Every year 10% of all Dutch people change address. Perhaps they bought a new house, they’re moving out of their parents’ house or they’re moving in with their new flame. Anyway: the average Dutch person moves seven times in their lives.

Me, I already changed address over nine times! That’s NINE TIMES people had to change their addressbooks because of me. In comparison: I never changed email-address or phone number (or Facebook, before I killed my account).

The dance

This leads to a ‘dance’ everytime you change your address. Of course, there’s all the frustration of packing everything, canceling all your contracts and finding a new place. But on top of that, you have to sit down and think which companies, friends, family and distant relatives all have your address. And where else is that address written down? It’s in Facebook, LinkedIn, my email-signature, my CV…

Can I get your new address? I never noticed you moved!
(a friend, seven months after we moved)

And of course, every company has a different policy for changing your address. And for sure you will forget to tell a couple of friends and family-members your new address. Or maybe their address was already wrong in your addressbook and they never get your well-intentioned “I’ve moved!”-card.

Anyway, the result is the same: less christmas-cards every year. Because 10% of the population moves every year, that means your addressbook has a data-rot of 10% per year. After 5 years, half the addresses are useless!!

that’s how we did things in the past. Just kidding: we’re still doing this 😩

The solution

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all just have 1 address we update? Our own address in one global addressbook?

Think of it as a LinkedIn for your address, you give access to your address to people or companies and you can ‘unfriend’ them as well. Now everybody always has an up-to-date addressbook without doing any work and updating your own address is a piece of cake! 🍰

It’s privacy-conscious: you are in control of your own information. You can unfriend people if you no longer want them to have your address (angry ex?) or people you don’t really know can have limited information (just your phone number for that hot one-night stand?).

On top of that, there are cool areas of expansion: you could set up a ‘temporary address’ (for holidays) or have integration with a postal company and webshops.

I think this is cool and I really hope it’ll be here sooner than later. I’ve got the plans laid out, sketches are ready, just hire me 😇