2007-2009
Role: Co-Founder, Design Director
I was a co-founder of Dopplr, a social network for frequent travellers.
The original idea was that of my co-founder Marko Ahtisaari, who had been my manager at Nokia, and much of the genius of the site was provided by my other co-founder and CTO, Matt Biddulph. The small core team comprised of myself and an amazing group of talented coders / product designers: Matt B, Tom Insam and Boris Anthony. Later we were also joined by Celia Romaniuk and Noa Alkalay.
Marko asked me and Matt B to a pub about around 2006 to talk about an idea he had.
The next January we took a weekend away in a cottage in Norfolk to prototype the first version.
We let a hundred or so friends try it, we took it to SxSW. We worked part-time on it, we got angel money. We quit our jobs and worked full-time on it for a year or two.
We aimed to release major updates to the site’s design and functionality every two months – often being cited for our novel and influential approaches.
Unfortunately we couldn’t capitalise on this in terms of monetisation or user growth and so our ability to scale and sustain ourselves suffered.
Dopplr was acquired by Nokia in 2009, the team were put to work on other projects, so it was left in ‘sunset-mode’ and shut down permanently in 2013.
Matt Jones 