#epiclist

The founders of Epiclist have written a post-mortem about their company Epiclist. Epiclist was an app that lets you plan, book and share travel plans. It allowed users to compile stories, pictures and locations on their phone.

Epiclist like many failed startups was not able to find a place on the market and unable to form a viable business model.

...it became a vitamin instead of becoming a painkiller.

However the post-mortem outlines some lessons the new to entrepreneurship have learnt in their 1000 day journey. I will share some of the ones that stood out to me.

One of the lessons that they learnt was to ask "Why". In particular:

Why do you want to solve this problem?

Why are you going to be different and unique?

These questions are important for any startup, whilst writing this article I asked myself about these questions. I am not very pleased with my answer either, so I have some more thinking and tough decisions in the near future.

Another lesson they mentioned was always delivering more than you promise. Despite this being common sense to most, it is very easy to overlook. One famous example is of a company that never told their customers they use next-day delivery. This way they were able to pleasantly surprise customers but also in the case that it was delayed they would not be breaking any promises.

One pitfall I see many entrepreneurs (Including myself) fall into is how to conduct customer interviews. Many people ask their friends for validation for a business idea, most people will reply with the affirmative. E.g. Would you buy this? The question you should ask is "Will you buy it now?". There are many ways during user testing that you can lead users to answer the way you want. It is an art, how to ask the right questions. You might not get the right answer always but you are learning something. This was another lesson that the Epiclist team encountered.

Finally the last lesson I wanna point out is that they learnt was to just give it a go, your product will never be perfect. Something any entrepreneur can understand, the fear of your product not being good enough. However if you delay too long you will never know what works! So don't be ashamed to show others what you are building, the more feedback early on the less you may have to change.

6 weeks ago we have released the 1.0 version of Epiclist on several App Stores. We have been thrilled to see the Epiclist community growing by thousands of new members. Together, you have created almost 3000 journeys and almost 10.000 steps, contributing with your travel experiences from around the world.  Last week we have taken another big step on our journey: Epiclist is now live in 20 new App Stores, including India, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and Northern Europe.  Its incredible how fast time goes by and how our journey keeps evolving, taking our team across the planet: - 2011: Me and my co-founder Olga start our backpacking journey in South-East-Asia, which kicked off our vision of the new travel discovery app! - 2013: We join Startup Chile and move to Santiago - 01.2014: We release the first official version of Epiclist in the US and Chilean App Stores - 03.2014: We release in 20 new App Stores and welcome new users across the planet! Onwards! Make sure to check out the new update here: download.epiclist.io

Last 4 weeks have been amazing! We have released the first 1.0 version of Epiclist on several App Stores. We have been thrilled to see the Epiclist community growing by thousands of new members. Together, we have created over 2500 journeys and almost 10.000 steps, sharing extraordinary travel experiences from all around the world.  We have been super excited to hear and read all of your feedback, suggesting new ideas and things to improve. We have listened and now we are ready to share all the new exciting updates with you. Today, Epiclist 1.1 is available for you! What is new?  1. Explore journeys nearby:  This is a new feature we are super excited about. Allow Epiclist to grab your current location and instantly show you travel experiences around you within a 300km radius. Everything which you can do within a day or a weekend of your time. 

Of course many locations will not have nearby results. We are just 1 month old. But imagine if you can open Epiclist whenever you go and instantly discover the best ways to experience this place on the go. Where should you go to capture the best sunset, see the best city views from above, hike the best nearby trails, explore nearby waterfalls or surf the best waves - Every location around the world has its own vibe and own ways to experience it. We want to unlock this experiences!  Do you know your hood? Go ahead and create a journey for your area, helping others to discover and experience it by following your footsteps! And, as always, earn some pulse for your profile and your Pioneer credentials!

3. Explore now from one central tab:  Based on your feedback, we have simplified several things. Now you have a tab in your navigation bar called "Explore". Here you will find new "Featured" journeys (we feature new user journeys several times a week).  Next tab opens the "Curated" journeys: Every day our team searches for new adventures from around the world and curates new journeys and steps for those. 

Finally, the "Nearby" journeys are displayed in the third section. Go ahead and add any steps from this journeys to plan your next weekend getaways or ways to explore your area. Sometimes you can be surprised to rediscover your own neighbourhood! All new activities, posted by Epiclist users, are now shown in the central "Newsfeed", so you can always find new exciting things to do by browsing through this feed. 

3. Get inspired and inspire others:

Epiclist is all about inspiring people and get inspired from other people, as you go along and discover new experiences to live. Whenever you inspire someone to follow your footsteps and add any step from your journey, your name will always go along with this inspiration, reminding the user that you have helped them to plan a step, as well as link back to your original journey to see more. You will notice this change in your own journeys as well. 

