We recently connected with Noel Broda and have shared our conversation below.

Noel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

September 2015… I was bored, checking Instagram updates, as usual… After wasting some hours in the infinite scroll of Instagram, I suddenly saw an awesome photo that made me stop scrolling.
The photo was superb. It was taken from some place that looked like a “Giardino” (and they say in Italy), and far away in the focus you could see the amazing “Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore”. It was clearly a photo taken in Florence, Italy… And that… That was a problem…

In August 2015 (1 month before that moment) I had been living in Florence for 2 weeks. I walked the whole city looking for some good photo spots and I never saw that place, and nobody told me that a cool place existed. Google Maps didn’t say anything about it, nor even the blogs talking about “the best places to visit in Florence”… There was no place in the whole internet talking about it.

So there I found that there was a clear necessity for photo-travelers: “We need an app to discover the best photo location around the world”.

I started searching here and there and I found some websites that were trying to cover this necessity but they were really bad. Some of them didn’t even have a map! How could you explore the world without a map? [shrug-emoji-here]

It was clearly an opportunity for me, for making something fun, and something that was even going to solve a problem that I had. So there everything started.

Luckily for me, I was (and I am) a web developer… And at that time a new technology started to get famous. It was a technology that allowed web-developers to create mobile applications.
I was looking for a change in my professional environment, so it was a win-win situation.

I opened “Apple Notes”, and started writing the details of a project that was going to push me to quit my job a few years after.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

At the time I’m writing this, I’m 32 years old. When I was 14 years old, I was living in a small town with only 800 people, and no internet at all. It was the year 2004.

Because I was a fan of computers in general, I got a job in the only “cyber” in the town. My job was clear: Help the little guys to play GTA on the computers.

After a couple of months behind that desk, one day I found a book that had a lot of crazy texts inside it. It was like a cooking recipe. A lot of steps to follow. I followed all of them.

After some years, I understood that the book I was following was “C++ from scratch”. So that was my first time learning code.

I clearly got in love with the programming world, and suddenly started learning about it .NET technologies, and some other crazy coding languages.

When it was 2008, I moved to “the big city”: Cordoba, Argentina. And all that coding stuff got real: I got my first job as a developer, at 19 years old, at the university.

Since that time, I have been involved in the creation of a lot of big projects, mainly for big blue-chip companies from the US.

It was a fun ride, until January 2022, when I decided to quit my (fun & cool) work, and decided to focus 100% on my personal projects.

All this time I’ve been trying to deal with what I consider the most important failure in the dev-world: Developers consider the code to be an Art, and they forget that code is actually a tool for solving problems.

The fact that I never forgot that important rule, allowed me to reach some interesting projects, and made my job one of the most fun and exciting things in my life (besides sailing, scuba diving, and bungy jumping of course hehehe).

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

“If I need it, everybody needs it”.

You can’t imagine how many years I had been dealing with that totally wrong fact.
It was really hard to understand that what I considered was a necessity for me, it wasn’t for the 99% of the users of my app.
It was even harder to understand that some features in my product were more important than I thought.

5 years took me to understand that “A `like` button in the photos” was a real necessity.
“It’s not Instagram” I thought… But… People want a Like Button in every single place of their lives. If they could put a Like button on a dog, they would.

Forget about what you think is important, and what is not important. Ask, EVERYTHING, to your users.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

“Crossing the Chasm”.

“Crossing the Chasm” is actually a marketing book for B2B companies. You may think it doesn’t help that much to somebody that is working in a B2C project, but, you can’t imagine how good that book is to understand how to split the people in different “state-of-mind”.

This book helps you understand the different levels of risk people/companies are willing to take, and how that changes your marketing strategy with each of those groups.

If I have to recommend one book, Crossing the Chasm will be the first one, even for B2C projects.
If I have to recommend two books, the second could probably be “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” (spoiler alert: Just get a strategy. It’s not even necessary to have a GOOD one. Just get one and follow it).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://getnofilter.com
• Instagram: @getnofilter
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/getnofilter/
• Twitter: @getnofilter