V-Festival, Weston Park, UK (August 2013)
Let me tell you a story. Back in 2013, a couple of us (soon to become the Yondapp founders) were at a weekend long UK music festival with a larger group of friends. A sea of tents, mud, rain, sunshine, music, laughter and beer. Actually, too much beer… is there such a thing? Everything was great, but on the first afternoon, we managed to lose one of the group (not cool). Now, with 100,000 other festival goers all bustling around the same space, finding our friend was easier said than done, but after about four hours, we were finally reunited. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it took the shine off the weekend.
We returned home from the festival, got clean and sober, and that was that. But there was something nagging away. Something in the back of my mind. We’d lost Rich. He wasn’t there with us. He’d missed the moment. We’d all missed that moment. And we were all the poorer for it. Or maybe that was just my FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) insecurity? Anyway, from that FOMO, an idea was born. A way to find our lost friend. Easily, quickly, reliably. A smartphone app that would have helped us find our friend, without the need for a map (after all, what use is a map in muddy field!), and Yondapp was born.
London (August 2016)
Jump forward three years, and after lots of hard work, lots of ups and downs, late nights, early mornings, a little bit of luck, a few too many beers (again) and just a sprinkling of madness, we’re finally close to getting our app into the app store.
Just to be clear, we’re not Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or UBER. We’re just a small team who wanted to get a great idea off the ground, and here we are. We’re actually doing it. We think we have a great little app that our user community will (hopefully!) love, and find invaluable when they’re out & about. Or at a festival?
Yondapp is a Map-Free Navigation tool. It helps you find your friends & find places, without the need for a map. After all, what use is a map at a festival? or on a beach? or in a strange new city, when all you want to know is that your hotel / friend / bar you were in last night is 500 metres that way?
How many times have you been out and lost one of your group? How many times have you arrived in a new place & thought “so which way do we need to head?”. Yondapp is the answer.
A few times we’ve been in London and people have come up to us and asked us if we know where a particular bar is, as they are meeting friends there. One girl even had a map on her phone, with the route planned out for her, but she still couldn’t work out which way to go. Maps are not always the best way to navigate. Sometimes, the ancient navigation part of our pre-historic brain just needs the old “it’s over that way buddy, about half a mile”. And if you’re anything like me, by the time i’ve taken the second left & gone straight over the traffic lights, i’ve forgotten the rest of the way anyway.
Our goal is to get Yondapp onto every smartphone on the planet (well, at least half of them!). We’re at the start of what we hope will be an incredible journey, and we want you to be part of that journey. We’d like to invite you to download and start using Yondapp, and we sincerely hope that you’ll enjoy using it as much as we have enjoyed developing it.
Thank you for your support, and welcome to Map-Free Navigation.
Welcome to Yondapp.
Yondapp will be in the Apple app store, summer 2016
/MG, Founder & CEO
