Background
A couple months ago, my friend wanted to spend his precious holidays diving around one of the most stunning islands in the world, Sipadan Island which is located at Sabah (Borneo), Malaysia. He ended up in frustration. Unless he is happy to pay extra for single supplement charges (which is basically charges applied to divers who are not in a group) and accommodation for 2 persons (most dive resorts are based on twin sharing, there is dorm accommodation, but that’s rare), it’s a no go for him. In the end, he canceled the trip because he decided that it’s not worth it to go on a trip that costs about 50% more than the usual price for a 3 days 2 nights dive trip simply because he’s a lone adventurer.
2 months ago he shared this frustration to me in great length during our casual meeting. The discussion later motivated us to dig further into this particular matter. After some researches and asking around, we learned that a lot of adventurers are actually facing relatively the same problem when it comes to kickstarting similar adventurous activities. Most adventurous activities require a minimum pax, usually 4 persons, adventure tourists who traveled alone and wanted to spend their precious travel time on an adventure to some of the most beautiful wonders on earth that God has created for us, will either shell out more money than usual or canceled.
At the same time, we also found a great length of Reddits where people looking for travel partners to partake in their journeys, but the rate of happening is disappointedly low. A lot of trips ended up postponed, change of venue or activity, or even canceled. This is not fun. We strongly felt that this problem has to be tackled, the community is in demand of a solution. While both of us are front-end and back-end developers, we thought maybe we could help.
Our vision
The next day, we moved on to the drawing board. We collect all our thoughts and restructured them into a vision of what this very solution should ultimately achieve. We want to build a community-powered adventure platform to enable everyone to adventure to anywhere with anyone in any parts of the world. It has to be Super simple. Super affordable. Super Approachable. We believe that anyone from anywhere should be able to explore the masterpiece that our mother nature has granted us to appreciate, without any cultural, racial, age, social status, or budget constraints.
How it works
In Expade, we breakdown the flow of kickstarting a journey into 3 simple steps. Search/create → Join & discuss → Go there together! Super simple!
It has to be Super simple. Super affordable. Super Approachable……without any cultural, racial, age, social status, or budget constraints.
The following image provide a more detailed explanation:
Expade is the first community-powered adventure travel platform. Going beyond our normal known area, seeking out new and unique experiences has always been an exciting thing for human to do. We love it. It develops us. It is life-changing, inspiring, and rewarding. But most of the time, what keeps us from doing it is because of the price to pay, the planning process, and the safety concern.
“A platform to co-create adventurous journey with people all around the world. With no barrier.”
What if we can break these barriers? What if we can pull the cost down? What if we can shorten the process and at the same time mitigate the safety issues with the help of others? We couldn’t be more excited to be part of this mission making adventure travel to be a super approachable subject for everyone, and to open up a whole new scene in this very sector.
Coming soon 🚀
Our very first version of Expade is almost ready for launch. It is currently in private beta, there will be some bugs here and there which will be fixed as soon as possible. The private beta will be conducted for about 2–3 months time for feedbacks and iterations. In this period, we are open for suggestions of what should be done to make it serve you better. You’re welcome to join our community :)
To stay in the loop on all our latest news, follow us on our Twitter, Facebook, Medium, as well as our community. Thanks for reading, we cant’t wait to hear from you.
