Nicki Klein and Melissa Hargis, the founders of Shortkey, both graduated from Sabio’s second cohort in October 2014 and are already on the path toward becoming successful tech entrepreneurs.
This weekend the dynamic duo competed in the AT&T 2016 Developer Summit Hackathon in Las Vegas and won $5,000 for creating a Vize, an app for project-based learning with reward incentives. The award that Nicki and Melissa won was for the best app developed by a women led team.
Vize isn’t the first app that Nicki and Melissa have created. This fall they founded Chorbit, an iOS navigation app that is currently for sale in the App Store. Chorbit helps users find the most efficient route to complete errands. The app was released on October 25, 2015 to the public.
“Chorbit is a multi-destination routing app, so you can say I need to get coffee, go to Target, and the pharmacy. Plug those things in and the app will find you the most efficient route to take,” Nicki said. “We’re in the process of releasing version two, which will have themed routes such as tourist routes, in addition to being able to create your own routes.”
Nicki and Melissa consider themselves lucky to have found out about Sabio when they did in 2014. At the time, both women were considering relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend coding bootcamp, but these Southern California based ladies found out about Sabio and signed up.
Right now, Nicki and Melissa are focused on releasing more apps so that they can devote all of their time to their growing business. Melissa just quit her job this week so that she can devote more time to Shortkey, their app development company. They also plan to compete in another Hackathon, and if they win there, Nicki plans to scale back her current job to part-time to devote more time to growing their business.
