From Startup Buzz to Mythoria: Writing a Business Plan in the Real World

Last weekend, I found myself standing in front of a jury at Startup Buzz, hands slightly shaking, pitch deck in one hand, Mythoria in the other.

Startup Buzz is a student-run organization at FEP (Faculdade de Economia do Porto) that exists for one reason: to get young people out of “play it safe” mode and into “let’s actually build something” mode. It’s a place where ideas are dragged out of notebooks and thrown into the light.

I didn’t win first place.
I got second.

And honestly? That hurt for about 10 minutes… and then it became one of the most useful weekends I’ve had on this Mythoria journey.

Because in those hours of pitches, questions, and hallway conversations, Mythoria stopped being “a cool idea with a pretty website” and started behaving like what it really wants to be: a company.

This post is about that shift — from weekend pitch to long-term business plan — and what it means to build something in Portugal, right now, in the age of AI.

Entrepreneurship in Portugal: Sunshine, Bureaucracy, and a Growing Backbone

Portugal is currently playing a slightly schizophrenic role in the startup world.

On one side, we’re still fighting old enemies:

Reports on the Portuguese startup ecosystem keep repeating the same chorus:
bureaucracy, regulatory complexity and access to early-stage funding are still some of the biggest obstacles founders face here.
It’s still harder than it should be to raise a proper pre-seed or seed round locally compared to other European hubs, as highlighted in the Portugal’s Startup Ecosystem Report 2024 on Scribd.

On the other side, something important has changed:

Portugal has been climbing the European Innovation Scoreboard, moving from below the pack in 2018 to much closer to the EU average; by 2025 it rose from 19th to 16th place, still a “Moderate Innovator”, but clearly progressing.
International observers now describe Portugal as a kind of “best-kept digital secret”, with districts like the Beato Innovation District in Lisbon becoming symbols of a new tech identity.

And this week, while I was catching my breath from Startup Buzz, Lisbon was hosting the Web Summit again: four days, around 70,000 participants, 1,000 investors, 900 speakers and 2,500 startups, with Artificial Intelligence as the central theme.

So yes:
We still have paperwork from the 20th century, but we also have events, talent and tools from the 21st.

Mythoria was born exactly in this tension.

The Seed of Mythoria 🌱

Mythoria started in a small, simple moment.

One evening in the Algarve, I made up a quick story for my younger brother and his friends, just to pull them away from the hypnotic scroll of their phones. Their faces changed. The room got quiet. For a few minutes, they weren’t consuming content — they were inside the story.

That tiny moment became a question that refused to go away:

What if anyone — a parent, a grandparent, a couple, a group of friends — could turn their real memories into a fully illustrated book in minutes, not months?

That question is Mythoria.

At its core, Mythoria is:

An AI-powered platform that turns your memories (a few lines, a voice note, a photo) into fully illustrated, one-of-a-kind books — ready to read, listen to as an audiobook, and even print.

Not just “put the kid’s name in a template story”.
Not just “another photo album”.

Real, original stories that literally wouldn’t exist without you.

The Four Gaps We’re Trying to Close

When we started working seriously on the business plan, we realised Mythoria wasn’t just solving “one” problem. It was quietly intersecting four:

The Passive Screen
Kids are bingeing reels and shorts. They rarely get to star in their own stories. We want to flip that: less scrolling, more starring.
The “Storyless” Photobook
We have thousands of photos in the cloud… but almost no narrative. Endless grids, almost no arc.
The Impersonal Gift
“Personalised” gifts often mean printing a name on a mug or a fixed book. It’s cute. It’s not really about you.
The Creator Gap
Everyone says they’d like to write a book one day. Almost no one has the time, tools or skills to actually do it.

Mythoria’s business plan is built on a simple bet:

If we make it ridiculously easy to turn real life into beautifully illustrated stories, people will pay to turn memories into keepsakes.

The Mythoria Way: True Personalisation, Not Template Tricks

Most “personalised book” companies today work like this:

You pick a fixed story template
You change the name, hair color, maybe the skin tone
You get a version of a story that a million other families already have

It’s customisation, not creation.

Mythoria chose a different path:

You tell us your memory:
“That time we got lost in Lisbon and found the perfect pastel de nata.”
“The bedtime dragon story I’ve been telling my daughter for years.”
“How my grandparents met on a train.”
The platform generates a brand-new narrative, with unique illustrations in a style you choose.
The audiobook voice can match the mood: cosy, adventurous, bedtime calm, etc.

