If you like houseplants, but despite your efforts, they don’t really succeed – you don’t have to give up growing them. Young Bosnian from Ljubuški has the solution, he invented a smart container that makes work easier and can turn an amateur into an excellent botanist. He invented a smart container that helps in choosing plants, and then takes care of the plant based on the collected data from its environment.
Frano Pimorac, as he says himself, a former plant killer, started the realization of the project of making a smart container for plants out of a desire to solve his problem. While still a student at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics in Varaždin, he received several plants as a gift, but, he says, despite his efforts, they did not survive for long.
“My plants were dying by themselves, after two or three weeks each, I didn’t know why. After I tried to find some solution online – there was none. Then I wrote that idea down, that it would be good to do it, and after working on a big startup, I decided to do something about it,” he says.
This innovative product comes in combination with an associated application that scans the conditions in the room through sensors and recommends optimal species to the user from a database containing more than 500 plants. After selecting a plant, the user receives information about the recommended heat, light and humidity.
“…if you have a monstera, you click on it in the application and we know exactly how much water it needs. If something is out of your control, say, the amount of light, you get a notification, i.e. the plant tells you that there is not enough light,” explains Primorac.
The inventor is from Hercegovina and, he says, it was only fitting that the dish also bear the original Herzegovinian name.
“Choncha in Herzegovina, at least in Ljubuški, is said for any vessel and while everything was on paper – it was written chancha. Despite five or six meetings, we did not manage to change the name, so we added CH and now it is Choncha, to be a little more global”, adds Primorac.
How global they are is shown by the fact that Choncha has already reached serious investors. In the beginning, he tells Federalna, it was not easy. The startup climate in his native Ljubuški, he says, was not the best, which is why the story about Choncha is swirling in Zagreb.
“Every investor is interested in whether your product will sell, and we were able to prove it through Kickstarter, which is a Crowdfunding platform where people buy products that they know are not ready. There, we collected 11,000 euros in twenty days, with 0 euros spent on marketing. That was proof for us that people want to buy it,” says Primorac.
Frano and his team, which consists of young people under the age of 26, students of informatics, mechanical engineering and agronomy, are in the phase of starting mass production. It is planned that Choncha will be on the shelves already at the beginning of summer this year.
