ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
Welcome to the ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping. Michelle and David, the founders of ExplorOz and the developers of Australia's best offline mapset available in the ExplorOz Traveller app will take you on adventures and beyond. Tune in to hear how offline maps are made, and go on a virtual journey with the mapping survey team to hear how they find exciting new places and how they balance work, and holidays. You'll get expert advice, and insider tips on what's involved in long term travel including all the tech stuff, and featured locations that are being added and verified in the app content. You'll hear about the ExplorOz Team's adventures 4WDing, camping, hiking, and more across Australia, from Aussie national parks to the beaches West to East, the rainforests, gorges and islands. Fuel your passion for overlanding whether you're a camper, caravanner or motorhomer, and ignite plans for your next trip or tune in whilst you're on the road. Subscribe and never miss a new episode.
ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
The Adventure of Leaving Corporate Life for the Open Road
What if you dared to quit your day job and embark on a thrilling adventure? That's precisely what we, David and Michelle, did when we traded our corporate lives for a troop carrier and the endless roads of Australia. Recalling our life-changing scuba diving holiday in Vanuatu, we share how we ended up joining the Toyota Land Cruiser Club, and how a cancer scare led us to a spontaneous and life-altering journey to Cape York. We'll take you through the trials and triumphs of our exciting journey, backed by the power of the internet and our popular website, Beach and Beyond, which helped us connect with a vast community of 10,000 like-minded individuals.
The adventure doesn't end there, though. We delve into our heartwarming experience in Birdsville, a small town that inspired us to use our platform to support local businesses. We'll discuss how we balanced our wanderlust with financial realities by picking up contract jobs in Sydney, and our journey across the continent to Perth. As we reminisce about the birth and growth of our business, ExplorOz, we'll reveal how we integrated maps into the platform and how the business model evolved over time. So, get ready for a wild ride as we share our adventures and misadventures and valuable lessons we've gathered along the way. Stay tuned for more insights into the ExplorOz business in our next episode!
Hi everyone, and I'm David and this is Michelle, and we're the team from Exploros, and today we want to give you a bit of a rundown on the story of how Exploros came to be and break the ice with our podcast, first podcast to you. So where did it all start from? It started. I don't know how many years ago did it start, michelle?
Speaker 2:So long ago. I can't even count that far back, I think it's 20, oh well, 25 years.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, some time around about that number of years ago, we had corporate jobs over Easton, sydney, and we were working for the man, like most people seem to be these days and every other day, and we went on a holiday and I think Vanuatu has a big, a big part to do with Exploros, as much as it could possibly be. We went to Vanuatu for a scuba diving holiday and there we met a couple of dive instructors and we were just having a chat and we were quite young. We were quite young mid to late 20s I guess that's quite young compared to where we are now and we had a discussion about when is the best to travel, when is the best to see things, what are the risks and what are the things that you want to do in life. And during some of those chats we found out that most people that come away and do these great holidays and have all this great time are older people who've particularly got plenty of money and not much capability of doing as many things as you want to. So we sort of set about a bit of a path to make sure that we touch base and travel around Australia specifically. We had no agenda, we weren't planning to go out and start Exploros. We just wanted to go out, quit our jobs and go traveling for a few years. I mean, what a perfect thing to do would that be? So we joined the Toyota Land Cruiser Club in Sydney and we bought a troop carrier and we went on some exploration trips with them and we learned a bit about how to do stuff.
Speaker 1:And during some of all of that setup I had a bit of an issue with a cancerous scare and I suppose that, coupled with wanting to go away, sort of increase the speed at which we decided that we wanted to make our break and do something. So the day that my final radiation therapy treatment was finished was the day that we had the car loaded up in the car park at the hospital and we got in it and we basically drove straight to Cape York from there to start our adventures, and we travelled around around Australia for a couple of years at that point, yep. So obviously, when we did this great travel and me being a computer nerd who was already into the internet in the days when we were working in Sydney, one of my jobs was early on in internet development I was part of the breaking group in first versions of HTML and all sorts of stuff. So the internet and I go back a long way.
