Our Story
The Observation
Color Your Life began with a big brother's love — and a problem he couldn't stop thinking about.
Evan Perez is the older brother of six-year-old twins. They're bright, curious, and full of energy — and they're also neurodivergent, which means structure, connection, and sensory balance matter a lot. But like most kids today, they get pulled into screens fast. Not cartoons in the background — full immersions. The moment a tablet turns on, it's like the world disappears. Getting their attention back feels like trying to reach someone on the other side of a wall.
Evan started researching. Not casually — seriously. He dug into what excessive screen time and social media actually do to developing kids. The more he learned, the more he felt responsible to do something about it.
The First Attempt
His first answer was a journaling and activity book — something slow, tactile, screen-free. He started building it out at the Met Entrepreneurship Center. But he ran into the truth quickly: it was too passive. Kids raised on personalized, responsive digital experiences weren't going to trade their tablets for a generic activity book. It wouldn't solve the problem.
So he sat with a harder question.
“What if we used innovation for offline engagement?
What if AI could create something offline that felt as personal as a screen?”
That question changed everything.
A Partnership
Adrian Bautista saw what Evan was building — the mission, the research, the passion. He also saw that turning that question into a real product required skills and tools Evan didn't have alone. So they partnered. Together, they built Color Your Life: a product that takes a family's own photos and transforms them into a personalized coloring book — printed, physical, and completely screen-free.
Validation
They entered NFTE — the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship — and competed in their national business plan competition. They made it to Nationals. They won. They went to Worlds as semifinalists. NFTE awarded them $10,000.
Color Your Life has since been covered by NPR, Yahoo Finance, NFTE, the Providence Journal, and TransformRI.
We're still early. But the mission hasn't changed since the first time Evan watched his siblings disappear into a screen and thought — there has to be something better.