Something had to be done...

Hi there!

If you're reading this shortly after it's been published, you're either friend or family of the logbee team, or you're one of our (future) partners, or... or you've been lucky to find us! 

We're currently working hard to fine-tune the first semi-public version of logbee that will be available shortly to our beta-testers. Wanna be one of them? Stay tuned, we will publish more info soon. Oh, and don't forget to follow us on facebook and on Twitter. This blog will inform about logbee's development, ideas, and big news. But for quick communication, Twitter will probably be the better source of info. 

And for a start, please let me tell you what's the idea behind logbee, how it started, and more...

Thanks for reading us, and we hope logbee will be useful to you!

Pierre


Once upon a time...

Slightly over a year ago, my girlfriend and I were looking for a holiday rental either in south of France or Italy. As always, we were late. Very late. And finding something both decent and more or less affordable for the first two weeks of August when you're under time-pressure is not easy. Nor is the search much fun.

So we both hit literally dozens of websites and portals that list holiday rentals. We of course did it separately, and when one had found something interesting, he/she bookmarked it and shot an email to the other with the url of the object.

Needless to say, it didn't take long before each of us had a long (and growing) list of bookmarks, plus a long (and growing) pile of emails. Keeping track of which objects we had both seen and discussed was a nightmare. Keeping our lists in sync and up-to-date was a real pain. Remembering what the other had said about this or that object was impossible. Sorting and summarizing our preferred objects was unmanageable. The whole thing was terribly time-consuming and frustrating.

Luckily, we finally found a very nice house in south of France on QualityVillas.com and had a great vacation. :-)

But...

Something had to be done.

The world was in urgent need for a quick, simple and effective way of storing and sharing this kind of objects among people who are planning their holidays together. This system could of course also work for all kinds of real-estate objects: many people are facing similar issues while looking for a new home, regardless of whether they're a new couple looking for their first shared home-sweet-home, a family who wants to keep everybody involved and informed, a bunch of friends looking for a big place to share, or a single who's browsing many portals in order to find that very special object she's been searching for so long.

Having quite successfully developed (and then sold) the leading swiss real-estate portal more than a decade ago (the dinosaurs among you might remember immopool.ch, now known as homegate.ch), I still knew a few things about the business. Of course, most of these portals feature some sort of wishlist that allow the users to store their preferred findings. But the vast majority of those lists are just that: a plain and dumb list. Some may allow to add personal notes, but that's about it. What about rating and sorting one's findings? What about sharing them? And what about a list that tracks objects from different portals? All of that (and more) had to be addressed.

Yes, there are tons of solutions to store and share bookmarks, and many of them are really good. But they are so good at keeping track of everything and anything that they're not focused. Or they're so flexible and so powerful that people are reluctant to configure them to their needs. We didn't want to build a magic system that does everything. We rather wanted to offer a solution to a very clear and common problem that thousands of people are facing again and again. We needed something focused. Something quick. Something effective. Something straight to the point. Something that can be used right away.

So I started to take even longer and hotter showers than usual, and kept putting on my thinking shower cap. Don't ask me why, but that's how and where I can think the best. And no, no pictures of this will ever be published. (Well... I might reconsider when we'll hit 1 million users!)

Ideas started to pop and grow in my head, and I soon had a basic overview of what such a service should offer as well as how it could offer it. Core features got defined, potential users and partners identified, strengths and weaknesses pinpointed, future developments sketched out, etc. A new service started to take shape in the form of a mind map. (And here the big disappointment: I'm very sorry but this wasn't drawn on a napkin in the middle of the night. The legend will have to find something else to frame for future worshippers.)

to be continued...