3, 2, 1… Prepare to launch!

It has been a very intense year so far. Last January we were making plans on how to grow our app Swop, that was getting very good reception among iPhone users and starting to grow in Hong Kong and Singapore. Things were good, we had fresh ideas for it and were really excited to keep it growing and help people with their currency exchange issues. Then the devastating news arrived, Apple called us and told us they were removing our app from the App Store for a couple of reasons, first because they found it risky to make people meet on the streets with cash on them, and second because they didn’t want to allow an app to bypass the banking system or FX transactions. We were left with nothing literally overnight. We tried to convince them to keep it on the Store, but all our efforts were in vain.

There is a lot more to be said about Swop and how Apple can squeeze a startup to death without hesitation, of course, but I’ll save that for another day.

It took us a bit of time to start the next project, we really wanted to make something that solved a real problem, we wanted to make it meaningful and have an impact on people’s life. We had countless brainstorming sessions looking for the perfect idea. At the same time, we had a lot of things to take care of, things that every startup needs to deal with, bureaucratic procedures, technical matters, or even needing to look for a photographer for promotional purposes.

We were having a hard time keeping up with all those things that were simply out of our area of expertise and finding help was really hard. I‘m an IT guy, it is quite difficult to find a lawyer in my network that can help us for example.

Then it struck us. We needed to solve the very issue that we were facing since chances were that many other startups were going through the same struggle than us.

We are lucky enough to be based in a really nice coworking space in Hong Kong. Hence, we went around and asked a few of the other startups around us and we always got the same response, all of them found it very difficult to find the right person available to help them. And that is how Smartcasual was born.

We wrote the first line of code in mid-April, and we had a working prototype that we started testing around with by mid-June. The development phase wasn’t all hearts and flowers, we had to change functionality on the go and face some external unexpected changes (LinkedIn updated their API right before our first attempt to launch, restricting the amount of data we could access significantly), but we are still quite happy with a 2 month zero-to-one timeframe.

Ever since we have been doing some beta testing of the app with some close friends and some awesome people around the globe that have donated their time to try it out and helped us to improve it. We also used this time to promote the app and collect some emails from people interested in the idea, centering our efforts mainly (but not only) in Hong Kong, and with pretty good results.

We are now facing our last week of the pre-launch era to step into an equally tough but even more exciting stage with the launch of Smartcasual.

We encourage you all to download the app as soon as it is available (Monday 5th October 2015) and start making your professional networking easier!

We would like to also thank all the people who have made this possible. Regardless of how things go from this point on, this is a journey we are really enjoying and learning from and there are a lot of people to thank for that. You know who you are ;)

Download our professional networking app now, and Happy Networking!