The Adventure Capital Pod

A case for trust & authenticity

Today features a conversation with Jon Rosenberg. Jon and Chap discuss a number of topics regarding his company, Cold Case Gear [https://coldcasegear.com/]. Here's how Jon describes Cold Case Gear, "We tell people that we sell peace of mind and we're all about safety. Our tagline is, we protect the gear that gets you home." Jon's phone case is designed to keep all your electronics warm, dry and charged.  We get the opportunity to dig into Jon's origin story and how big ideas are generated. There's often one moment where the revelation happens and then the work begins. It can take years of grinding to make all the puzzle pieces fit together. Jon talks about how he has gone from 0 -> 100. Over the years, Jon has learned tons. We pick apart the learning he's discovered along the way. There are a handful of super tactical conversations in today's episode. It was fun discussing Jon's incredible ability to take authentic and meaningful photos as he builds his brand. His work is fantastic, every company needs great content and Jon delivered some high quality tips. First and foremost, it's about authenticity. Practice what you preach. Use your services or products and use that as content.  One of the most important takeaways, use your work to create a productive work life balance. Go do what you love while recording content. It's one of the greatest advantages for running an outdoor industry company. You get to play and work simultaneously. :) One of the highlights of this episode is when Jon details one of his favorite moments while building CCG. He talks about how his customers came up with an entirely new use case for Cold Case. Learning from our customers is absolutely one of the most important tools in our toolkit as founders. Because, ultimately, it's our job to solve their problems.  Thanks so much for tuning in this week! Go follow along with Jon at - https://coldcasegear.com/ [https://coldcasegear.com/] * Also, you can find him on Instagram here - https://www.instagram.com/coldcasegear/ [https://www.instagram.com/coldcasegear/] * On Twitter here - https://twitter.com/ColdCaseGear [https://twitter.com/ColdCaseGear] * And on Facebook here - https://www.facebook.com/coldcasegear/ [https://www.facebook.com/coldcasegear/]

I have Ultra-erior motives...

Chap Grubb, your host, flying solo. Today’s episode is about bringing our company to the next level. We felt like there was this next level that we could take Rerouted to. Something that truly is the easiest and the cheapest way to buy and sell second-hand outdoor gear. Proudly, I'm here to announce Rerouted Ultra, and we're really following the mantra of Reduce | Reroute | Reuse. CHECK IT OUT HERE! https://rerouted.co/rerouted-ultra [https://rerouted.co/rerouted-ultra] It's what it's all about, is recycling that gear and getting it from somebody's dusty garage to the people out there that really, really, really want it. People that need affordable, accessible and sustainable gear. Besides, that gear deserves to be on the dusty trail, not a dusty garage. * The big thing that we're doing for Rerouted Ultra is we're eliminating all shipping. For all your orders all year. We want that to be as painless as possible. When you're thinking about buying something, you don't even have to think about buying new anymore. You can just buy second-hand. * The second big piece of it is that we're eliminating all the commission fees for all the people that have gear to sell. * The third major part, and this includes all sorts of different things that we'll talk about a little bit later in the episode. It's about this infinite support. We're going to step in and we're going to manage everything for you. We're doing everything we can to make it super easy for you to solve all of your secondhand gear needs. We built Rerouted Ultra for all those people who give a damn about the wilderness. For all those people who wanna put a little bit of extra cash in their pockets for the holiday, clearing out their old stuff for, for all of the people out there that, that absolutely prefer to choose used first for all of their needs, but, can't make it happen fast enough or efficiently enough or, or effectively enough. We're, we're really, really hoping that we can lock in a bunch of people out there that have always thought to themselves, man, I'd love to start selling secondhand gear, a side hustle, or as a job it, we've seen a lot of people make a good amount of money selling stuff monthly on our platform. We're really trying to make Rerouted Ultra a solution for anybody that prefers to choose second-hand first.This is for them. It's for those friends and family that love to play outside, but they either have too much gear or are complaining about how much the gear they wanna buy costs. Obviously, we're really excited. Because we're all working together with you, on your behalf. We're solving this problem together for being the very best community out there for people to buy and sell gear. Painless, efficient, easy. It's all the same things Rerouted was doing except for we've even gone the stuff further and tried to make it unlike any other secondhand marketplace that you've ever seen before. We’re running Rerouted Ultra through the New Year. We’re on a limited timeframe because we feel that this is the early adopter deal. This is the deal that we wanna offer to every single person that's ready to go, to get involved in the marketplace. To become part of the second-hand movement. And then later down the line, as we continue to iterate and refine and learn from this experience, we're really excited to continue making it better. To continue improving the platform, the system and the offer. And, and we're just super psyched to let you, all of the podcast, to let the community that exists within Rerouted today be the very first people to be able to take advantage of this. So we have three deals. Three opportunities to level up your Rerouted experience.  CHECK IT OUT HERE! https://rerouted.co/rerouted-ultra [https://rerouted.co/rerouted-ultra]

