Hejsan Arno. Would you like to introduce yourself?

My name is Arno Smit, I am an engineer turned entrepreneur and also one of the founders of FundedByMe (a european approach to a kickstarter solution), born in Namibia and i’m proud of it.

You just launched Instadash a week ago. Congratulations! Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Thanks, yeah it was a pretty exciting launch!.

Sure, Instadash is a Pinterest inspired dashboard for instagram users with dropbox synchronization, i.e. always keeping your photos up to date.

You build Instadash in twelve hours as part of Stockholm’s Startup Hack. What are the secrets to build such a good ready-to-ship product in only twelve hours?

The idea came naturally, after juggling it back and forth with my wife, she loves Pinterest and Instagram has really brought out the photographer in all of us.

At the time there had been no solution for it, this was about three weeks before the actual event, so I simply thought a Pinterest inspired dashboard is what I wanted to do.

I immediately jumped onto twitter and asked one of the organizers if he (Jonny Stromberg, amazing designer from mynewsdesk.com) is already involved in a team, and he directed me to Magnus Johansson (now my co-founder).

We met for coffee once and I had done some sketches on what I thought the product should look like, and Magnus agreed to do the iPad app for it.

As every day grew closer I had the urge inside of me to just sit down and get working on this idea, but needed a great platform to launch it on, hence we prepared mentally as much as possible and pitched the same idea we had to the media, and a lot of interest came out of it.

Since there was a massive time constraint we wanted to make use of a lot of ready built items, hence we turned to some web standard such as Twitter bootstrap, Heroku, Django, Git to easily build and deploy the product.

How does the future for Instadash looks like? What are the next steps?

As you can imagine with a lot of articles out there already, a lot of people have gotten in contact with us wanting to do something, collaboration wise. We are doing some minor tweaks on the service to improve the flow and speed, lastly we are finishing up the overall look and feel of the product and then also getting ready to launch the iPad app for this, which is going to be amazing!

Maybe a trip to the US one day to meet Kevin and Mike (founders of Instagram) for a coffee to just hang out with some really cool entrepreneurs and bounce a few ideas, after all it all thanks to an amazing product, that is Instagram.

Lastly: What is your favorite Instagram picture or Instagram account you spotted recently?

This has to be one of my favorite images, this is from a person that I follow and she is currently going in Namibia (my home country) and this has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, Where the ocean and the desert meets in Swakopmund, Namibia.

instagram pic