The Founders of Easy2Hike tell about their journey since winning the Coller $1,000,000 Startup Competition
Remember the big winner from the Coller $1,000,000 Startup Competition in May? First place was awarded to Erez Talgam and Uri Bar, founders of Easy2Hike – a platform to connect park managers and visitors in order to enhance outdoor experiences for nature park visitors. The first place prize was a $100,000 investment, as well as mentorship and assistance with meetings with potential investors. British financial executive and philanthropist Jeremy Coller was the driving force behind the competition.
Four months after the competition finals, we received an update from the winners and founders of Easy2Hike, Uri Bar and Erez Talgum, alum of the MBA in Management of Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at the Coller School of Management. They told us about the rapid and successful sequence of events which occurred from the moment they won the competition.
Below is a summary of these events in their words:
Funding:
We received funding ($100,000) from Mr. Jeremy Coller, founder of Coller Capital, a UK based private equity. We are very excited to have Jeremy as our first investor – his advice is spot on and his entrepreneurial spirit is something we feel fortunate to learn from and implement. After a long and insightful meeting in Tel Aviv in June, we recently met with him again in London.
Business:
- San Diego County Parks: We launched in 16 parks in San Diego County. The county sent a newsletter to 20,000 local nature fans, highlighting Easy2Hike. They also published it on their website and added an “Easy2Hike Button” in a few strategic places, as well as ran a FB campaign.
- San Diego City Parks: Following our success with the county, the city of San Diego summoned us for a meeting with the head of open-space Dept. The meeting went very well and we are continuing to develop plans for the future.
- LA County Parks: We met with representatives from this agency, the largest in Southern California. As a result, they signed up for five subscriptions – one for themselves and four more for agencies who have trails in their county. One of these agencies is the National Park Service (the federal US agency for parks with over 300,000,000 annual visits). We hope this will be a good entry point to get the National Park Service as clients across the country.
- Murrieta Creek Regional Trail (MCRT) – We met with representatives of four cities in Southern California where the MCRT passes (this trail is already available on our app). One city already added a recommendation about us on the city website and we hope that the others will soon follow.
Product:
- Park Builder: To deal with increasing number of park map changes by San Diego county volunteers we released our first version of the “Park Builder.” This is a vital function of the backend system for park managers and it will allow them to make changes to their content in real time(CMS: Points-Of-Interest, park-amenities, images, text, etc.). In the future, this system will allow us to scale faster and self-onboard parks.
- Social: We recently started adding our highly anticipated social layer to our app by adding user reviews, ratings and the ability to share a route.
Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months!
The Coller $1,000,000 Startup Competition will occur for the second time in May 2018. For more information, visit the following Facebook pages: Coller $1,000,000 Startup Competition and Coller Ignite: The Entrepreneurship Club
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