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The Outbound Collective 2.0 — Find the best adventures in your backyard and worldwide.
We built The Outbound to spread the excitement of travel and adventure, whether you're looking for something to do this weekend, planning travels abroad, or backpacking around the world. The site is community-driven; it's easy to discover and share new adventures, stories, photos, and more.
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Hey Kyle,
Exciting to hear so many international folks have been attracted to Outbound, and that growth remains steady. It's the most epic source of beta on the Internet (and inspiring you've made all this progress while bootstrapping).
Curious about the Pursuit Series (which looks awesome). How does it fit into the larger strategy, and if you classify Outbound as a media company, in what ways events play a role moving forward. I think it's awesome your content can feed experiences, and vice versa.
@danpierson , glad you’re finding the site useful!
One of the key things we identified early on was that outdoor activities can be *very* intimidating for a lot of people. It’s not the easiest thing to start mountain biking or rock climbing or hiking, especially if you don’t know anyone who’s already experienced. The Pursuit Series has been an awesome way for us to engage our community and give folks opportunities to experience things they never would have tried on their own.
Events in general play very much into the community aspect of The Outbound. While we’re mostly online, there has been a strong desire from our members to meet up in real life. As you said, there’s a nice synergy between the site feeding events, and events providing a real-life platform for the site, and we have a few things in the pipeline in that vein, so stay tuned!
@kylefrost love it (and really really really hoping to make Pursuit in NorCal this year).
A bit of background on the 2.0 updates:
- 📈We undertook an extensive dive into our analytics, qualitative feedback, and interviews with our community (now over 1M monthly visitors) to identify areas for improvement and combined that with internal goals
- 🌍Significantly improved discovery and search — we want to make sure our community knows that The Outbound works worldwide. (international growth has outstripped domestic by 2x in the last 6mo)
- 📷Improved community photo management and visibility
- 💻Refactored most of our front-end code, including re-writing and re-organizing styles from scratch
- 🛠️Still bootstrapped
- 😀Lots more to do (especially focusing on worldwide expansion)
Man, the gear section on the site is so dangerous. I was cruising through and noticed an article on "Packrafting". Never heard of it, but 10min later I'm struggling to not add any more gear to my pile.
I typed in Lagos, Nigeria where I'm headed in a few weeks and found nothing 😕 are you prioritizing specific regions in your expansion? @tylerdrake727 @bheiff @kylefrost
@abadesi Sorry about that! The expansion has definitely come in some places faster than others, since the site is community driven. We tend to be stronger in places that are popular with adventure travel (and hiking/backpacking, since that's how we started), like NZ, Iceland, the Alps, etc. Africa is a big priority for us in 2018!
@tylerdrake727 @bheiff @kylefrost @abadesi Perfect opportunity for you to contribute some adventures to the site Abadesi! There are many other resources for adventure travel and if you discover anything cool you can add it to the site to make it easier for people that follow.
Good to see progress is being made, I've been contributing for a while and will continue to.
Keep up the good work and can't wait for the Android app!
The people behind the Outbound Collective are the raddest human beings. The website and Apple app (soon to be an android one too) are awesome and so useful.
Pros:Allmof the pros.
Cons:No cons.
The redesign makes an already good product even greater.
Pros:Adventure front and centre
Cons:Can’t think of any
Really excited these guys continue to put in work here. Not the easiest business to build - they get folks excited to contribute super high quality content that rivals what you'd read in top magazines.
Pros:Best database of outdoor activities out there
Cons:Wish I could check off more of the trips I see on here!