WHAT IS WINDOWSWAP?
Let’s face it. We are all stuck indoors. And it’s going to be a while till we can travel again.
4 months ago this inspired us to create WindowSwap. A website created to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else’s window, somewhere in the world, for a while. A way to travel without moving.
A place on the internet where all we travel-hungry fools share our ‘window views’ to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.
We started out with 16 window-views from 4 countries and about a thousand visitors a day.
Today, we have over 8000 submissions from over 180 countries and 3.3M+ visitors from 190 countries.
Over 30M video views.
Covered by almost every major publication (TV and Press) including the Guardian, BBC, The New York Times, Business Insider, Forbes, NBC, CBC, Reddit, South China Morning Post, HuffPost, The Verge, VICE, Fast Company, Daily Mail, National Geographic, CNN, Y-Combinator, and countless other publications across the globe, in multiple languages.
We even made it to the highly coveted print edition of The New Yorker magazine.
THE STORY
During the thick of the lockdown in Singapore, my wife, Sonali Ranjit and I came across a picture of a beautiful window view of a friend who lives in Spain. Even though the view was to die for, he complained about how bored he was of looking through the same window every single day. Spain was about a month into lockdown back then. We wished we could swap places with him. But since that was never going to happen, we thought why not swap window views instead? That’s how Window Swap was born.
There is an unsaid rule that says, when there is a huge audience binging off something (let’s say TikTok and other short form, bite-sized content) there has to be another huge group of audiences on the opposite end of the spectrum waiting to be served.
So, we decided to feature 10 minute long videos along with ambient sounds. The goal was to make people truly feel like they’ve swapped places with someone, somewhere in the world. To help soothe them, give them a sense of peace, or satisfy their inner voyeur.
Some of our favorite window-views so far: The Pyramids of Giza, a backyard in the UK filled with badgers, a lush green meadow with grazing llamas, a view of the Eastern Himalayan Mountain range, and a Maine coon cat staring out of a window of a gorgeous apartment window in NY.
The project took about two weeks to design.
It went live on June 5th.