If you're mappy and you know it clap your hands

For today's episode, we are pleased to welcome Ankit Jain, the CEO and Founder of Pathloom!  We'll let Ankit talk about Pathloom himself.  "We look at our, ourselves as an outdoor tech company, really thinking about travel tech and, and that experience of getting outside. So that's the way. It really kind of comes together as a whole piece, but certainly a lot of our secret sauce and backend is fueled by the kinds of expertise and things we're doing with data and the GIS side of the things and our pipelines there, where we're not just creating insights or bringing things together, but we're creating new insights in a way that hasn't existed in this industry before." Ankit and Chap discuss what it's like to work on a sophisticated tech platform. We chat about founder burnout, worklife balance and product management. Really, they just go into the weeds about their processes and their learnings along the way. Ankit started the episode with a quote that sums up his experience building Pathloom, "Nothing will work unless you do!" Find more about Pathloom! www.pathloom.com [//www.pathloom.com]

There's a retailsnake in the grass... [BF/CM Emergency Pod]

This is an emergency pod where my teammate at Rerouted, Chris Wilsey, and I dig into the global phenomenon that is Black Friday/Cyber Monday. We discuss a little of the research we have uncovered about the history and growth of this incredible retail events.  There is a lot to consider as a business owner/founder/leader of a project. How do we contribute, leverage and organize around existing events? There is a lot to unpack in the discussion! Thanks for listening... please don't hesitate to send us an email with any questions! - theadventurecapitalpod@gmail.com

Tried or die with a Dirtbag CEO

Ride or die with a Dirtbag CEO Meet Kay Rodriguez, the self proclaimed Dirtbag CEO of both Outerly and Urban Outdoors. Kay’s outdoor entrepreneurship started from a logical, yet surprising, place. She worked at Bain as a strategy consultant. After a few years, she knew her path needed to change - so when she started to sense a problematic pattern - she hit the ground running. Her background, plus desire to help get people outside, set her on this exciting journey. Startups are all about acting quickly, learning faster and adapting to new information. Kay discusses the process from the early days of Skyline Adventurer to it’s current iteration, Outerly. There were critical moments where new info challenged Kay to reimagine and reevaluate - much of this while writing about badass adventures all over the country in her converted van. We learned a number of high-level perspectives from Kay in this episode about founding an outdoor industry business: * Passion, dedication even obsession is a necessity * Decide on something, anything, and just go do it * It’s better to try and fail -> because that way you learn something There are two key tactical takeaways from this episode. Both are tactics that give you tremendous insights into your business. Our job is to solve peoples problems and provide value, you need to always be learning and adjusting based on new information. * Interviewing customers * Google Alerts Daily Digest Much about this episode epitomizes the Founder journey. Kay says it best, “I guess there's a couple morals of this story. The first is if you're in a situation where things might be precarious, a little risky, it's better to enjoy that experience while laughing and making light of it then freaking out”. But, you’re going to have to listen to the episode to found out exactly what she’s talking about. 🙂 Learn more about Kay! https://outerly.co/ [https://outerly.co/] Twitter: @kaygoesoutside [https://twitter.com/kaygoesoutside], @urbanoutdoors [https://twitter.com/urbanoutdoors_], @letsgetouterly [https://twitter.com/LetsGetOuterly] Instagram: Kay Rodriguez [https://instagram.com/kaygoesoutside?igshid=Nzg3NjI1NGI=], Urban Outdoors [https://instagram.com/urbanoutdoors?igshid=Nzg3NjI1NGI=], LetsGetOuterly [https://instagram.com/letsgetouterly?igshid=Nzg3NjI1NGI=] Linked In: Kay Rodriguez [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kay-rodriguez/] Be sure to check out what we're building at Rerouted too! https://linktr.ee/rerouted [https://linktr.ee/rerouted]