How GAFFL will change travel, adventure and airport transits worldwide
The beginning!
It all started in 2013 December, as I was going back to Bangladesh. I booked the cheapest flight I could get out of Detroit, and found myself in a 12 hour layover in Dubai. Those 12 hours in Dubai were just the most boring time of my life. As I was looking around, an idea just crossed my mind; what if I knew some people here already? Can I build a platform, where people will be able to find others in a layover, before they actually fly? I could surely use it for Dubai. After walking around for a bit, eating on my own at a cafe, I was so bored that I fell asleep for a few hours. I went to Bangladesh and then came back in the US to finish my last two years of college. But those 12 hours were always on my mind.
In 2015, in my senior year of college, I started traveling a lot. Eveliina and I went to Europe and to a lot of states in the US. I came in the US in 2011. I have always played soccer for my entire life. But after coming here to study, I have always found it really hard to find people to play with. So deep in my mind, I was always looking for a new sport, more like a solo sport, in which I could just go on my own. In September 2015, I had a life changing trip to Grand Canyon National Park. I got a 1$ promotional ticket from Frontier to go to Las Vegas. So from Vegas, I just decided to drive to South Rim of the canyon. When I reached there it was already dark, and when I stood in the rim, I felt this big, vast darkness in front of me. I posted in my Facebook, “The feeling of looking at the stars and the darkness of Grand Canyon is not real! Damn! This is not real!!” I slept in my car that night just to see the sunrise. I had a flight to catch the next day but I spent as long as I could at the canyon. As a matter of fact, I barely caught the flight asI was the last one to board. Why these stories? These two stories have a lot to do with GAFFL.
The Grand Canyon trip worked like a trigger as I started exploring more and more after that. I became a traveler, hiker, even did some mountaineering. But the more places I went to, the more I met people , I found out, although my whole idea was to do the sport solo, but my nature is to play sports in a team. My nature is to make lifelong friends who I meet out of nowhere, out of nothing. But there was a problem. For example, the day I would go to a national park, I would meet someone or a group of hikers, but I would not be able to hike with them because it is their last day of the trip and my first. There was always this lag, that is only solvable if I knew exactly when these people are coming here and a platform where all of us could plan our hike out long before we would see each other in real life. After my graduation, I rented a car and started driving towards the West on my own. I did a lot of traveling and hiking. I completed the double crossing of the Grand Canyon, hiked to the top of Sandia Peak in Albuquerque and some other trails in different national parks. I made some amazing friends on my trip. But before my trip ended I wanted to climb a 14er in Colorado. I looked for a shorter route to the top and found Craig’s Trail. This is not the conventional route to the top. As I reached the trailhead, there was only one car and as I asked the person, if he knew where others are, he just told me that the trail had just opened for the season, 20 minutes ago. We started hiking together. As I was coming down from the top, the other hiker had already started going down before me and I was the only one in the 7 mile trail. After I got down to the tree line, there was a marker that I misjudged and I started hiking in completely opposite direction. After 40 minutes of fast hiking, I realized I was completely lost in the forest. The other hiker had mentioned about mountain lions and bears in the area and as I was shouting for help, I could hear nothing but birds flying away and thunders in the sky. What a moment! I just closed my eyes and tried my best to keep it cool but it was hard as it was very close to getting dark. All kinds of weird things come to your mind in those situations and you think about things that matter to you the most. I was thinking about my parents, family, my girlfriend and accepting the fact that I am very lost and there is no way people would even know about me. I did not even tell anyone, where I was hiking.
Somehow I kept my head working and finally got my way back as I followed back my route to where I saw that sign. I found a way out as I looked on the other side, got into my car and thought about how people actually get lost and die trying to explore the wilderness. You just can’t control everything. I just thought maybe tons of people hike on their own because there is no one around them interested to hike. Not everyone likes exploring, hiking and mountaineering. Not everyone likes to meet new people. But there are people just like me who love to travel, hike or climb with others. I thought about my friend Oskar and his brother Ricky, who I met in Grand Canyon as I was hiking towards the North Rim. The brothers only planned to hike for 7 miles but ended up hiking 30 miles with me that day. I wanted to build something where people will be able to find destination specific traveling and hiking partners. Later I added mountaineering in my idea, as I was looking for mountaineering expeditions they are seriously pricey. I just could not afford to climb Alaska, and climbing on your own is seriously risky as well. However, this kind of a platform can connect people for small or big mountaineering expeditions as well, where a few mixed level mountaineers can actually complete something without paying a big fee or a price.
These ideas changed everything because it directly correlates to the problem which I felt I needed to solve in Dubai airport. I would think about this project all the time. That was when I found Shakil. I needed someone I trust, someone who knew web developing to the core; he was my man. We have been friends since childhood but after I came in the States we lost touch for a little bit. The day I told him about this project, he got so excited that he developed a front end and showed it to me in three days. Fast forward 6 months, after countless days of brainstorming about different features, functionalities, content, development, we have GAFFL. We built it part time, as we both had full time jobs the whole time. We worked our evenings, weekends to make this happen. Along the way, we even built a small team.
So now, what is GAFFL (Get A Friend For Life)? What does it have?
- GAFFL is the world’s first and only platform which is enabling people at an airport layover, to find others, to get connected before they actually fly. Users just need to type in the airport and their dates of layover to find others.
- GAFFL is doing the same for travelers, hikers and mountaineers. You can find someone to explore Paris, to hike in Grand Canyon National Park or climb Long’s Peak in Colorado. GAFFL has destination specific timeslots, where users can plan in a group using real time chat or question answers.
- For every listed destination, GAFFL has a community page, where users can join the community and participate in real time discussion regarding that place.
- We created G-Feed for travelers and adventurers. You can post your updates and share your pictures with other Gafflers. As a user of the feed, you can filter what kind of posts or updates you want to see based on interest, age and occupation. So, if you are an airline pilot who loves hiking, and you want to see hiking pictures and updates from other airline pilots all around the world, GAFFL can do it for you.
- As a nearby assistant, in every community or timeslot page, we have maps showing nearby restaurants, bars, transportation and emergency services. So if you are participating in a real time chat for a particular destination and some of you need a place to meet up, just hit restaurants in the map and find the one you all like. You don’t need to go to a different window search and send the link of the restaurant or anything like that, as all of you are looking at the same listing.
6. You can also message another user directly using our one-on-one . messaging system.
What you have to do to experience GAFFL the best?
- Update your profile. In a platform like GAFFL, users do not want to go out traveling or hiking with someone whose profile has no picture, or whose details and past travel histories are missing.
- Invite your friends to the communities and timeslots for destinations where you are traveling. You and your friends can form a small group with a few others to complete some extraordinary travel itineraries, some amazing hikes or some really difficult mountaineering expeditions. There does not have to be a boundary in what you can achieve in the traveling world.
- Share all the interesting travel and adventure hacks with the rest of the world in G-Feed.
Why Medium?
I don’t think writing has ever been my best quality. Since we started GAFFL in May 20th, 2017, we had hits from 68 countries and 493 cities. We found some amazing support. As we are not a funded company and do not have a lot of money to advertise, I took the route of writing to let others know, that we exist as a service and there is a zero(0) cost to use it.
The users we are having right now, will have a direct impact on the product that we are iterating. After all, the product is for the people and we want it to be made by the people. So sign up, enjoy our service and give us any feedback or suggestion you have. Every real user is important, every one of you.
Akib Amin
Co-founder, GAFFL
akib@gogaffl.com
https://www.gogaffl.com/
