If you’re someone who enjoys being outdoors, perhaps hiking, climbing, boating, or any other outdoor activity, but don’t like to spend too much money on the gear you need, perhaps you should check out Equipster.com.
Equipster.com is a relatively new website, which allows you to search for the gear you need for your outdoor activities and displays results, which are aggregated from a variety of of different online shops and retailers. By doing this, users are able to find the items they want to purchase without having to spend an excessive amount of money.
Users can also choose to filter the type of equipment that they’re interested in purchasing and can choose from a variety of different filters, including size, gender, the type of item that they are looking for, as well as others.
Also, users can create an account on Equipster in order to save their searches, filters, and wishlist. In addition, users can choose to receive an e-mail when items in their wishlist drop below a certain percentage. Equipster also offers the option for users to receive a GearReport e-mail, at a frequency of either daily, weekly, or twice a week. However, if users would rather not receive any price notifications or GearReport e-mails, they can set the e-mail frequency to “never”.
When I found out about Equipster from a Tweet by Kevin Rose, I thought the service was a great idea and sent the founders, Will and Chris, an e-mail, asking if they’d be interested in doing an interview about Equipster, and they were!
Before we get to the questions and answers, I’d like to thank both Chris and Will for taking the time to respond to my e-mails, as well as for agreeing to actually do an interview. The six question interview can be found below.
Q: When and how did you come up with the idea for Equipster?
A: We came up with the idea for equipster our senior year of college. Basically, we both needed a bunch of new gear but couldn’t afford to go to the store and pay retail. Searching across the web for deals got old fast, so we decided there needed to be a better way to buy outdoor gear online. Also, finding deals on products which had sold out in our size was irksome, and we wanted to be able to filter products for EXACTLY the one we wanted.
Q: According to the Equipster website, neither of you had any web development background before creating Equipster and because of this, both of you had to learn how to create a website. How long did it take to learn the required skills and did you receive any help with creating the website?
A: It’s been a non-stop learning process. Using free material online, Chris learned how to code and Will taught himself web design. With some programming advice from our engineer friends, it only took a couple of months to get something decent online, and since then we’ve been continuously making things better and improving our skills.
Q: After launching Equipster, did you expect to get as much attention as you did?
A: We’ve always known that if we made the awesome website that we have in our minds, people will use it, love it, and tell their fellow outdoor adventurers about it. To be honest, we’re pleasantly surprised with the amount of traffic and positive feedback we’ve seen thus far, but we still have a long way to go until equipster is as awesome as we want it to be.
Q: What goes into the day-to-day running of the site and how many people work at Equipster?
A: It is still just the two of us, but we are looking to add a few more teammates shortly. Day-to-day we spend about half of our time keeping things running and interacting with our users and half our time making equipster better, either by planning and implementing new features or expanding our product database.
Q: What are the future plans for Equipster? Do you plan on adding any new features, services, etc.?
A: Right now, our main focus is getting more retailers into our database and collecting more information about each product to provide a richer shopping experience.
Q: What were the best and worst moments that you both had while you were in the process of creating and launching this service?
A: The best moment thus far was watching our website crash with the spike in traffic this past cyber monday. The worst moment was getting the flood of “this site isn’t working!” complaints from this past cyber Monday…
Again, I’d like to thank both Chris and Will for taking the time to answer the above questions!
If you’re someone who’s interested in the outdoors and outdoor activities, I’d suggest that you visit Equipster.com the next time you’re looking for some new gear!
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