Step is the app for finding, saving & sharing recommendations. It is the platform where people share their favourite places, or in our word’s “steps”, explore curated content and connect with their friends, following their steps around the world.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
We were having a drink four years ago – discussing the pain point around sharing place based recommendations, and said there must be someone in the market servicing our demographic well…. We did our research and felt there was no one we would use / that had a product that had the functionality we were looking for.
Having both travelled a lot for work and having lived in multiple countries, we were constantly sharing recommendations with our friends. Rachel used notes on her phone and separated them by city and category. Robyn used google pins but found it wasn’t optimized for social sharing.
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Has the pandemic changed the way you operate as a business?
We were supposed to launch Step right before the first lockdown, we were in beta and a couple of weeks away from our public launch. We decided to hold off launching the app until we knew what was happening with the pandemic, and started doing city guides on Instagram – our narrative was ‘save for later’ and ‘support local businesses’.
We were very focused on travel before the pandemic but our narrative shifted post-pandemic we focused more on using Step in your own city – explore your city and country regionally.
What can we hope to see from Step in the future?
We have just launched phase 1 of our new creator economy. We have a partnerships right now with YouTubers, Top Jaw, and berlin-based food blogger Berlin Food Stories. They came to us as they were looking to sell their map-based recommendations via private profiles on step. We didn’t have this functionality yet, so we hacked together version 1 using a 3rd party to house the payment and are launching our in app B2C creator economy early next year on the app.
What advice would you give to other aspiring female entrepreneurs ?
Keep going, don’t take no for an answer, and believe in yourself. Surround yourself with other female entrepreneurs; there is so much you can learn from each other. Start before you’re ready.
