‣ Company: Triple Glazed Studios
‣ Founders: Kai Dombrowski and Malin Sundberg
‣ Mission: Building cool stuff
‣ App launched: 2020
‣ Team size: Two
‣ Go-to emoji: 😅 (Kai) and 🎉 (Malin)

Kai Dombrowski and Malin Sundberg, founders of Triple Glazed Studios, know a thing or two about extreme weather.

The couple met a decade ago while backpacking in Europe, and they started their company a few years into their relationship. They’ve lived in Sweden’s Arctic territory and cities in Australia before settling (at least for now) in Canada.

“The Arctic is really, really cold, so we moved to Australia, which is really, really hot,” Dombrowski says. “We realised, all right, maybe let’s find something in between.”

They’ve made the most of their temperate situation. While hunkered down in their new home base, Dombrowski and Sundberg released two apps: Orbit, a simple time-tracker, and Mercury Weather, whose elegant layout shows just about every meteorological stat under the sun.

We caught up with Dombrowski to discuss the joy of working under extreme deadlines and his counterintuitive advice for collaborative couples.

You and Malin handle it all – development, design, marketing. What advice do you have for other couples who want to become entrepreneurs together?
We pretty much do the opposite of what’s usually suggested: we work long hours, don’t have strict roles, don’t have clear work-life boundaries and talk about work at odd hours. One thing we do that helps us work well together is to talk about anything that comes up and figure things out together. Despite our unconventional approach, running Triple Glazed Studios together has become our favourite job by far.

What is your creative process?
To get to an initial design for a screen or app icon, we’ll have multiple five-minute design sessions, then borrow the best ideas from each other in the next round until we land on something we’re both happy with.

What was it like creating your first app, Orbit?
When we started, we thought, “How hard can it be?” It’s just a timer – you start it, you stop it, it’ll be fine. We figured it’d take about a weekend; turns out it took a few months. I got a note this morning that said, “I don’t need any time tracking, but I love your app, and I’m trying to figure out a way to use it.” You can’t get better feedback than someone saying I don’t need it, but I’d like to find a way to!

What challenges did you face while developing Mercury?
We were trying to submit Mercury for the release of iOS 16. Malin had planned to speak at an iOS developer conference in the UK, so we worked in shifts across time zones with a FaceTime call. It was a bit stressful, but we managed to submit on time – and Malin’s talk was a success too!

What feature in Mercury do you wish more people used?
Trip Forecast. One of our users is a commercial airline pilot going to four or five cities in a week, and Trip Forecast shows the weather for all the trips in a single view. It sounds straightforward, but building that one feature took way longer than the entire first version of Mercury.

Triple Glazed Studios is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the program, follow the link below.