No two Mythoria books are the same, because no two memories are the same. That “true personalisation” is our main product promise — and the backbone of the business model.

The Competition: Templates, Tools and Giants

Of course, Mythoria doesn’t live in a vacuum. There are three main types of players circling the same territory:

Template-based personalised book brands
Think of the classic model: you choose a fixed story, tweak the child’s name and avatar, and get a beautiful but fundamentally pre-written book. These companies have strong brands and good distribution — but personalisation stops at the surface.
Generic AI story generators
There are plenty of apps and tools (and even features inside big tech platforms) that will “generate a story with AI”. They’re fun toys, sometimes useful tools, but they usually don’t go all the way to a polished, print-ready, emotionally consistent book with illustrations, layout and audio.
Photobook and print-on-demand platforms
These are great at printing photos, calendars and albums. Some are starting to sprinkle AI on top (automatic captions, layouts), but they’re still built around images first, story second.

Mythoria positions itself in the middle of all this:

More deeply personal than the template brands.
More end-to-end and crafted than generic AI toys.
More story-driven than the photobook world.

We’re not trying to win on raw AI horsepower. We’re trying to win on how human the final book feels — and how closely it hugs a real memory.

The Market: Tiny Moments in a Big Industry

On paper, the market looks… huge.

Our pitch deck describes Mythoria as playing in a blended space:

The personalised children’s book market (already a sizeable global niche)
A meaningful slice of the photobook / keepsake market, where people pay to transform photos into something more lasting than a social media post

Put together, you’re looking at a multi-billion euro global opportunity just around personalised, meaningful storytelling products.

We’re not trying to own the world; we’re starting simple:

Focus first on Europe, where gifting traditions, literacy, and family culture align well with what we offer.
Capture a tiny fraction of that market over the next 3 years, but with high average revenue per story thanks to our upsells (audiobooks, printed hardcovers, translations, etc.).

We’re not building “the Netflix of stories”.
We’re building “the tiny studio that makes your family’s film, on-demand.”

The Business Model: Credits, Not Subscriptions

One big decision in the Mythoria business plan: no subscriptions (at least for now).

Instead, Mythoria runs on a credit system:

You buy packs of credits (small, medium, large)
Every action “costs” credits: generating a story, adding illustrations, creating an audiobook, preparing a print-ready PDF, etc.
You use them when memories happen: a birthday, a special trip, a newborn, an anniversary.

Why credits?

People don’t want another monthly fee silently draining their account.
Our product is naturally event-based. You don’t create a family story every Tuesday at 7pm. You do it when something meaningful happens.
Credits let us keep pricing transparent while managing real costs (AI, printing, payments).

Behind the scenes, the plan is simple but strict:

AI + printing = variable cost for each story
Our job is to keep those unit costs predictable and low enough that we can:
- Offer at least one very cheap or free “onboarding” story
- Still have a healthy margin when customers fall in love and upgrade to bigger packs or printed editions

The business plan is basically a long argument answering:

“Can this thing produce enough margin per story to be a real company, not just a cute demo?”

The Growth Engine: Stories as Tiny Ambassadors 📚

One of the most exciting parts of the Mythoria strategy is that every book is its own little salesperson.

The plan mixes:

Digital acquisition
Using AI-managed ads (Meta, Google) to find people at key “gifting moments”: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, back-to-school, Mother’s/Father’s Day, etc.
Physical-world capture
This is where Mythoria gets fun — and weird in a good way:
- QR codes on restaurant placemats where families are already making memories.
- Partnerships with zoos, aquariums, museums so kids can leave not only with a ticket stub, but a book about their day.
- Live “Story Forge” demos at book fairs and family events: Porto and Lisbon book fairs alone receive hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, a perfect stage for instant “wow” moments.
Word-of-mouth
A printed Mythoria book on a coffee table is a conversation starter:

“Wait, where did you get this?”

That’s free marketing we bake into the product itself.

Our moat isn’t “we have the fanciest model”. Models can be swapped.
Our moat is getting Mythoria in front of families at the exact moment they’re living the memory.

Proof of Life: What We’ve Done So Far

For a business plan to be more than a wish list, it needs evidence.

Right now, Mythoria has:

A fully working web app, responsive on desktop, tablet and mobile
Mythoria live in five locales, so families in multiple countries can already create and read in their own language
A fully working management portal on the back-office side, where we can track books, users, credits, and operations
A story engine that already handles:
- Text generation
- Multiple illustration styles
- Audiobook creation
- Print-ready PDFs

All of this — the consumer app and the management portal — was built in under three months, powered by late-night sprints, AI pair-programming and more than a bit of vibe-coding.

