Sofie Hafström Nielsen

First-time entrepreneur

I want to invent something cool.

I really wanted to work on something, I’m passionate about – food, travel, meeting new people. By starting on my own I could go in this direction. Benefits of being your own boss - I get to decide my own work schedule and location, it’s a lot more flexible, and I get a chance to travel a lot. And I think the world needs this. I’m a regular traveller and a big time foodie. I have friends all over the world, and love to visit them and feel like a short-term local in their cities. It’s just a way more awesome experience, when you know someone in the place you visit. You often try foods you would’ve never considered, and see places that are not available in any tourist guide. We want to offer this to people, to provide a local person they can interact with.
On the downside – it’s hard to switch off completely, whether on holiday, at a family birthday etc. I always need to be responsive, since if I don’t work, I cannot expect others to do so, and Comeat’s progress will be paused. It's also very hard to grow a company from idea to actual business, with limited capital and high employee turnover. It’s a lot of hard work and late nights, so it’s important that each person fits our team. We need all our team members to be social, self-driven, and highly motivated in developing own capabilities. Most of our work is learning by doing, and it’s unlikely someone will be able to teach you in a structured way, so problem solving and thinking out of the box are daily requirements in our work. We need to push the progress on our own. As we often have meetings outside regular office hours, due to time difference across the world, and different work schedules, it also requires a lot of flexibility. It's really hard to keep a team motivated, when contact is mostly virtual, and everyone is working in different time zones. Also we try to make plans, but in the startup world they rarely stick, and especially for IT projects, we experience delay after delay, and challenge after challenge, which can be super frustrating at times. However, it’s an awesome feeling to help build something from scratch, see it grow, and hopefully influence and leave a small mark on the world.

I think many startups focus too much on the tech side and too little on the business side. There are many great platforms around, but if you don't have any users, noone is benefiting from the value you might bring. So we try to focus half our time on building our community, even if our technology is not fully developed yet.

I don’t have a count of all our challenges and mistakes, endless I’d say (laugh). As this is my first startup, first time managing people and first tech build, I have learned a lot of things already. Our first developers were not delivering as promised, but because I heard that all IT projects are delayed, we were too bearing with the work and deadlines. If something is not working, you should ask the developer to improve immediately or end their contract. We have learned that now, but wasted too much time and cash to realise this. Another important thing is to keep the motivation levels high for everyone. Because this is my passion and life, there is automatically motivation in my work, but it took me some time to realise that the situation is different for everyone else. This has cost us both time and money, and now I try to make sure to always check if someone seems less committed to our work, and improve the motivation level however I can, or end the collaboration.

Currently working on developing Comeat, a platform that combines three things I love; travelling, meeting new people and eating nice food :) The idea is that travellers who visit a city, can book a dinner at someone's house with the company of other travelers and locals and a homemade meal. We expect the platform to be fully functional in June 2018. Always interested in freelance jobs - gotta make a living :D