4. Many small updates:  - Tap on all images to see them in full screen and show credentials of authors. - More immersive experience: We have expanded all feeds to be even more immersive. - Epiclist smoothly reminds you to add steps to your past journeys.

Go ahead and discover the updated Epiclist: download.epiclist.io

Welcome to Epiclist! 

Epiclist is a discovery app, helping people to discover, plan and share activities and travel experiences. Our vision: Inspire and help people to become active and pursue most memorable moments in their life. Here at Epiclist, its all about the whole experience, not just one photo, one word or one place: Its about helping people to add all this pieces to discover real journeys, taken by real people. And its about making this experience as simple as possible, reducing everything unnecessary and focusing on the moment, like every journey supposed to be.

After months of building and testing Epiclist, our community has curated over 200 journeys and added over 1000 steps to this journeys. We became partners with almost 100 unique adventure tour providers in selected destinations. Because of our local position, most journeys are focused on South America and Europe, but everyday more are being  curated in Asia, Australia, and Africa. Even in Greenland!

And we will launch Epiclist in the App Store in just a couple of days!

Back to the basics: Being human. Being simple.

Here at Epiclist we believe that all of us are mostly inspired by stories. Stories, which people share with each other. At Epiclist we want to connect people around their stories. The stories of our friends and the people surrounding us can release a spark and inspire us to do move and do something great. 

  1. Everything in Epiclist is built to be social:

When you first open the app and the “Discovery Tab”, you receive a stream of new activities, steps and journeys, taken or planned by people around the world or around your location. If you add steps from other users, they will get a notification, saying: “Andrew, you have just inspired Dany to Dive in the Crystal Bay”. And same things happens when people add steps from your journeys. So you know exactly when your discoveries are helping others to have better adventures.

That also means, that if you share your plans for your journeys, other people and your friends can follow you and leave their suggestions. So next time you meet and ask your friends for suggestions, you can just open Epiclist and add these tips as steps to your journey, and other travelers might share their opinion on your plans. Because Epiclist is mobile, you can take all your plans anywhere with you.

Every week we will feature the most exciting journeys on the “Featured” tab, as well as suggest pre-planned journeys for you, which we have created here with the Epiclist team.

2. Epiclist is about the whole experience:

On Epiclist you discover new journeys and capture and share your own journeys. Our goal is to create a simple way to capture the whole journey, right from the palm of your hand.

Create a new journey, add a picture to visualize it and some words to describe it

Add steps, which you plan to do or capture moments on the go or every time you come back after your adventures.

Don´t have photos? Simply search through 500px or Flickr to visualize your steps or journey.

You can share your whole journey with friends, inspiring them to follow your footsteps and organize their own activities and plans.

3. Epiclist is about the global community:

Everyone of us is an explorer. We are adventurers in our hearts and our minds. Just look around you. People are the ones, who go and discover the most incredible places and things around the world! With Epiclist we build a place to unite these people and their discoveries, so we all can inspire each other and help each other to explore the world simpler and better.

What about travel companies? Most of these founders are passionate Explorers and Entrepreneurs themselves, so they main goal is to share this passion with you, the traveller. And mostly they are the people who have the best knowledge about the area and local culture. But many of them don´t have the money to build good looking websites nor spend money on advertising. So when you are looking for them for your next adventure, you might not even find them or understand why you should choose them. And while you are traveling with your smartphone, 95% of tour providers don´t have any mobile presence!

Epiclist helps unique tour providers to share journeys they offer, so you can simply find them, browse through the complete experience, see photos and highlights, and contact the provider with just one tap. And if you want to share the provider with your friends to recommend them to do it as well, you can do it by adding them as part of your journey.

4. Epiclist is about friends and partners: 

Our attempt is simple: Less noise, more quality, more curation.

We do the hard job for you, pre-selecting the best tour providers and develop friendships and partnerships with the right ones. How?

We spent hours searching, considering ratings, reviews and years of experience and operation, to make sure you are in good hands.

We focus and choose experiences for 3 styles: “Backpacker”, “Traveler” and “Luxury” . The last one is about high-end experiences, where you get the maximum for your budget, reaching the most remote and unique places with the best providers out there.

We add reviews, awards and “Uniqueness” to every journey, making the credibility transparent to you.

And finally, we let the community being the judge. Add pulses to support providers you like. Follow their new journeys. Recommend them to your friends and other users in the Epiclist community. 

Are you ready for your next journey? Or do you want to share your story already now? We would love to hear from you: [email protected]

Read the journey from our team, launching Epiclist from 5 countries: “Making of Epiclist”

Life is an adventure. Discover it.

Exploring rural Rajasthan for the first time by motorbike was a revelation - incredible culture, landscape and hospitality and not one tour group in sight.

