Telluride Venture Accelerator: All about PlanitMapper

03 Jun Telluride Venture Accelerator: All about PlanitMapper

 Telluride Venture Accelerator & PlanitMapper, the backstory:

Last year, the Telluride Venture Accelerator, a mentor-driven accelerator and initiative of the Telluride Foundation, began hosting an annual competition seeking applications from entrepreneurs ready to accelerate their businesses.

Jonathan, Haj & Pradip, the PlanitMapper team

From the candidates, TVA selects this year 6 companies to attend a 5-month immersion. TVA then invests $25,000 in return for a 4% stake. Once in the region, entrepreneurs work together at a dedicated space at The Peaks Resort & Spa in Mountain Village and attend regular workshops. The group also benefits from a host of perks including free and discounted products and services, website development and hosting, legal and accounting. TVA is a partner in the success of each company and ensures that all involved receive the targeted assistance needed to take their businesses to the next level.

TVA uniquely focuses on areas aligned with the values of the Telluride region. In addition, it prioritizes technology solutions in any of these focus areas:

• Outdoor recreation
• Tourism
• Natural, organic products
• Health and healthy living
• Energy, water and education

PlanitMapper, (a great pun) and interface for layering outdoor recreation content, checks off several of the bullets: outdoor recreation, tourism, health and healthy living, that along with the solid gold resumes of the partners (see below), suggested a slam dunk for TVA.

The idea for PlanitMapper came about when one of its founders, Haj Khalsa, tried to plan multi-person outdoor trips and became frustrated trying to gather and correlate all the needed information. His solution? New software, which he took to his friend Jonathan Repa to vet. Jonathan immediately recognized the potential of Haj’s idea to not only reshape the way people plan outdoor adventures, but also how the implicit technologies could be transformative within the larger arena of e-commerce and online marketing.

Haj and Jonathan’s knowledge of and connections within the outdoor recreation market coupled with the potential for PlanitMapper to scale made the project very attractive. PlanitMapper had passed the “head test.” But does it make sense as a business?  Perhap more important, PlanitMapper passed the “heart test.” A passion for playing outside is at the core of the drive to build PlanitMapper.

PlanitMapper’s dream team:

To bring vision to, who knows how high the sky, PlanitMapper relies on the talents and passions of its management.

Haj Khalsa – co-founder, chief creative officer, designer, idea guy, business development. Haj has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, first in construction, then real estate, and most recently as the founder of Random Apps of Kindness llc which produced the re-mindful app. Haj has also been an active rock climber, backpacker, and backcountry skier since his teens.

 Jonathan Repa – chief product officer, co-founder, business development. Jonathan has started multiple successful service businesses in New Mexico and was most recently director of Client Services for a lucrative IT startup specializing in real-time inventory management and financial reconciliation for the worldwide energy market. Jonathan is also a passionate participant in skiing, climbing, kayaking, and backpacking.

 Pradip Hari – chief technical officer, lead developer. Pradip is a software engineer with extensive experience in application and infrastructure development in C, C++, Java, PHP, Javascript, and SQL. Most recently, he taught computer science as a full-time lecturer at Rutgers University for seven years. Prior to that, he was an IT & management consultant, working with clients to build database-driven and web-enabled applications to improve business profitability. Pradip also loves hiking and rock climbing.

How PlanitMapper works, the broad strokes:

The PlanitMapper interface is simple. Select one or more outdoor activities (climbing, skiing, kayaking, etc.), enter a location and press GO!  The results are displayed as pins on a map with each activity having it’s own layer. Click any pin to view details about that location as well as custom product recommendations based on your selected activities, gender, location and even the season.

PlanitMapper solves 2, possibly 3 problems at once. From the outdoor enthusiast’s perspective PlanitMapper makes the complex and time consuming task of planning and gearing up for multi-activity, multi-location, multi-person adventures fun and intuitive.

To learn more, click the play button and listen to my chat with Haj Khalsa.