On the market side, even with a tiny budget and almost no marketing, we’ve already seen:

Hundreds of registered users
Hundreds of stories generated
A conversion rate from “try it” to “pay for it” that is strong enough to justify scaling if we invest in acquisition

We even managed to pick up an award at InovaGaia and, now, a second place at Startup Buzz — small external signals that we’re not completely crazy.

And recently, Mythoria took a bigger step:
we were selected for the Google for Startups Program.

For a tiny team trying to turn a beloved prototype into a robust platform, this feels like the right kind of wind in our sails. It’s a signal that we’re building on top of an ecosystem where many AI unicorns already live — and that we can stay resilient and scalable while keeping the storytelling experience close, warm and human.

The Challenges: Let’s Not Romanticise This 🎢

Now for the honest part.

1. The “Copycat” Fear

Yes, big tech companies are already releasing story tools. Yes, some of them are “free”.

If Mythoria was just “a nicer interface on top of an LLM”, we’d be dead before we start.

The business plan spends a lot of time on this point:

The code is copyable.
The ecosystem — partnerships with zoos, schools, events, book fairs, family brands — is not so easy to clone.
Our defence is not “secret sauce AI”.
It’s being the first meaningful storytelling layer sitting between families and all this raw AI capability.

2. The “Two-Person Team” Problem

Mythoria is, at heart, a micro-team:

One young, hungry storyteller who can switch between product, marketing and learning to code.
A mentor - one experienced entrepreneur with a background in distributed software and AI.
A legion of Oumpa-lumpas - They code, test, deploy, marketer, make business plans and even help write this text!

This is both our advantage and our risk:

Advantage:
- Low fixed costs
- Fast decisions
- We use AI internally to design, code, copywrite, test and prototype at a pace a traditional team would struggle to match.
Risk:
- Burnout
- Limited capacity for parallel experiments
- Investors worrying about “key person risk”

The business plan’s answer is:

Use AI + carefully chosen freelancers/partners to punch above our weight, then expand the core team once revenue justifies it.

3. The Portugal Factor

Building this from Portugal adds a specific layer of difficulty:

Early-stage funding requires extra hustle and often international conversations.
Bureaucratic processes and legal frameworks still aren’t “startup speed”.

But it also adds something powerful:

Access to events like Web Summit and Startup Buzz, where you can test your narrative and meet partners in days, not months.
A growing innovation reputation that wasn’t here 10–15 years ago.

In other words: the ecosystem is imperfect, but alive.

The Opportunities: Why I Still Believe This Story Ends Well ✨

When I zoom out from all the spreadsheets, pitch decks and sleepless nights, the Mythoria business plan boils down to three big opportunities:

A Cultural Shift in How We Remember
We’re moving from “photo storage” to “story curation”. People don’t want 50,000 images buried in a cloud folder — they want five stories their kids will read again and again.
AI as a Creative Partner, Not Just a Productivity Hack
Most AI products are about speed: write faster, code faster, summarise faster.
Mythoria is about depth: making emotionally resonant artifacts that feel human, not synthetic.
Portugal as a Launchpad, Not a Limitation
Yes, there are challenges. But if a small, AI-native team in Portugal can already build a functioning, loved, revenue-generating product in a few months… what happens when we add real capital, strong partners and focused time?

That’s the bet Mythoria is making.

A Note to Angels and Early Believers

If you’re an angel or seed-stage investor and this resonates with you — the product, the timing, the way AI can be used for depth instead of just speed — I’d love to talk.

You can try Mythoria directly at mythoria.pt and, if you want to go deeper, reach out by email at hello@mythoria.pt.
Bring your questions, your skepticism, and your curiosity. We’re still early enough that the right partners can shape the next chapters with us.

Closing Chapter (For Now)

Startup Buzz gave me something I didn’t expect: not a trophy, but a mirror.

In that mirror I saw:

The courage it takes to stand in front of strangers and say,

“This is my idea, please try to break it.”
The reality of building a business in Portugal: full of opportunity, still full of friction.
And the quiet conviction that Mythoria is more than an app — it’s a new way of holding onto the stories that make us who we are.

We’re still early in this plot.
There will be twists, probably a few villains (bureaucracy, bugs, maybe an outage on Christmas Eve 😅).
But the direction feels right.

Mythoria is, ironically, just another story.
But it’s one I fully intend to finish.