"Stay Curious - Keep Asking Why" Caroline Vrauwdeunt, CEO & Founder, Of Map Your City

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I actually started my career in law and from there on started leading large multi million dollar civil engineering projects with a multitude of stakeholders to serve. After successful delivery of my last project in 2012 I founded ANDRS Projects - and started taking it in a new direction outside of civil engineering - but still focused on stakeholder value creation.

It turned out that software technology was a pretty good match.

We created a foundry of brands that excel at connecting and engaging stakeholders. Our platforms help speed up innovation, get better project results and create more business value.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Map Your City is a new kind of map where explorers and storytellers meet. It is where explorers get valuable tips & insights, the latest on events, get festival tickets, and discover spots they did not know before.

It is where businesses tell their stories, either by joining a community or creating one. A Map Your City Community is simply a group of people mapping places and telling stories together – like a city or town, event organizers, travel vloggers, photographers, or architecture lovers.

What is the origin story?

We started building Map Your City in 2015 - it was not more than a Minimal Viable Product when we launched it during an International Trade Mission to Canada.

We were lucky enough to have the Dutch King and Queen on that mission and our app was launched by the Royal couple in Toronto. I cannot tell you how proud I was. It helped us do various pilot projects in Ontario and it allowed us to market validate our product and business model internationally.

Now 5 years onward - and many changes and updates later - I can still laugh at how naive I was about the road it takes to get your product to success.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team has changed over the years, the ones working on Map Your City now are not the ones who created it.

As long as you know how to create continuity in your business, new team members can bring new ideas and fresh perspectives on things. You just need to make sure you do not lose any valuable knowledge in team change-ups.

We are a distributed team of experienced professionals - if you are to be part of it you need to know we come from diverse backgrounds and are united by an enthusiasm for great products, exciting stories and delightful location experiences.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Mmm. good question. The pandemic and some personal health issues has made me look for more creative things outside of my business ventures. I actually love photography and put more time toward it in the last year. The problem I have is I want to do it all at an extremely professional level. The further experienced I get at something, the more I tend to challenge myself to do better - while it all started to just find a creative outlet and a way to relax.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

The core metrics we measure have changed during the various stages of our product development. We are a double-sided platform so we measure metrics that indicate platform vibrancy. As for our business, we steer on SaaS business metrics. For our product development we look at product performance and crashlytics.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

After a long road of building, testing, market validating and finding our market niche - we are now rolling out all marketing efforts to give us a flying start.

We are currently targeting a few first target audiences - after a strange pandemic year and a half - and already getting exposure in relevant magazines and news media. We have created opportunities for brand partners - like a re-seller program and a brand ambassador program. And that has resulted in onboarding brand ambassadors and a handful of first clients that we are really proud of.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

The Map Your City platform consists of a native mobile app, a web dashboard and a flexible backend servicing both app and web dashboard. The backend is built in Laravel and the app with a cross platform technology called titanium. Platform and app also use various third party map technologies. In our opinion titanium is the best cross platform technology on the market (better than React Native).

The fact that the acquiring company Axway start this year ended support of titanium suddenly had us worried. But forecasts are good with the titanium developer community taking over and even improving onboarding for new developers looking for an accessible cross platform app building technology.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I am a follower and avid reader of Hackernoon since the early days on Medium. When Medium pulled up a paywall, Hackernoon stepped up and took the community with which it helped Medium platform grow and started their own. I loved the way you pulled that one! Hackernoon bootstrapped vs Medium very well VC funded. Maybe it hit home, as we are not VC-funded ourselves either.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Spend more time with those you love. Life can go fast and some leave this planet even faster.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

I am a 50+-year-old woman, there’s not much that surprises me anymore. ;) But yeah for my younger contemporaries: stay curious - keep asking why - don’t take no for an answer.