How Eskimos led this Japanese entrepreneur to create a GPS-powered social trekking app

Yoshi Haruyama has the lean look and firm handshake of a man used to trekking the great outdoors. For years it was a hobby that he engaged in when he was not working as a magazine editor. Then, during a seal hunting trip in Alaska with Eskimos, he found a way to turn his passion into his own business.

While out with the Eskimos he noticed that their knowledge of nature – insights into things like what cloud formations indicate rain or what wild food is safe to pick – is deep and vast but it has a limit. Blinding snowstorms reduce anyone to a lost wanderer, which is why the Eskimos he stayed with religiously carried GPS devices. Seeing the huge value they placed on GPS got Haruyama thinking. “Without the experience of seal hunting I would probably think of GPS as just another helpful product,” he says.

He envisioned a GPS-powered app that would inform hikers about the trail they are on and the best paths to take. It would work online and offline so adventurers could travel safely even with no internet signal. From May 2011 the app was in development until finally, in March 2013, he and two other team members released Yamap.

Using regularly updated, publicly available maps from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, Haruyama painstakingly digitized 800 maps that cover 3,000 areas. He explains that a single map can cover multiple areas within one region, each with their own towns, cities, and mountains. Included are numerous GPS-traced hiking trails but Haruyama made a conscious decision to not bother with particularly dangerous paths. “I want to make a culture of climbing regular mountains, not just the large ones,” he says.

He did not provide an exact number for how many hiking trails are available but notes that users are becoming the main source of hiking trails. The social aspect of the service is very important to Haruyama. The app currently has 83,000 downloads and 20,000 monthly active users, all achieved through word of mouth.

Haruyama is dedicated to building the grassroots support system, individually contacting people who download the app or comment about it on social media. The app itself allows you to connect with other users so you can get tips on hiking various trails. Users have also met online and then gone hiking together in real life. Haruyama himself leads a monthly trek for users, too.

Making money, staying alive

When it comes to monetization, Yamap is not looking to maps for a pot of gold. Instead, he wants to pool his community’s knowledge to create an outdoors-version of Kakaku, the popular price comparison shopping site. With experts ranking the quality of goods, users can trust the advice they get and make purchases. In Japan, roughly US$4 billion is spent on outdoors goods and clothes.

Yamap will need some extra cash because it is fighting against a strong incumbent. GPSies is essentially the same app as Yamap but already available in multiple languages. Haruyama admits the similarities are many but looks to the nascent ecommerce function (the beta is expected this month) to distinguish himself. After taking both services for a spin, I would give GPSies an edge for variety of trails but Yamap has a stronger user interface which makes it easier to find the trail I want to hike and communicate with the maker of that trail. Casual hikers, Haruyama’s main target, may have an easier time using Yamap.

Yamap is still quite small but it has been garnering some positive attention. It won a prestigious Japan Good Design Award this year and it was also accepted into IBM’s first “Blue Hub” incubation batch. Haruyama hopes that translates into investor dollars.

Right after launch, Samurai Incubate invested around US$40,000. Yamap has not received further funding but Haruyama is looking to close a new round in the spring. His goal is roughly US$500,000, which would power the apps conversion into multiple languages and also be used to bring a few more employees on board.