Camping lovers can find all the information they need in one place with CampMap

By Polya Pencheva

Apart from being fun, camping could also be frustrating. It often comes to choosing the right camping pitch and the utilities around it. Generally, this information is spread out by word of mouth, paper maps, and websites. CampMap has developed a digital solution to help camping lovers. Simon Neal is the founder of CampMap. He is a geoscientist and programmer with a passion for making maps. In today’s episode of start-up-of-the-day, Simon Neal tells us more about CampMap’s journey.

What is CampMap actually?

“CampMap is a digital interactive map for campsites. Essentially what we’re doing is trying to capture all the information about the camp. Its shape, its size, its features, and also further information about each one of those things like pictures, descriptions, and opening times. So, it’s a full information and mapping platform, for campsites, in which the guests can interact with our mapping app, 2D search, navigation, and activities suggestions during their stay at the campsite.

What does it do?

“It’s a bit like Google Maps at its core. You can open it up, you can zoom in, and click on things. It just has a lot more features and a lot more interactions. Like every single place where you can stay at the campsite can be looked at and visualized in a 360 photo.  The guests can search for all sorts of information like where’s the restaurant, where’s the show, and when does it open. We really want it to be an active tool the guests are using as a single source for everything they need to know. It’s also, a bit of a helping hand to make them aware of more things they can do during their stay. That will make it better for them.”

How did you come up with the idea?

“Through my own pains. So, I was trying to book a campsite for our family. I really wanted to choose where I wanted to stay at the campsite because we had a small child at the time. And it was just really difficult to find that information. The camp’s website had some information, and the map kind of had a bit more, but it was all in PDFs, and it wasn’t all in one place. That was the pain point of the problem for me. And because of my background in making maps and designing things on the web, I thought we should make a web mapping application that brings us information together. So, people like me won’t get stressed anymore. They go to one place and find everything they need.”

How hard was it to get funding?

“These days, if you have just an idea, it’s possible to get funding. There are a lot of kinds of support or ecosystems for people with ideas now. But for me, because we’re based in Croatia, it was a bit new. I was a bit lost trying to find funding, but actually, almost within a few months of me looking for funding, a new start-up fund was created in Croatia. I got to know about them. And I was one of the first start-up founders who approached them for funding, and they jumped in straight away and said it was a great idea. They said they would give me a small chunk of funding to get started. This is kind of the easy bit, but then I had to prove lots of things beyond that. And that’s where it starts to get quite hard. And there’s more competition. We’re doing quite well at the moment. But we need to keep making process to get funding.”

What were the biggest challenges that you had to overcome?

“I think the hardest thing is, is to build a team and find the right people to help you because you can’t do everything on your own. It’s simply not possible. I think that are really the toughest elements. And the rest is then you know, developing that strategy in interaction with your customers, which in our case, at the moment is mostly the campsites. You have to learn really fast how to communicate with them, how you consult with them, to kind of prove that it’s not just a great idea, it can also be a business as well. So, I think these are the two hardest things.”

What makes you proud?

“I think it’s the reaction from the users and the customers that almost everybody we show this to, or gets the see it has a really positive, strong reaction. People tell us that they wanted something like this for a long time but didn’t know how to do it. We get that a lot. And that really kind of shows that, you know, it’s not just a nice to have a product, it’s almost a master product, which is really, you know, create recognition that you found something that has value for people.”

The first electric camper comes from the Netherlands

It was just a matter of time. Europe’s first electric camper van has recently been released on the open roads.

How do you see yourself in five years?

“I think our mission is to try and map all the campsites in the world. Obviously, we’re not going to do every one of them, but we really want to create this amazing data set and maps that people can use. So, we want to grow the team really quickly. We want to be all over Europe, we want to go to North America, Australia, New Zealand, and even Asia. So that’s kind of our five-year plan.”

How do campsites react to your product?

“They are the primary customer now who we are actually selling to and they’re really happy because we really solve a lot of problems for them. It’s an investment, but it’s kind of a long-term investment for them. Having their map or their campsite maps in such high detail is really, really valuable for them internally. And also, you know, to share that information with their guests. So, I think they’re very happy with what we’re doing.”

Be sure to read other instalments in this series.

Each day, Innovation Origins puts a start-up in the spotlight. Read them all here.