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
Building a Travel and Exploration Business: From Travel Blogs to E-commerce Platforms
Have you ever wished you could turn your travel passion into a thriving enterprise? Well, buckle up as we navigate the highs and lows of building our ExplorOz Business. We share our humble beginnings, from documenting our travel experiences to setting up our early user interaction systems, and the exhilarating challenge of converting our passion into revenue. We take you through our journey of creating an e-commerce platform for essential travel gear and our efforts towards building a successful membership program. We also delve into the milestone of constructing EOTopo, our innovative Raster map set that redefined exploration and navigation.
Moving forward, we pull the curtain back on developing our indispensable Traveller app. We recount the brainstorming sessions, the process of transforming ideas into reality, and their significance in shaping the ExplorOz journey. This journey hasn't been a smooth ride, but with each bump, each success has been worth it, to bring a fantastic product to market and help others travel and explore Australia. Join us, as we unravel our tale of trials, triumphs, and the continuous evolution of our ExplorOz Business.
Hi, welcome back to the next episode of our podcast series, and Earlier we've been in our first few series we talked about, you know, getting to the point where we started the explorers business. Now we want to go through a bit of the ins and outs of the explorers business in the early days. So you know, we originally we're doing this travel and we could see that there wasn't much content available on the internet of any description for the kind of Journeys and trip planning and information that we needed to do. You know the traveling that we were doing, so we just winged it using our experiences and Working our way around, obviously, the writing of all of that and basically the documentation which was probably started out more about what we're reading every day and where we were, as you said it was kind of family focused and to our family and friends.
Speaker 1:Evolving that into into a business obviously comes with lots of challenges. You know where's the revenue, how are you going to fund the, the ongoing costs and marketing and the other bits and pieces. As you said, early when we started, you know, google didn't exist. All this stuff didn't really even happen. There was no advertising platforms, there was no monetization systems available. It was all very early on in that whole scheme of things.
Speaker 2:So we had no jobs.
Speaker 1:And we had no jobs and we had lots of cost.
Speaker 2:I was.
Speaker 1:I was well, I was still doing a bit of contracting, I think, contracting back to customers that were still in Sydney that would still bother to ask me questions. So we were still had some revenue coming in. But how do you, how do you convert that and how do we make a business out of it? I think very early on, you know, we store it we. We started with publishing the user interaction systems with the forum and getting some great interactions with our user base. We had our Trek notes published, which was, you know, giving information now to people about how to move around.
Speaker 1:We quickly came along with the realization that we probably needed some sort of e-commerce platform. So we created the shop system and in the shop system over the years the shop evolved and grew and shrink and expanded as we move forward. We started out pretty much with maps and books and permits the maps and books, the things that you know everyone needed to travel with. Everyone needs a map and everyone needed books, because even our internet stuff couldn't go with you like it does today. So we started with that system and we were a very early retailer in Australia for forward driving travel books and we took on, you know, Heema, Westbrun and a whole load of other brands and particular products at the time.
Speaker 2:I was even audio books, do you remember?
Speaker 1:The Belinda Audio Books.
Speaker 2:They were a great idea because people would get them on a cassette tape.
Speaker 1:Oh no, they were CDs. Were they CDs when we started? Only just.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but there were all those awesome stories but there was also things started coming out. You know Lemberdell's stories and there was lots of really interesting backstories about pioneers and historical figures, that and then they really took off because people wanted entertainment when they were in their car.
Speaker 1:So over the years we had access to some great products that we were able to sell. We went to GPS's, we went to E-PURBS, we went to parks passes with. You know, the store was quite a thing.
Speaker 2:There was 1500 products, I remember it was about the largest, it was our largest line of items. There was a lot of products.
Speaker 1:And we sold a fair bit enough to help support the business. Additionally, we created some additional facilities with our with a membership program which we added to the website to allow some people to have higher level of access, controls and more features within the app.
Speaker 1:So you know, and also, well, the tracking didn't come till a bit later, but we created a membership system and you know around about that time. We were also able to buy into things like advertising platforms from Telstra or Census and things like that. Early on in the day Google didn't have it, it was all run by Census and we were basically buying ads from them and at the time it was good revenue because there wasn't a huge number of people doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we got 40 CPM. Oh yeah, we were getting.
Speaker 1:We were getting CPM rates that you could only dream of. Now it doesn't even exist, no. But so we did reasonably well out of some of those things and they helped us to keep the business running and developing the business along over the next few years, adding blog systems, more interaction tools, adding more member services. It became some. It became a bit apparent down the track that we needed to do something with online maps. You know we had things coming out like Google Maps were appearing on the scene at the time. So digital mapping started to become a thing and one of the things being in maps and business like.
Speaker 1:We were realized that we probably needed to have something in that in that space. So we started by we were already retailing the Geo Science Map Map Raster series and things like that and using it with Aussie Explorer Like most people back in the day. You know we use Aussie Explorer or Fagawi, or we'd use Garmin, the Garmin GPSs with their inbuilt tracking stuff. We tried all those things out. We had all that stuff and we sold products into that market. So what we first thought we would do is we'd better be better, make sure that we had an online mapping platform. So we took what we could and produced our own. Well, we actually we didn't have the mapping platform to start with we created our own Raster map set based on the topographic maps from Geo Science. So we basically took that data, reengineered it and spat it out as our own product called the OTOPA.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it was under license.