Today is a sunny Sunday in Chile. We are in Santiago and together with our team we´re one of the selected companies for the StartupChile program. We´re working towards our big goal to launch our experience discovery app Epiclist. And we release it already in a couple of days, celebrating an incredible year of adventure 2014! In the last 5 months we´ve been working, coding, designing, writing and curating experiences for Epiclist. We redesigned the complete app from scratch and built over 100 partnerships to unique adventure tour operators in selected destinations. We are very lucky to be supported by great angel investors and amazing people who believe in our vision. We don´t want to reveal too much about the new Epiclist app and its concept, as we will cover this in a new blogpost next week.

The journey till today was a pretty long and a pretty challenging one. But way more, it was a very exciting journey, full of adventures around the world! And our journey is still just in its first steps.

The Year 2013:

This year was an incredible and crazy year for us, so we decided to share our story. A story about building a simple, social and beautiful way to discover and share experiences and activities around the world. A story of building a global company from a global perspective, working from 5 different cities around the globe: Berlin, Tallinn, London, Kuta (Bali) and Santiago (Chile).

We believe that its more than just building an app. Its an inspiration for experience seekers and explorers! Its a call for adventurers and travellers. The ones who always look for new views and experiences in their life. New places, new lessons, new friends and new stories to tell in 30 years from today!

The start of a long journey:

7 months ago, in March 2013, me and my co-founder Olga, found ourselves in a little cafe in Berlin Friedrichshein, looking at our notebook, reading:

- No investment = No money to develop the company - No team = No developers to develop the product  - No income = No money to have a normal living (Döner Kebabs are great in Berlin, but after a while it’s not very healthy to eat them 5x a week) 

In other words: The situation was far from perfect. We were sitting there and questioning everything.  After finishing our studies, backpacking 4 months through South-East Asia and moving our whole life in a little car to Berlin, we decided to start Epiclist in May 2012 during the Startup WiseGuys Accelerator. Why? Because we have traveled so many times in the past and we knew the challenges faced for travellers. We knew that travel experiences are some of the most amazing experiences in our lifes. And while our friends kept asking us about these experiences, we realised that there was no simple way to share them and help others to achieve them as well.  

Pictures: Our first official office in the rooms of StartupWiseGuys. Brainstorming session, searching for the new brand name of our project, which would become Epiclist.

The first big setback: 

So, the idea was there: Creating a simple place, where people could share everything they want to do or achieve, find like minded people and discover how others have done something similar before. From becoming a surf pro, learning kung fu or traveling around the world, we wanted to unite people to take action. As the StartupWiseGuys accelerator was ending, we failed to raise enough funding and decided to take a break to rethink our project. And while Olga and I decided to continue despite all the uncertainty and lack of resources, our CTO decided to leave and get back to a normal job. This meant that we didn’t have anyone to do the technical development. In other words, we had to start all over.

  Finding the right goal:

We decided to rethink our mission. Always getting back to the “Why?” can´t be wrong. Our "Why" from the beginning was a passion for travel and exploring the world. We wanted to help people to get out there and travel, and make some of the best memories in their lives! 

And as we analysed the user behavior on our platform, we saw that over 70% of them were already creating and sharing “travel” and “adventure” oriented goals. The other 30% were setting goals for themselves, like “Get in shape”, “Drink more juice”, “Own a big house”. We decided to take a big step and focus on something we ourselves and our users were most passionate about: Adventure! Epiclist would become the most simple and beautiful way to help people discover, plan and share unique travel adventures and activities around the globe or just around the corner.

Finding supporters:

We started to look for a new team, emailing people through LinkedIn and Angellist, interviewing dozens of candidates. We needed a platform, but we could not code. Since we had done so many presentations back in business school and at work, we decided to make a presentation of the product. So we went ahead, downloaded Keynotopia to get iPhone shapes and icons, and adapted them in Keynote to create the first mockup for the Epiclist app. We looked into our favorite apps to analyse their UI and UX and within a week we compiled something, which we connected via Invisionapp to an interactive mockup. And yeah, it looked basic, but hey, we had something to show! 

The first new designs for Epiclist iOS App:

By November we were able to find some people to help us part-time. Alex, an amazing young designer from France, jumped on board to redesign the app and the homepage. Illya, a developer living in Italy, started to write the first lines of code for the new iOS app. By that time, we had already showed our mockup to all our friends and advisors, getting as much feedback as possible. We cant thank all of them enough for being so open with us, answering our questions and helping us to imagine the future of Epiclist in the next few months!

The other thing was the brand, which we tried to move forward all the time. At one point, we went through National Geographic Bucket List, seeing all those amazing people doing amazing things around the world and we decided to email all of them. Adventurers, athletes, travelers, explorers - those who have inspired us so much and fuelled us with energy to build a product, those who would be able help people around the world discover and do great adventures. 

