1. Inspiration

Building upon research suggesting that exposure to outdoors makes people happier, healthier as well as it makes them want to intrinsically protect nature, I was intrigued - could it be that the solution to climate change was simply to get urbanites into the outdoors again?

To better understand the relationship between living in the city, going to the outdoors and the environmental attitudes, I have done a considerable amount of desk research; but also spoke to over 20 people in various parts of NYC. They spanned across various age, cultural and economic groups. Some were friends, others were strangers I would randomly talk to at Starbucks or bars.

It was crucial to understand how often, why and how they got out of the city. But what I also found really interesting was learning about their daily lives - what it was like to live like them. In some cases I even visited their dwellings and places they worked at. In one case, I joined this young guy and his friend when they went skateboarding together. It was interesting to learn what media they consumed, how they talked to one another and what worried them on the daily basis.

What I learned during those interviews was really surprising - very few of them had done any form of nature-related activity in the past 3-5 years! Even my most pessimistic predictions were not that bad.

One of the main reasons they brought up was fear. People said they were worried that - among other possible dangers - they would "get lost", "hurt", "dirty" or "eaten by bears".

Another reason they claimed was lack of available information about transportation, routes, supplies etc. Actually that information was widely available.

However, I felt like the real reason was the lack of predisposition towards outdoors. There was a striking relationship between outdoor attitudes as adults and frequency of doing outdoor trip as kids. If you grew up in a rural environment or spent time playing outdoors as a kid, it was likely to be a bigger part of your life as an adult. Further desk research confirmed that.

For most people, nature was an abstract, distant concept.

2. Ideation

During this phase, I’ve put together a small team and together we considered a number of possible solutions that would influence the attitudes of these young, urban millennials.

We knew we had to do it through their medium of choice - mobile. We also found that “coolness” was a big behavior driver for these young urban folks. So the challenge was to make the outdoors seem cool again. Apart from doing our own app, we also considered various ideas including Instagram/Pinterest/Snapchat campaigns, smartphone photo competitions and other ideas (my co-founder Ana was heading digital strategy for LVMH at Havas and knew a lot about this stuff).

We also found some brands with similar goals and wanted to get them involved. That’s how we became friends with Poler. Those conversations proved to be crucial as we discovered that there was a fundamental cultural shift happening in this industry - the hero was no longer the middle-aged white guy at the top of Denali with $10k worth of gear; but the young, casual, urban camper taking a weekend-trip to have fun with friends. The new kids (Poler, TOPO, Iron & Resin etc.) were celebrating the casual aspect of the outdoors and their main form of marketing was aspirational content. Mainly in the form of visual stories, distributed through social media. They were taking over the industry.

That’s when it hit us - these companies needed a better way to tell their stories and wanted to sell products through them. If we helped them, we’d have access to high-quality inspirational content which we could then use to inspire urbanites to go outdoors. We would have a stable supply of content, the brands’ promotional capabilities and a business model in one package.

Just to make sure we were thinking in the right direction, we made some visual sketches of what the idea could look like (using Sketch and Flinto),  and then showed it to brands and some of the people we talked to before. Brands were in and were asking to white-label the app (good sign), and the users loved what they saw so much they couldn’t stop scrolling through the mocked content feed. Confident that we were onto something, we were stoked to start building the first version.