👩🏼‍💻 Meet our Co-Founder and CEO @Cindy Allis!

Cindy spent her summers skippering in the Med while doing her masters degree in Amsterdam and later her first job as a software engineer, when she realized there are lots of challenges charter companies face in their daily operations.

Connecting the dots between her experience as a skipper and skills in development, she now set out to provide that tool and help charter companies make their life easier, and improve their customer experience while at it!

Why did you start Floatist?

"The more I worked as a skipper, experiencing the chaotic check-in days first hand, the more I thought; “there must be a way to make this better”. If it doesn’t exist yet, why not build it myself? It was never my intention to start a company so early on in my career, but when the opportunity presented itself, there was no doubt I was not going to! It has been an amazing journey so far, Albert (my co-founder and CTO) and I have created the foundation for an absolute dream team that Floatist is now."

What has been most challenging in building Floatist?

"Definitely prioritizing. At the start of our journey, when we didn’t have any product or customers yet, and it was a bit of a chicken and egg story where you need a product to get customers, but you need customers to get funding.

So, you want to move as quickly as possible, and with limited resources you have to stay on the critical path. Also, with every bit of new information you get today, the priorities can change tomorrow. Therefore, you need to keep asking yourself every day if what you are doing now is still the most important thing, given the information you have right now.

This requires a very agile way of working and a flexible mindset from the whole team, especially the development team, but we have done very well and built an amazing product in less than a year! We keep iterating and building out with the same agile mindset which works very well for us."

How would you describe the Floatist company culture?

"Together with our whole team, we defined a few core company values. Some of the ones I really resonate with are ‘We learn by doing, one step at the time’, which is very true in more than one way. From a company perspective, where none of us ever started a startup before, we are definitely learning a lot on how to do that, just by taking the next step, and then the next one, and we learn along the way on how to do everything. From a customer perspective we are also learning more about what our customers need step by step, as we release new features, request their feedback, and then further expand on the features, together with them.

Also, I find that ‘Every opinion matters’ very fitting for our company culture, where everyone in our team is expected to voice their opinion and explain why they do or do not agree with something during our team meetings and design sessions. In that way we are quite a ‘Dutch’ company, being direct, open and non-hierarchical.

Finally, ‘We have fun while doing’. It is so fun to build Floatist together with our motivated team, and seeing the impact of our product for our customers’ operations. Our customers are located in the most beautiful places in the world, so we have fun while visiting them. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, as we know we are still young and learning, but at the same time we are serious when we say we are going to disrupt the charter industry!"