We messaged about 70 people and about 5 of them reply. And one of these people was Alastair Humphreys, a National Geographic Hero of the Year, who replied to us after one of his expeditions. We ended up skyping with Al, who liked our idea and helped us by introducing us to Dave Cornthwaite, an adventurer from England. Dave helped us to by introducing us to 10 further incredible adventures. Talking to all of them, listening to their stories and their life journeys, was incredibly inspiring. Thank you guys so much - You´ve been our inspiration to keep building Epiclist since the beginning. 

  When all the pieces fell into places:

We were very lucky to find amazing people willing to support our vision. 

As we looked for further team support, Gaurav joined the team from London to code the back-end architecture for the next version of Epiclist. A few weeks later, we received amazing news: we had been accepted into the StartupChile program. Looking for a new iOS developer on Angellist, we started talking to Ignacio, skilled both in iOS design and development, who became the lead designer and front-end of Epiclist! Allison, from the US, and Lauren, from France, joined our team as interns here in our Santiago office. 

Finally, everyone got together here in Chile from all different parts of the planet. We were excited to have a truly amazing team, working on the mission to launch Epiclist worldwide! We can´t imagine a better team to work with us and we are truly thankful to everyone for that! 

Pictures: Epiclist team working on Epiclist 1.0

2014 - The biggest year for Epiclist:

Since August 2013 we´ve been moving Epiclist miles and miles forward. We´ve launched a completely new flat design for iOS7. We´ve built an advanced product, which is very simple and at the same time stunning to use. We´ve partnered with some of the most incredible adventure tour providers, allowing users to discover activities and experiences and simply add them to their future journeys or share them with friends! 

Being in South America is great for this purpose, since adventure is here everywhere and millions of people come every year to discover new experiences in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador and Colombia. The diversity of adventures is incredible, ranging from trekking in Patagonia, kayaking in its massive glaciers, getting lost in huge deserts, surfing on the coast of Ecuador and Brazil, finding the lost city in Columbia, rafting the world-class rivers in Chile and getting deep in the Amazon Jungle in Peru. 

Check out our latest blog posts and Pinterest maps to see which adventures we´ve already been scouting in South America, curating one incredible list after another, from "Discovery of Peru" to "The Greatest of Chile from North to South".

We´ve defined our company DNA, focusing on building the most beautiful product for people who always seek more unique and adventure experiences. We don’t see Epiclist as a travel startup, we see it as an experience company. 

Let the real journey begin: Today is a sunny Sunday. Until now, it has been a long journey. And its still just the first steps. Epiclist is going live in just couple of days and we are incredibly thrilled about this!

Follow the next steps of our journey on this blog. Sign up for Epiclist to check out our product or drop us an email to say Hi or if there is any way we can help you: [email protected] / [email protected] 

Life is an adventure. Lets discover it.Stay hungry. Stay curious!

Stan and OlgaFounders Epiclist: www.epiclist.io A big cheers! There have been so many incredible people, who have supported us on our journey so far and keep supporting us. This list is truly "epic":

- This one is to the Mentors and Advisors: Founders, Entrepreneurs and just incredibly smart people, who have taken their time to help us with advice and sharing their experience: Thom Cummings, Andrey Sergeyev, Jay Barker, Mark Turrell, Dirk Bartels, Floris Dekker, Flo Meissner,  Peter Read, Andris Berzins, Andrus Oks, Mike Reiner and Harald Katzenschläger. - This one is to the Visionaries: You guys allowed us to do what we do today: Create, innovate and disrupt. A big cheers to Gary Lin, Ralph Suda, SWG crew and the team behind SUP! - This one goes to the Epiclist Team: Without you guys nothing would happen! A big cheers to Ignacio Romero, Gaurav Giri, Lauren Durand and Allison Stickley!

- This one is to the Pioneers: Our friends and first testers have been so important on our journey, testing our first concepts and answering our endless questions and feedback rounds. A big cheers to old and new friends, like Sinan, Steffi, Emil, Irina, Kate Michi, Erika, Eduard, Manuel, Ismail, Kalev, Sanjay, Celine, Riina, Onur, Sonnie, Cassie, Rob, Melvin, Monica, Josh, Augustin, Yannis, Levent, Richard, Ines, Madis, Kirill and the whole StartupChile crew! - Cheers to the Epiclist Heroes: All incredible adventurers, whom we have interviewed and who keep inspiring us every day with their actions. A big cheers to Susi Mai, Matt Prior, Al Humphreys, Dave Cornthwaite, Krissy Moehl, Dave and Deb at PlanetD, Leon MacMarron, Emily Penn, Squash Falconer, Sean Conway, Jessica Winkler, Hannah Reyes, Phil Carrington, Nellie Huang from Wildjunket, Nuria Goma and Ray Zahab.   - Cheers to Early Contributors: Incredible people, who have contributed with their time and skills to Epiclist. A cheers to Illya, Aleks and Philipp!