placesum

placesum was the startup dream, fully envisioned, designed, and developed by me, with two friends handling marketing and content production.

The idea: a location-based content creation platform. Think a mixture of Webflow, block-based WordPress, and Notion, but tied to physical places. “Adding stuff to a place,” that’s where the name came from. The frontend used Ionic with Angular, the backend ran on Elixir with Phoenix and PostgreSQL, and the whole thing was designed to let anyone create rich digital content anchored to real-world locations.

We got accepted into the StartupVoucher program, which gave us twelve months of structured support. Later, the Tourism Explorers acceleration program. I pitched it, built it, designed the brand, wrote the business plan.

Then COVID hit. A location-based product in a world where no one could go anywhere. The Tourism Explorers cohort helped us see what we’d been too close to admit: the app was too tech-focused and lacked product-market fit. We shelved it.

The lessons didn’t shelve. placesum taught me the distance between ambition and execution, between building something you love and building something people need. It taught me that killing a project you care about is its own form of craft. And it left me with the hunger that would eventually become GoodBleep, the same drive to build from scratch, but this time with the scars to know what to protect against.