Speaker 1:Michelle was always a journalistic type and documenter and good writer, so by taking what I wanted to do being internet and software, internet communications and Michelle's journalistic things, we started writing our own personal website as we travelled. It was called Beach and Beyond at the time and it was basically a precursor of our scuba diving adventures, then coupled with our travelling around Australia, adventures for which we thought we were going to scuba dive our way around the country we had in our camper, in our trailer, set up at the time behind the Troopy, we had five scuba tanks and a whole lot of deep diving rigs and equipment and all the stuff to go and do this great scuba diving that we thought we were going to do heaps of, and two years later I think, I took the tanks out, having used it once or twice, maybe in our entire adventure, but that's another story. So Beach and Beyond became our publishing platform and let's talk about the publishing platform.
Speaker 1:The publishing platform. That was pretty cool, that is actually really, really cool.
Speaker 2:We had a mobile phone and in those days they were smart phones. Yeah, they were literally a brick like about this long, you couldn't fit it in your pocket. It was about this thick and it had removable battery on the back. Anyone that's in our era, you know for 50 year old and older, you remember what it is, yeah and somehow David figured out a way that we could actually publish a website using that phone.
Speaker 2:I don't understand how it all worked, but there are photos of me diligently writing at a camp table in the dark with a floodlighter torch. Whatever you were used in those days, there's nothing fancy, we didn't have headlamps. This is in the 90s and I'm typing on the laptop.
Speaker 2:And then somehow he managed to upload that information through that phone at very, very slow internet data speeds, at huge expense 1200 bps, I think I thought it was 96 oh, that was when it got better and made it onto this, this website, and look honestly how we went from that which was documenting our personal life to becoming explorals. Took about 18 months and what actually happened was we got 10 000 people following that website and we're talking about 1997, 98, 99. That's enormous numbers. When you look back now, there was no such thing as Facebook, there was no Instagram, there was no one even had a desktop computer at home.
Speaker 1:There was no Google.
Speaker 2:There was no Google. There was nothing like this. I don't know how 10,000 people found us, but what we did do, and we still do today, is we actually opt people in to give us their email address, you know like subscribe or whatever and then we sent out newsletters. And the funny thing is, this man here is absolutely hilarious to travel with and unfortunately he's funny because I make fun of his misadventures.
Speaker 2:So on the front page of this Beach and Beyond website was an update, and so I'd send a newsletter to say come and have a look at the update of what's been going on the last two months, what we've been up to, and David would have had an accident of some sort. And there was this huge list of little accidents. And look, I'd only been with David. I think we're only about five years into our relationship when we started this trip. And look, now we're about 30 years into our relationship and I've now come to realise that that is just the pattern of David's life. He does get really involved in things and he just is an overachiever. And people who tend to live that sort of life live large, also have a lot of large accidents, and David is forever hurting himself.
Speaker 1:So it made really good reading. You've got to break it to make it. So people tell me.
Speaker 2:You've got to break it to make it, yeah. So, anyway, this personal travel website. It was really for family and friends and also for David to develop, I think, some of your internet writing skills, because you did have a vision that the internet was going to be the big thing, and so you're dabbling around with that, or what better place to be doing that when you're travelling? So, yeah, that's honestly what happened. We suddenly got feedback from people, invites to their house. Come and tell us your story. You're so inspiring.
Speaker 2:We're so scared about quitting our jobs. How do you? What do you do? What do you do with your house? What do you do with your belongings? And a lot of people were actually quite surprised when they actually heard about how we did it, because we are talking, and I'm saying, before Google, before Facebook, in the early in the mid 90s, and we literally just sold everything and quit. And we were quite young and we were on good jobs and I'm not boasting but we had very high salaries, we didn't have kids, we didn't have like the ties, the anchors that you know, make you, not make those decisions.
Speaker 1:We also didn't go out with a plan to do this. The plan to do this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess that's right.
Speaker 1:I suppose we, I suppose we were publishing, so people might think we had an agenda or something. But, as Michelle said, this is before all this stuff and publishing wasn't, wasn't a thing. So we were publishing but we hadn't created a business concept. And I remember, I remember there's a few, very few memorable parts of when we were on our journey. But on those few years of traveling, and you know the turn left, turn right, we're going this way or that way, you know that was kind of a common thing.
