Venture Lab Augusta (VLA) is a collaboration among the Aiken Chamber of Commerce, Make Startups, based in theClubhou.se at the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center, and the South Carolina Research Authority. This is part of the Aiken Innovation Corridor, which the chamber announced in August 2025.
In this time of hi-tech and smart devices, the love of reading can get lost in the hustle and bustle.
Jackie Viramotes is developing TrueStoryBro, LLC. As its website explains, “Goodreads tracks what you read. We track how it felt.”
“It is a book tracking app that focuses more on community building, finding your people, your deep feelers, your readers that get lost in the book, and just curl in a ball for a couple of days, because all of their emotions are all over the place,” she told ABD. “Now we have a place to track those feelings and find people that also get lost in books like that.”
Viramotes said the idea grew out of a desire to share not just the reading, but the impact the book had.
“I didn’t like any of the apps that were out there,” she said. “Some of the apps feel more like social media, to talk about a book, or this person has so many thumbs up. “It was like this is something else I’m performing for, because there’s other people who are going to see this and see how many thumbs up I got, and I got to word this perfectly, and it just didn’t feel authentic to me.”
For this single mom, however, there was an even more personal motivation.
“My son is legally blind, so there are some aspects to the app that have allowed for a feature to dictate a review of the book, and then also have the reviews read out. He still has decent enough vision with his glasses that he can see most things, but it definitely helps him out,” she explained.
The inaugural cohort was developed during a VLA Cinco de Mayo pitch competition in May. Viramotes was searching for a way to fund her project when she learned about the competition. She applied, pitched, and was selected to move into the next phasThe Magnate Angel Group supports the entrepreneurs in the group. Investors that are looking for ideas for businesses that can be scaled with the potential to be sold for millions of dollars.
The group has committed a $500,000 fund to distribute among the cohort members. It will not provide the members with enough to finance their business, but it will provide seed money to keep the business moving forward.
“So valuable right now,” said Viramotes. “Everything is on me. The $20 for Chat GPT a month, the PO box that I got as the business address, and buying the domains for the website, all of that is coming from me. The domain to host the app, because we’re not in the app stores yet, but then eventually, when we get to the app stores, all those fees, it’s just coming from me, so any little bit helps.”
The website with more details about the project is https://truestorybro.app/
