Viktor Engborg

I'm Viktor, a 23 year old designer from Stockholm, Sweden. I currently work full-time at a web agency, which makes the hours working with Globified less than I want to. Let's see how that turns out.

Globified was created together with my older brother Patrik, who is the developer. So we're two guys making this, you can see why I want more time? Anyway, I can start by telling you a short story about why we built Globified.

A couple of years ago, we (me and my brother) were out traveling for three months in Central America, and wanted a good blog to go with it for all our friends to read. We couldn't find a single good web service that would fit our needs, which led us to make a custom blog together with an interactive map so everybody could follow our track. A simple blog wouldn't cut it. Shortly after we can home, we thought - are we the only backpackers with this problem? That's how it started.

The features we wanted when we pictured the perfect travel log web service simply weren't there. Seeing an activity log on the start page, seeing your own whole journey with a journey archive for previous trips, sharing jour journeys with other friends on your trip (so you don't have to have a shared account; an upcoming feature), and more stuff we want did not exist. Similar services are also to difficult to use, therefore we wanted to build our own. We're on the right path.

About our map, it's an easy way to show that people are writing, arriving somewhere or uploading pictures everywhere on earth. We think it's a fun way on showing that our service is global and social and that anyone can be inspired and even comment users activity.

You can actually comment every journey entry, everything from check-in's to an uploaded photo album, and in three ways. 1. Being a member. 2. Connected to Facebook. 3. By name/email.

There will be community features, such as the possibility to follow trips or users. The reason we haven't implemented it yet is simply because we wanted to see how people use the site first, and not rush things and features. Also we're still in an early stage and the current version of Globified is only the core. But we do have many ideas and some really exciting features that will be added in the near future. One of the prioritized ideas is to make an app that goes along with the site. We realize this is a need, so you'll likely to see an app soon enough.

We have thought of integrating third-party services such as Gowalla and Foursquare, but not the other way around actually. We also want to see how Facebook Places develops and it's impact on these services first. We'll see.

We have discussed this topic a lot, since we don't want to be one of those sites that launch without even having considered a revenue model. So we think we will make Globified a paid service, but a very cheap one. Everyone else can of course browse around for free. The only thing we haven't really decided is if we will use a freemium or a trial model. We will have to make up our minds on that before the beta period is over.

Of course. A half year in with Globified we went searching for investment, but with a product not yet finished it was difficult. It would be awesome being able to work with Globified full-time without outside investment, but we realize this may be hard doing this longterm and full-time without income. Also, the US investor market is a lot wider and better. You know any good ones?

First of all, we would both love working with Globified full-time. To make that possible, it all comes down to making a successful revenue model. If we get lucky and all goes according to our plan, we hope to have made Globified a pretty well-known brand in five years. The service people will use if they're out traveling and want to share their stories and memories, or find tips and and info about places you're about to visit. That would be awesome.

It's actually not our first startup. We started a small web app three years ago called Önskelista (Wishlist in Swedish) for people to send their wishlists to family and friends. It was and still is a really cool project, but we haven't spent time on it in a while.

The experience with Globified has been similar to what Önskelista was at the beginning for. Exciting and with a lot of potential. The difference is that when Önskelista was launched, that was pretty much it at that time. We had all the features we wanted and just wanted to let the service grow by itself. With Globified there's a ton of potential. We have a gazillion of ideas to make reality. And now when the excitement of the launch has let go a bit, we're ready to make these ideas happen.