Success stories: XSportmap – a social tool for outdoor enthusiasts
Chris Headleand runs Xsportmap, an online community for extreme sports. Together they create custom web systems through their company, Ogwen Publishing, but they were originally brought together by their shared love of extreme outdoor pursuits. Chris Headleand has been an accomplished wakeboarder in the UK and internationally and an avid kayaker. Xsportmap helps users navigate the landscape of extreme sports, from rock face to interface. We spoke with Chris Headleand about what they’ve created.
What is Xsportmap?
It’s a social network that’s based around locations and interests, rather than the conventional social network based around existing friendships. Those are usually the same networks as in real life. But we’ve got this group of people who like to go out and visit places, who have their local spots and interests, and we thought, “Let’s see if we can connect them, take them out of their own little groups and introduce them to new people.”
A lot of these extreme sports are dangerous. If you climb a rock face, for example, that will have been there for millions of years before you, and will be for millions of years afterward. But a rock can move. Or with rivers, a river can flood, a rapid can change, a tree can fall in — and that’s quite dangerous. The existing information is in books, or on static websites, so this makes it safer because it can be updated a lot easier, and is written by someone who knows that river or mountain very well. Xsportmap puts the content in the hands of the people actually doing these sports.
How did Xsportmap emerge?
We had a project about five years ago. It was called the Wet Patch, and it was an online forum for north Wales kayakers. We tried building a map system into that then, but the state of web systems and what was available at the time wasn’t up to the job — Google maps was still very much in its infancy. So we stuck our toes in the water and it was alright, but it didn’t go very far.
When I left university, to get experience I formed an online magazine called Xsport Magazine. That was really because I wanted to get a job in content management, and I needed some experience. In north Wales that’s hard to find, so my best opportunity at the time was to start my own venture. I used my existing contacts from sponsorship and in extreme sports, and had contributions from over 200 people from across a huge range.
So that’s two areas we’d dabbled in — we had the magazine and we had The Wet Patch. So we thought, let’s stick these together and see what comes out the other side.
CLICK TO READ MORE Who is the team behind the idea? I teach creative technology at Coleg Harlech. I studied Design in Education at Bangor and was originally going to be a secondary school teacher, but I enjoyed the design stuff more than the teaching. And we have Jack Robinson, one of the top student skiers in Wales. He’s also a member of my university canoe club, and just a very keen all-rounder. He helps to get content into the website. There’s Nicky Rudd, our kitesurfer, who is currently second in the UK in the BKSA. She’s a coach, and she helps us make sure what we do is inclusive. She’s really well-connected and you couldn’t wish to meet a nicer person — she helps develop the content side of the website. And there’s Dan Hayworth, a whitewater kayaker. He looks at our whitewater content and checks how worthwhile it is, but he’s also a bit of an ambassador. He gets people involved in the site and tries to introduce new groups and people into it. He’s a retired scientist who used to work for 3M. He retired at 35 to go kayaking around the world. How did you come to be involved with Inventorium? Our offices are based in the Ty Menai space, the offices formerly known as CAST. Our building manager was Caroline Thompson. She looked after us and was a business mentor as well; she helped guide us all a lot. Then Inventorium came in and Caroline moved into that. When we decided to develop Xsportmap it was really new for us because while we had developed websites for contract work, this was our first project. We knew it was an innovative idea, but we didn’t know what to do. So we went up to Inventorium and Caroline helped us develop a business plan. She pointed us in directions we needed to go, and that’s taken us to where we are now. At what stage is Xsportmap now? We’re about to spin it out into a new company. We’ve had chats with one potential investor, and we’re about to approach another one as well. What we’re looking to do at the moment is bring in a partner who potentially can help us extend our industry contacts and help with marketing. And if we can, find some financial investment to help the company grow. At the moment it’s all off our own backs, all sweat equity. We’re proud of our extended team, of all the people who’ve put time into helping the project grow. What’s your vision for the future? We just want to keep it growing. The position we’re in at the moment is that we’d like to completely open the system, so that everyone can just share information, similar to a Wikipedia philosophy. We’d like to see everyone sharing knowledge freely, sharing experiences — “I just went to this beach and it’s fantastic” or “I just paddled this river and it was the greatest experience of my life.” We’ll never compete with facebook, but extreme sports people are a special kind of enthusiast. They put their lives on the line to follow a sport that can be really dangerous. It breeds an individual kind of person and we’d like to have a forum where those experiences can be shared with the whole world. What have you learned that has surprised you? From what we drew out on a white board to what we’ve ended up with has been very different. Social networks is such a complex piece of mathematics. How people join and interact — you can’t predict it, and we’ve tried to roll with the punches and develop in directions that communities have wanted. And you can’t predict how it’s going to grow. What we planned and what it’s turned into is really different. It’s amazing how organic these things are. If you try to force it down a specific route, which we did — and got wrong. We had to completely change plans at one point, but it’s probably better than we’d originally planned.
Posted on May 30th, 2012 by Jenny