2014 to 2015 - Horsha

Horsha (from ‘Horse’ + ‘Share’) was a startup in stealth-mode which never came out of the stealth-mode. The idea was a social network specialized for horse owners to help them share the care (and the costs) of a horse. Over time, it evolved in a full-blown clone of Facebook, with pictures, events, likes, friends and so forth.

I worked there for about a year and was in charge of the Android app, which was coming together quite nicely.

During that time, I also started working on one of my most successful open-source projects, Android GPX Parser, a library built specifically for Android to parse the GPX files produced by GPS tracking devices. We needed it for the “share ride” functionality.

The project ran for a few years in total, always in stealth-mode, before being finally abandoned without ever seeing the light. I can’t help thinking that by avoiding feature creep and following the most basic startup advice (release fast, iterate fast, fail fast) history could have been different.