Speaker 2:Yes, in the center of Australia. Are we going the West Coast or the East Coast?
Speaker 1:You know, and we sat, we turned the ignition off and pulled the handbrake on and stopped the satin talked about it for 10 or 15 minutes before we decided. But we had a number of those sorts of things. But I remember driving through around the inner Minke area and I remember seeing a car that had X-Blauret or something as a number plate and and that kind of stuck with me for a while and then it was a few weeks later we were sitting on the banks of the Diamond Tina River sorry, the Cooper River in the Minke having a few bevvies and we came up we were analyzing the fact that we had this massive web readership and we had this large number a reasonable web readership and a large number of email people talking to us.
Speaker 2:Because what I'm really remembering at that point was that we'd spent a lot of time in the Birdsville community and we'd actually been asked by the Birdsville community if there was a way that we could use our internet and our sort of platform to better inform the incoming influx of travellers, to make better use of what was in the town.
Speaker 2:So the town had supermarket and you could buy fresh food and you could buy fuel, and what they wanted was to make that disconnect closer between thinking that you're going somewhere remote and you haven't got anything to offer yet the local community wanting to service those. That's tourism side of things. And look, whilst whilst there's the, these days there's a big red bash. That didn't exist. There was only the birdsville races, and in between the whole year, between the birdsville races is just a few grey nomads travelling by four-wheel drive, and really only in the outback season it's not as popular as it is now, and so what the birdsville community were saying to us was that is there a way that you could better inform people coming from the cities and they spend all their money and they're loaded up to the hilt and then they arrive and then they're not there to spend any money in the community and yeah, so we took that.
Speaker 1:We took that and we took the number of people that were visiting our site, the number of people who were sending us emails all the time, and right there, on the right there, on the banks of that river, we decided to set up this business opportunity and that we'd work towards that well, we wrote a business plan, we wrote a business plan, yeah, which which was much more about the marketing of the outback regional areas than yeah than ever actually came to be.
Speaker 1:And, as Michelle was saying, you know I like to do everything a hundred million times over to the n-stegree.
Speaker 1:We wrote this great customer management system for all these regional businesses that didn't understand it and didn't use it.
Speaker 1:And we did all this great stuff early on in the in the life of explore oils. But basically, getting back to how you know, when we, when we started that, we effectively, by hook or by crook, we drove ourselves back to Sydney so I could pick up a bit of contract work, so that we had some level of income coming in and in the caravan park, michelle was sitting in the caravan park during the day while I was catching the bus into north Sydney doing some work and Michelle was writing the business plan, creating logos and doing the first content for the website. This was around about December 99, that sort of a time frame, and we basically had made the decision that we were going to hightail it to WA and make our setup of our business and our lives in Perth, and so basically from from the caravan park in New South Wales. It still took us some time, did we? Didn't go straight from there, we did another trip, didn't we, to get over there yeah, we were trying to meet up with Carsten at.
Speaker 2:Moomba Gasfield for the year 2000, whatever they called that in those days, the end of the world was going to be the world the millennium bug.
Speaker 1:That didn't happen that didn't happen yeah, we ended up in Broken Hill because the roads were all flooded so we couldn't actually get to our destination. But yeah, so you know, if you cast all that decision points and all those bits and pieces that we drove over to WA, we plopped ourselves into our house and we started writing this thing called Explorers, that we had a logo for, we had a business plan and we started to create. It was first published and first put out there in March 2000.
Speaker 1:No, it was January 2000, oh, okay, january 2000 January, february, march, something like that, but it was fairly much January and I think the first parts of you know any commerce type stuff we tried to do was a March, april timeframe and we spoke to Himra about bringing maps on and we, you know, we then started the whole business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's another whole story in itself so now you've heard a bit of an introduction about how Explorers came to be and where we bought it from. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Make sure you subscribe and jump on to our next podcast, where we're going to expand a little bit on the actual Explorers business and the model and making it go through the ages. Catch up with you, then.
