“We figured, if we just make something that’s good we’ll end up alright. “From the start, we were mainly focused on the product”, says Daniels. We had a clear roadmap.” With that roadmap in hand, they had raised €1.2 million by 2016. “So with only a little extra development power, we came a long way. Going at it full-time meant they had to look for funding. The three co-founders were pretty much a complete product team, says Daniels. We already had 100,000 users and all metrics were incredibly strong.”

“The first half-year we developed and ran it next to our day jobs”, says Daniels. It quickly grew from an idea to share with friends, into an actual company. Relive turned out to be that ‘something good’. We always had the idea that if we’d land on something good, we’d get into it together.” Raising funding “We’ve known each other since we were students and we did some minor projects together. Their skills combined, meant they had everything on board to create an MVP and hit the ground running. Lex Daniels was at the time working at ABN Amro Bank as a data scientist. Joris van Kruijssen took care of the design part, falling back on his experience as a freelancer and interaction designer for Fabrique. Relive co-founder Yousef El-Dardiry is a backend developer and experienced entrepreneur who founded several social media companies. It just so happened that the group of friends, pondering a new app by the barbecue, already consisted of a good team of founders. The emphasis lies on sharing the story, rather than tracking stats, making it attractive to use for both casual and more serious users. Their trip is automatically turned into a slick 3D visualisation, complete with pictures and notes. Relive is an app that lets cyclists, runners and hikers visualise their accomplishments. A day later, they had a moving dot on a 3D landscape.

That technology is out there, so let’s create something for that.” Despite being on holiday, they grabbed their laptops. “We thought about those visualisations they have in the Tour de France, where you fly over the track. They realised none of those accurately captured what they had experienced. In the evening, we were having a barbecue and were looking at our stats for the trip.” Average speed, heart rate, altitude and whatever. “Next was 50 kilometres of climbing the mountains, followed by a beautiful descent. “That morning, we descended to the coast and took a picture at the seaside”, Daniels remembers.

Relive company