Flying
App startup (2012 - 2014), Co-Founder
Flying, THE iPhone app for all your air travel. All airlines. Track, Connect, Share and Compete.
The Flying App was an international startup founded in 2012. Flying used to be an amazing experience, and our mission was to bring some of the jet-set back by building the ultimate flight companion for all your air travel needs. Read more below about what the Flying App was, how it looked, and what our goals were for the app.
The Flying App
Our goal was to make Flying the ultimate companion for air travel. From booking a flight to landing, the app brought together the important parts of the journey in something that felt right, worked well, and—most importantly—was useful.
To become the ultimate companion for air travel, we aimed at combining three elements: useful, insightful, and social.
Useful: real-time flight information, an airline-independent boarding pass, and a marketplace for flight-related services. Insightful: interactive visualizations of flight history and travel patterns, with stamps and fun facts to collect along the way. Social: sharing travels with friends and colleagues, and competing to see who had flown the most.
The Flying Story
Flying started as an idea in a notebook in November 2011 and was brought to life at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in May 2012 as a UI/UX concept for an iPhone app to log flights. We founded a company in September 2012 to bring our baby up in the air, and shortly after started developing the backend system along with the actual iPhone App.
What connected us as a team was a sense of nostalgia for the way flying used to be. Being on a flight used to be a momentous experience; sadly today it has become an impersonal commodity. Our goal was to make the act of flying feel special again and, along the way, to bring some of the elegance and panache back.
From day to day, we worked together remotely from Stanford, Chicago, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Vienna. We met for intensive sprint weeks in Hamburg and Berlin, and after months of long days & nights, we let the Flying App out for its first test flight in private beta, inviting the first 53 users to join us in April 2013.
In May 2013, after 9,000+ work hours, 18,527 emails, 7,681 layers in Photoshop and 32,328 lines of code, we proudly launched the public beta of Flying onto the runway and into the air.
We pitched Flying whenever we could. We won VIR’s Startup of the Year 2013 and a Lovie Award, received a German Design Award nomination, and were featured by Apple in the App Store.
We worked hard on extending the features of Flying together with our partners: With Flightright, we notified users if they had the right to claim money from airlines for flight delays and cancellations. And we were very proud to integrate a CO2 calculation of the user’s environmental impact with our partnership with ARKTIK.
Six months after launch, the numbers looked promising. Thousands of users had flown millions of miles with our app, and around 6% had made in-app purchases. We hoped to start talking with new investors in early 2014: our team of eight needed funding to grow. We acquired the flying.com domain, pitched at SXSW, and worked double shifts to keep the startup alive. But two promising Series A investments fell through, leaving us facing closure. Then, in August 2014, a US investor approached us and bought the company and app. The new owner, Status King, LLC, later shut them down in 2016.
The Flying Crew (2012 - 2014)
Panos as Managing Director, took care of finances and legal matters, constantly flying across Europe to meet press, potential investors, and made deals with our business partners. He pitched our app on countless occasions and worked double shifts in order to keep the company running. Markus put the team together and drafted the concept, roadmap and user experience of Flying. He designed the app’s user interface, while trying to bring some order into the startup chaos as product manager. Andrew was our creative head. He worked on the app's concept and took care of creating content (much of it physical) that people care about and want to share. He beautifully shot and cut our videos, made infographics, wrote the concepts for the visualizations and created the laser-cut stamps. Katie wore the visual design hat and designed and developed our beautiful interactive infographics, while working hard on the stressful day-to-day startup operations, sitting in snowy Chicago. Sebastian based at sunny Stanford, wrote the very first line of Flying code in October 2012, and with many months of night shifts he developed the major parts of the iOS App, managing to study for his master’s degree in parallel. Johannes single-handedly developed our reliable backend system in Python on Django and also became our customer support captain on Twitter & Zendesk, sitting in Vienna next to Markus. Georg, also sitting in Vienna, joined the team in June 2013 as our iOS developer and improved and extended the app with multiple feature releases, crafted additional infographics and kept us entertained with his duck-face performances at trade shows.
Some favorite moments with the Flying team:- Panos Meyer: Co-Founder, Managing Director
- Markus Schmeiduch: Co-Founder, Product Management, Interaction Design, UX/UI Design
- Andrew Spitz: Co-Founder, Creative Direction, Marketing
- Katie Kindinger: Co-Founder, Interaction Design, Visual Design
- Sebastian Schuster: iOS Development
- Georg Molzer: iOS Development, UX/UI Design
- Johannes Lerch: Backend Development, Customer Support
And special thanks to all our friends who helped us along the way: Klemens Mantzos (iOS Development), Martin Reichart (iOS Development), CIID (for the kick that got this going), Vinay Venkatraman (priceless advice), Raureif (for setting us on the right track), @HendricRuesch (the grand networker and beta tester), @misc_at (hardcore beta-testing), Karin Botta (copy ninja), Michael Uffenbeck (iOS code help on the moon visualization), @smi (startup consulting), Benjamin Fritsch (Backend Development) and of course our families and friends for being so understanding :-)
