We are really happy to announce that we’ve secured our second finance round. This will help us to realize our big visions for Flying. We have raised a significant six digit number from the conuno Group in Germany, Hamburg.
They have joined the Flying crew not only as investors but also as hard-core frequent flyer users! They have given us invaluable feedback on the beta, thanks conuno.
In the last 10 days we’ve been on a development sprint in Berlin working like crazy to get Flying ready for a private beta launch. We made it!
This is a small private beta round so that we can make sure all the main bugs are squished and the system is stable. We will be bringing in more and more people in the upcoming days and weeks. Stay tuned.
Too excited to wait? Get in touch: andrew@flyingfrom.to
Keep flying.
P.S. Here are some shots of Flying in action:
A very special part of travelling is the stamps you collect in your passport over the years. It’s a great source of pride for so many people and we wanted to bring this feeling to the app and so, for your achievements, you receive stamps just like in your passport.
The digital world is great, but the real world is better. We wanted to blur the line between the digital and the physical, so instead of designing fake stamps using photoshop, we made real stamps and scanned them into Flying. Now you’ll never have to be sad when you get a blank new passport and have to start all over again.
We got our hands dirty making these stamps (literally), check out the making of the stamps:
Thanks to The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design for letting us use their lab to laser cut the rubber!
Got some stamp ideas? We’d love to hear them, email us at andrew@flyingfrom.to
Sneak peek of the stamps in context (work in progress):
We all live in different cities and collaborate mostly online. We love this! We’re about 75% done with Flying and this infographic shows how much has gone into getting us this far. It’s hard to tell when you’re in the midst of it, but once you take a moment and zoom out, it’s amazing to think how many resources have gone into making this app.
Some of our favorite collaborative tools:
Evernote
Creative hub for all our raw ideas. It’s basically an inspiration dump, which over time gets curated into a more thoughtful moodboard.
Dropbox
That’s a no brainer. All our files are kept there and safely backed up. We can all access each other’s work and assets at anytime and from anywhere.
Basecamp
This is where we do all the project management. Great for keeping track of the millions of little tasks that need to happen to get Flying to launch. It’s crucial in keeping an overview of the whole process. This is also where we log all the bugs and discuss concepts and designs.
Github
To keep all the code organized and communication flowing, we use Github to source/version control our code.
Google Docs
Perfect organic tool for collaborating on the same document and give contextual comments. This blog post was done like this ;-)
Google Hangout
Great to conduct our meetings from all corners of the world. Google Hangout can host up to 9 people at a time, we’re now 6 so we mustn’t grow much more…
Sprints - Tangible collaboration
Nothing beats being together in the same room. We try to meet every few weeks in person, so we pick a city and fly there for an intense week of work. This is how we move Flying through the next big steps. It’s always very intense, busy and fun.
Coworking spaces & Coffee shops
It can be pretty lonely to only collaborate online and not have in-person connections like you would get in an office. These laptop-friendly spaces are crucial to our workflow and staying stimulated. We also get to save up our resources to focus on Flying instead of renting and running our own office space. And best of all, they allows us the flexibility to change location or scale up when we meet up for sprints.
Our first post. How exciting! We always love reading how startups get going, so we want to do the same and tell you about our humble beginnings. It’s been an amazing journey to get to this point and we all feel so lucky to be able to turn our dream into a reality.
What connects us as a team is a sense of nostalgia for the way flying used to be. Being on a flight used to be an amazing experience, sadly today it has become an impersonal commodity. In a sense, our goal is to make the act of flying feel special again. And along the way, why not bring some of the elegance and panache back to today’s flying experience.
Katie Kindinger, Markus Schmeiduch and Andrew Spitz while at The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design created a concept iPhone app for logging flights. Panos Meyer, now the Managing Director, saw our video on Design.org and contacted us to turn this concept into a product. With Sebastian Schuster, part of the initial concept and now heading the development and Johannes Lerch doing the backend development we’re a team of six.
Since December 2012 we’ve been at full throttle to get Flying into your hands and into the skies. We’re working on Flying from six different cities - Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna, Chicago, and Palo Alto. We do most our communication online with as many face-to-face development sprints as possible. This means we get to fly lots and test the app in action!
Stay tuned, we’re really close to launch.
Keep flying,
The Flying crew
