Owegoo is a startup from Malmö, created by Sofia Franzén. Since 2013, Sofia and her team were working hard to get Owegoo going. And only two weeks ago, their new webpage was finally launched, and a whole new era to book your trips has begun! Instead of searching and comparing destinations users of Owegoo can just type in a keyword, such as Free Diving, and Owegoo finds you the destinations where Free Diving is possible. It is possible to explore the places and compares the prices. I had a chance to chat with Sofia about her startup:
Sofia, How did you get the idea to create Owegoo?
The idea of Owegoo grew from my own personal experience with traveling. Since I used to work with web stuff my computer was my office and I could not stand the cold winters in Sweden so I usually took off in November or December to go somewhere warmer and work from there. First I only went away for about a month, then the longest I have been gone was 6 month.
Planing those trips though was very complicated and it was difficult to find out information about the destination, such as their infrastructure, cost of living and so on. For example, in Asia it is cheaper to rent a hotel than an apartment. So I got really annoyed and after 2 to 3 years I got the idea for Owegoo.
What are you working on right now?
Adding lots of content to the site and measuring how people use the site.
What were the biggest obstacle to overcome with Owegoo?
The biggest challenge was to convince travel agencies of Owegoo before the site was even up. They had to sign a contract based on trust. But they also had a hard time to imagine that unconventional way of booking holidays. It took a long time to collect contracts with travel agencies and to collect flight data. Now it has become easier, since the site is up and travel agencies don’t have such a hard time to imagine what Owegoo is actually about.
How was Owegoo financed?
Owegoo has an Angel investor and is also financed by the ALMI government loan program.
How do you picture Owegoo in the future?
Right now the site is just small fragment of what it will be. I imagine to add a lot more content to the site, such as the possibility to book hotels, more filters, let users create filters and let them tell their stories about their trips, more flight data for the US, more language options and so on, to simply expand the web side to its full potential.
Thank you, Sofia, for sharing your thoughts with us. And good luck for the future.
