baby products maker Dorel. Needing a new name that night, they took Kirillov’s suggestion and named the business for the hours they had worked, NineTwoThree.