Co-Founder Texted GPS Coordinates via Satellite Phone to Build Early Prototype
Koen Droste · He lost 90% of his users overnight—then grew his consumer app to $10M ARR. | Koen Droste, Founder... · PMF Show · May 1, 2025 · at 2:20
Polarsteps co-founder Koen Droste discusses the origins of the travel-tracking platform on the PMF Show.
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“How Polar Steps started was actually my co-founder, who's a very fanatic traveler, just like most people who work here at the Polar Steps. And he went sailing across the Atlantic. He's a very adventurous yeah, type. And when he did that, he figured out it would be pretty cool if people back home could follow in real time where he was sailing across the Atlantic. And this is over 15 years ago. So it was before the times that everybody would have a cell phone in their pockets and all that stuff didn't exist. So what he figured out was that on his sailboat, he took a GPS tracker, which was a little device a few people know nowadays. But it would just be a device that shows you your current geo coordinates and together with a satellite phone on his boat. And then every day he would read off his geo coordinates on that GPS tracker and then type them into the satellite phone and send a text message to a server that was located in his home country, the Netherlands and plot life on a map on the internet where he was sailing across the Atlantic.”
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