A New Adventure!
By: Gokhan Gultekin
Tags: Blog, Outdoors, Hiking, Adventure, Community

One of the most exciting activities that can be done outdoors for me is hiking. I spend most of my time hiking somewhere in Sweden, or in the mountains. I love hiking so much and staying overnight in the wild after a long-distance hike even if you have tired legs and probably some blisters on your toes. It’s such a nice feeling that sleeping out in the wild, and it makes me feel more connected to nature. While I’m being outdoors, I also enjoy taking photos, amateur film making, and writing, especially if it’s a long hiking day. Consequently, I do create content a lot in the woods as well as doing hiking a lot.

An idea that came up while I was walking along on the beautiful shores of an island in Gothenburg, dragged me to build a new product, a platform. And today, I am pretty happy to introduce that platform to you guys! The idea, or rather, the question was:

Almost every Friday evening, or during the week, I’m spending so much time to find and explore new hiking trails in Gothenburg or in the surrounding area. And once I find those trails and start hiking them or just while being outdoors, I create content a lot. So, why wouldn’t I (or we) combine them and share my experiences (or others’) regarding the trails around Sweden?

Since I had that idea, I’m trying to improve it, to build the business model, and start working on technical stuff for making it real! It’s not a unique idea. Besides that, have no competitors, no risk at all, and, no that much initial costs to start testing the idea. Lagom!

For the ones who might not know, we as 4 people started a company called Peakode when we were 25 years old, and ran it for 4 years. It was quite hard times, made a lot of mistakes but we learned a lot from them! But that is how you grow, right? Since I would always like to enjoy my free time in the evenings, my intention is to not spend that much time on the platform, that’s why I decided to move forward with this easy-to-build idea.

On this journey, we are together with my lovely wife Eda, she is designing the whole creative stuff on the product(s). Moreover, she handles the technical stuff as well. The logo that you will see shortly is designed by her❤️

So let’s talk about the product! Hold on…

The name of the product is…

hikethenorth.com!

Click here to see how the first version of the product looks like!

You can find more details about the product on the website I shared above. The first version of the platform will be helping me to find hikers who are eager to share, and convince them to write their experiences along the trails. Then the actual version of the product is planned to be released before the summer. My plan is to have at least 5 authors and around 10 hiking trails on the platform before it will be released in summer. The plan for the next versions is to have more authors on the platform, perhaps from the different Nordic countries☺️ Therefore, I will focus on looking for authors and try to convince them to share their hiking experiences. If you have a friend or someone you know who might be interested, please share the website with her/him!🙏

I’m aware that the first version of the product and the Instagram profile are quite empty right now, however, there is some work in progress in the background. So please follow @hikethenorthapp Instagram profile for the updates, you can follow me on Instagram as well. There will be updates soon.