We live in a world where we have anchored all our activities in and around social media.

Whether we are in office or at home, we spend most of our time sharing, liking and following each other on the internet. But trust me the world of social media is strange, one moment it's there and another it's gone.

Imagine, one day you wake up to find that your LinkedIn account got hacked, your Facebook account in no longer available or the Twitter website has crashed.

It's nightmarish, right?

And in such situations, you always wish if you had created a back-up of all your social media accounts. The moment the word 'Backup' hits our mind, all that we think of is that it's one multi-step difficult task.

But what if I told you that backing up all your social media account is an easy task and it becomes more easy when you do it with Frostbox.

Frostbox is one stop backup for all social media junkies. 

Frostbox is a social media backup platform that lets users to easily their social media networks Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Gmail, etc by creating their online backup. You can easily access this information anytime. You can also edit and share whatever information you want to share with anyone you feel like.

Frostbox is the brainchild of Maggie Foggin and Shane Robinson, who sat together one winter night in Poland talking about their world domination plans. They realized, how everything today revolves around social media and the need to backup social media networks. That's how Frostbox came into existence!

Read on to know more about Frostbox in our exclusive interview with one of its co-founder Maggie Foggin.

1. Hi Maggie, please introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Maggie Foggin and together with Shane Robinson, we are the founders of Frostbox, social media backup platform.







































Frostbox is an automated, cloud based social media backup for services like: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Gmail with Tumblr coming soon. The story behind the name is pretty simple: we want to "freeze" your data and secure it on an independent to original source platform.

We have experimented with various names, but Frostbox was the only one we still liked after weeks, so we the purchased domain and made it official. The name is very integral part of any business. It needs to be something that will be relevant for years and something you don't get bored of quickly.

There was a trend for shortened words like Blrb, Flickr, and also anything ending with –ify. After the first mainstream "ify" service emerged (Spotify), we had companies like Dropify, Storify, Shopify following suit. We wanted to make sure we had a name that was easy to remember and catchy, that's why we have Frostbox, instead of Frostify or Frostbx.




















It's a valid question coming from someone who has never got anything hacked or deleted, suspended or lost. It's a different story when we speak to users who lost their data.

To give you an idea of how much data has been compromised last year, we prepared an infographic: https://www.frostbox.com/infographic/

Last year over 6 million LinkedIn passwords were stolen, most recently 50 million passwords were stolen from Evernote.

This year surprised us beyond any expectation with many prominent social accounts being hacked, from Barack Obama, Donald Trum, to Burger King. Within the last few months Tumblr, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, NBC.com and more have been targets of online attacks, exposing personal data. These attacks resulted in maliciously modified content, but imagine if hackers went further? Having full access to your social platforms, they could have cleared the list of your followers, friends and contacts from all networks. They could have deleted all your photos from Facebook, most of which you probably wouldn't be able to restore.

The services themselves are pretty reliable, but no one is infallible and data loss happens. One good example we spotted recently was Facebook forum, where users were discussing albums that suddenly disappeared from Facebook. The sad thing is, there was no response from Facebook staff even though the problem persisted for months.

























Policy Concerns are an important factor too. Last year Instagram experimented with policy changes allowing itself to sell users photos to third parties to use in advertisements on their site. Many outraged users ditched the service for one of many alternatives, but without having their photos and data backed up, it proved a struggle.

Every day we create massive amounts of content without even realizing it. Backing up your social life is no longer a luxury reserved for people supporting their work by using social media (recruiters for example). It's becoming a modern day necessity, just like car or house insurance.

4. What is it that make Frostbox such a unique service? What were the strategies that you did right that were the cause for your success?

We listen. You can contact any one of us via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and we are taking all the feedback onboard. If our users come up with ideas to make the service better, we always consider implementation, unless they are not quite in line with our plans, then we explain why at the moment this is not an option.

The uniqueness of Frostbox lies in the fact we incorporated many seemingly unrelated functions, and put them all under one umbrella. We back up the main data from the top social media platforms, but we also back up your documents and non-social media files, as part of one solution. Somewhere in 2010 startups decided that they needed to focus on doing one niche thing well and ship it. Today users haven't got time to remember countless services they signed up for and hundreds of passwords. We want to log in and have a platform where we can store everything.

Another important fact that helped us succeed was timing. There were companies who offered social media backup years ago, but due to the fact they were way ahead of their time, the focus slowly shifted towards corporate backup, reducing their offering for private users.

5. How would you differentiate Frostbox from other services like SocialSafe? 

Social Safe is a great tool to use as a social media aggregator, rather than a dedicated back up system. The archiving happens when you sync your data manually to your hard drive. If your hard drive crashes, which is the most common reason we lose our data, you lose everything. If you forget to sync your data to your hard drive, your data is not up to date, when the worst happens.

This is not the case with Frostbox. We not only automatically back up all your data from the moment you connect the service, taking the stress to remember about it off your hands. We secure everything in encrypted format on Amazon servers, so even if you get your computer stolen or your hard drive crashes, the data will still be available in your Frostbox account ready for you to access.

6. How do you see the advent of Social Media?

There is no doubt social media is deeply engrained in our daily lives. Andrew Keen may be trying to convince us it's all bad and we are selling ourselves and our data to the establishment, but what we get for it is a pretty good tradeoff.

Facebook delivered what they was supposed to deliver, and it did make world more connected. I know for a fact I would never have such a good connection with friends and family by calling, writing Christmas cards or occasional letters. Now even though we are miles away, we are all closer than ever, and that's great!

