NAME OF STARTUP: Òtító
FOUNDER: Timi Olotu
THE IDEA: What is the problem being solved by your startup / business?:
If you want to learn about the range of opinions on a given issue, there’s an overwhelming amount of sources on the internet for doing so (from blogs to sites like Reddit). In fact, that’s part of the problem of the (mis)Information Age.
The democratisation of commentary has eroded our ability to apply standards to online information.
People have grown accustomed to consuming false, half-true and biased information, as if they were facts.
Òtító exists to bring balance to this picture—it gives people a place to go when they really just want to get to grips with the facts of an issue. No ads, no ideological biases, no political agendas.
THE FOUNDER’S STORY: When and how did you come up with the idea for the business?:
Timi Olotu was born in Nigeria and moved to England in his teens. He studied law (with minors in politics, philosophy and international relations) before completing a master’s degree in English (creative writing).
He has helped build unicorn software companies, like PatSnap, and worked at Facebook between 2018 and 2020.
He used to write political articles on Medium, and became quite dismayed by the fractious political landscape in the UK and the US. He decided to create Òtító as a way to help and productively channel his frustration.
WHO IS THE CUSTOMER: What is the typical profile of your target customer? Where would they be located?:
Fact Checkers, Researchers, Forum Users, Politically Engaged Millennials, Quora Users, Wikipedia Editors
LESSONS TO SHARE: What 3 key lessons from your startup journey you’d like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs?:
Òtító is where anyone can go to get the facts straight, when it comes to complex, important issues.
The app is a crowdsourced library of factual claims that helps people stay informed, while avoiding misinformation and bias.
Because of its crowdsourcing model, òtító’s library of factual claims is always growing and being updated. It doesn’t require misinformation to emerge before it is tackled. It is fact curation (proactive), rather than fact checking (reactive).
City: Grayson House, London, United Kingdom.
Website URL: https://www.otito.io
Number of Employees: 1-5
Company’s LinkedIN URL: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openotito