Speaker 1:We had a license agreement from Geo Science to use the data and we produced our EO TOPA map set and that was that was quite early. It was a Raster based product. It was based around the 2005 Geo Science product and I think why don't it? We can't remember what vintage that was, what year exactly that we did that. Also, at the same time, we decided we needed a Geo based system of place data, place attributes and things like that. So we we had another licensed product that the Geo Science Gazetteer database system, which had all the place names and points of interest and bits and pieces that we could create a database from. So we created the places database using data that we were able to source from Geo Science as well at the time, and so they were kind of the core components of moving towards our app product. You know that we did some years later.
Speaker 2:I do recall some of that, although you're speaking so technically advanced that I'm falling asleep here. My love, I'm sorry but it's getting hard and I know that that's because you're a developer and that's the way that you look at things and look at solutions. But I know from the user's perspective, from the travellers perspective, it was more about. There was definitely this beginnings of using digital mapping and there were beginnings of sat navs in people's cars, but the maps were crappy as soon as you went out back. So you know your Google map that appeared either on the device or in this sat nav, just didn't have the outback data. So straight away there was this huge pressure on all these existing mapping companies. In Australia there was HEMA, there was Westprint, there was, you know, ourselves. It is. How do you target that? How do you give more offline detailed maps to two people in this digital space that was very quickly evolving?
Speaker 2:depending on the government had stopped well, that's a really good point to highlight, isn't it?
Speaker 2:stopped in 2008 producing the geoscience mapping they're public mapping they do produce maps still, but they don't have a public mapping, yeah, and so coupled with that at the same time. I recall this because I've actually done some notes because, like, it's all changed so quickly. Once the Apple products came onto the scene, apple really took a hold of the market, so most people were buying iPads and phones when they came out, and Android wasn't quite as popular at the time.
Speaker 1:Android didn't exist for years.
Speaker 2:It was created by Google after Nokia, but the biggest problem sorry, the biggest problem was that there was no way for the existing beginnings of digital maps to be used on Apple devices. It because the, as everybody knows, to put anything on an Apple device, you actually have to do it through an app, and it just all got quite complicated. And so whilst we were, as you mentioned before, creating these raster maps that completely cut out all the Apple market because they couldn't access those maps. You remember that?
Speaker 1:well, there was no software to run them there was no software.
Speaker 2:So the biggest software at the time for mapping for travelers of the time was a well-used geological survey type or surveyors type software which I'm sure some people know the name of Aussie Explorer sounds the same as us, but it's not. But that existed but it's. It was sort of more windows based and, you know, had dropped down menus and things like this, not very user friendly in the car or if you're bouncing along, but still that really only had limited maps that you could use in it. They had to fit into a particular format and all of a sudden people are buying these wonderful portable devices and not using their pc. They're using these iPads and going, oh, but I can't get maps on them. And so this is honestly the challenge that we were presented with through user demand. We would get phone calls and emails and phone calls and emails constantly and we didn't like saying no, we can't do it. They literally wanted us to make maps for Apple devices and do you recall how long that took us to try and make a solution there?
Speaker 1:I remember that we oh yeah, we went, we went, we went to, we went to foreign development for a while trying to do app development but we weren't very trustworthy I yeah, no, I took on some foreign development out of India at one point and we spent a fair bit of money and didn't get very much.
Speaker 1:We then went looking at all the products that were available in the market already to see if we could partner with anybody or maybe buy someone out, and that didn't prove very fruitful. So one day I just sat at my desk and it was more than one day.
Speaker 1:It did a bit of research and found some platforms and some things that may work. And then, yeah, it wasn't one day, but a couple of days later I had made something that would load as an app, that had kind of a map, that kind of did something very raw that gave us the understanding that we actually probably could produce something and develop an app that would do. You know basically what we wanted, and it did take a long time. I've always had this idea, and it actually involved Aussie Explorer, because that was the product that we knew so well for so long. I had created in my head a solution to using Aussie Explorer with a place's database and a proximity to a learn alerts and pop-ups when you get to a certain place to tell you what to do.
Speaker 2:I remember that so often we wanted that information.
Speaker 1:We would discuss this all the time and we sat in the car on all these trips for years and years, researching, going. Wouldn't it be great if we had this?
Speaker 2:If you could just press that button and find a cab.
Speaker 1:And so you know, when we actually started down the development path to create a product like the Troubler app, we had lots of preconceptions about what it should and shouldn't do, and we had a really good understanding of what it should do based on travelling around Australia and doing the things that we like to do. So, you know, then we created it, then it started, and so that's how we got to the start of our Explorer's travel journey. So we hope you like this podcast and make sure you jump on board and subscribe and catch up with the next one, where we'll talk a bit more about the app and how it actually works in the market.
Speaker 2:Yep, so subscribe and stay tuned for the next episode. Bye.