Social media goes through an evolution, and looking at the way teens use it today, it gives us glimpse into the next few years. The humble beginnings of Facebook and Twitter were the learning years for everyone. We were posting anything as a status update, even quite personal things, as no one realized that anything could be used against us at some point. Those were the care free years, when legal system didn't use our pictures with bank notes to get us to pay child support (http://www.happyplace.com/22447/deadbeat-dad-poses-with-cash-on-facebook-forced-to-pay-child-support-and-live-with-himself)

or to fire us from work, because we wrote something not HR friendly on Twitter. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297817/Woman-developer-fired-tweeting-sexist-comments.html)

What followed, and what is still quite prevalent, are the years of self-promotion.

Teens, who are entering the majority of social users, grew up with social media. They don't see what's the big deal, because they take it for granted. They fall into two groups: the ones who are glued to social platforms, following celebrities and posting videos, and the ones who couldn't care less. They don't need the validation and ego stroking we get from posting random gym check-ins, restaurant pictures, or party shots. The latter group is growing quickly, and social media will have to act fast to keep them coming back regularly.

Path took the first step to attract those teens to their platform: they introduced stickers. Most of the current users look at it thinking: WHY? There is however reason behind the madness: stickers appeal to the new wave of users. Now is the time of trial and error in social media, and everyone is trying to fail fast and regroup. No one knows the perfect recipe for fully engaging platform, so the shift of focus and constant changes are something we are just going to have to get used to.

7. Please explain your monetization model to us.

We are currently in beta, therefore everything is absolutely free, regardless how big your social life is you can back it all up on Frostbox. We want to provide value for users and get as much feedback as possible first.

When we are out of beta, we will monetize using monthly subscription model.

8. What is the fondest memory that you and your co-founder have of the process, from conceiving Frostbox to having it up and running? What is the best compliment that you have received from your users? 

The first time we had our designer James working on our site, from the wireframe created by our developers.. we almost had tears of happiness in our eyes, when we saw the site come to life. Staying grounded is important, even when receiving compliments from our fans, because as much as they stroke our ego, it's the negative feedback that helps us grow and improve.

During The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, we presented Frostbox to the world for the first time and got tons of positive feedback. People were saying: "This is genius, cannot believe no one came up with this idea before" (obviously, they haven't heard of our competitors).

From a personal point of view however, the nicest feedback must have been from one of the bloggers I respect, Hillel Fuld, who said "Frostbox is a keeper" and that it's "cool". You have to understand.. back up services don't tend to be called "cool". They are necessary, but rarely "cool". This comment made my day.

9. How does it feel to work with your partner on one project and spend all day together? Would you advise couples pursue this road.

We absolutely love it. I have to say it's definitely not something I would advise for everyone. I know I wouldn't be able to do this with anyone else.

From financial point of view it also means putting all eggs in one basket. In addition if you have family to support, that can be a major factor before deciding to risk everything on one business.
There needs to be enough commitment from both sides and clear division of responsibilities. Startup life sometimes requires you to do everything, but everyone needs to decide what they are good at and stick to it.

10. What sort of activities do you guys like to pursue in your free time? Which of these do you find to be most de-stressing? 

There are countless publications telling entrepreneurs that they should work themselves to the ground. You won't achieve anything without hard work.. it's all true, but you also won't achieve anything when you are tired. At Frostbox we believe creativity thrives in relaxed atmosphere. I even wrote about it for Social Times. (http://socialtimes.com/facebook-is-good-for-productivity-at-work_b120476)

Me and Shane are total travel junkies. We never refuse a plane ride. We drove coast to coast in the USA and travelled route 66, and now we are straight from spending two amazing months in Spain. We have been known to take an odd road trip across Mexico, when all our friends were telling us we are going to get shot and buried on an agave plantation.

We work remotely a lot and by now learned how to organize ourselves so that we are productive and focused when necessary, but at the same time we realize there is life outside of tech and startups and we are embracing it to the fullest. We both dive. Shane is also a keen snowboarder. The love for international cuisines won't allow us to stay in one place for too long.

11. What are your future plans for Frostbox?

We have couple of great partnerships that are going to kick in around the third quarter of this year and more services lined up to be added to Frostbox. At the beginning of this year we have partnered with Wahooly, to spread the word about Frostbox in exchange for a stake in the company. You could read about this partnership in Mashable. http://mashable.com/2012/12/31/klout-score-60-frostbox/

We will continue to add different services we secure via our platform. The next two backups we will offer to our users are Tumblr and Facebook Pages.

12. What are on the top shelves of your inspiration library right now? This can be anything from blogs, books and magazines to vintage catalogues/manuals, etc.

I have just finished Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In". It's a must read for all women and men. I call Sheryl a "soft feminist", because she addresses the gender related issues women face in the work place without alienating everyone.

I follow a bunch of great people on Facebook and they provide me with a daily dose of inspiration. Shervin Pishevar, ex MD of Menlo Ventures is someone all of us should follow. He is a great example of someone who worked his way up from nothing. Shervin, his wife Ana and their family inspire me every day in all fields, from work to home life. It's hard to be inspirational these days without sounding pompous, but they certainly succeeded.

13. Top advice that you would like to share with fellow entrepreneurs? Your advice to aspiring and budding start-ups?

I am going to combine two best marketing lines of our century, created by Nike and L'Oreal: "Just do it, because you are worth it." It's better to start and fail than to never start and regret it till you die. I also think, if I don't take a risk now, how will I ever be able to expect my kids taking the risk in their lives? Be the change you want to see in the world and inspire with actions not words.

Last but not least: forget about trying to do it all on your own. Every one of us needs some sort of support, whether it's work related or at home. Don't be afraid to ask for help. In today's world people may be too busy to notice if you struggle, so don't keep it to yourself. Don't think about it as a sign of weakness.



Thanks Maggie for taking out the time and working with us for this interview. We'd like to wish you and your Frostbox family the very best for the future.