I’ve been in touch with Jason for several years and have seen his site Unanchor.com go from an idea to a full fledged business. It’s an interesting idea and I thought you guys might like to know a bit more about it.
What is Unanchor and why did you decide to build it?
Unanchor puts a new spin on the traditional travel guide. We work with local experts around the world and essentially ask them — “if you had a close friend or family member coming to visit your town for the first time for only 3 days, what would you take them to see?”. They take this information and write an extremely detailed self-guided tour itinerary and we sell it for a few bucks on our site.
It was my own frustration with travel-planning that led me to start the site. I was in Beijing for a few days and started researching what to do and how to get around. It was overwhelming. I found literally over 1,000 things to do on TripAdvisor in Beijing. I just wanted someone who knew the city well to put together a logical itinerary with detailed directions. This was the beginning of Unanchor.
What made you initially start traveling? Why did you decide to build your site abroad?
My wife (girlfriend at the time) and I are both from the Silicon Valley. We both had cubicle jobs that we didn’t love (or hate either). So we started saving and eventually quit our jobs, sold all of our stuff and traveled for a year through Asia. While we were traveling I became interested in entrepreneurship and started thinking about what problems I was interested in trying to solve. I launched the first version of the site while traveling.
When our year trip was up I wanted to continue to work on building the site, but unfortunately it wasn’t making enough money yet to support me and my wife. My wife wanted to be a teacher, so we compromised by having her apply as an English teacher in South Korea. The job pays so well that we’re able to both live comfortably on just her salary. She teaches while I’ve been able to work on Unanchor full-time. It would be very difficult to make this situation work in the United States. The cost of living in South Korea is significantly lower and the pay she receives is great.
Did you have any experience with this sort of thing (HTML, site design, programming etc) or did you just work it all out as you went?
I primarily worked it all out as I went. I had built websites and dabbled with HTML and CSS when I was younger. I also took some Computer Science classes while in college, but I hadn’t touched it for almost 5 years. I downloaded a PHP, MySQL and Javascript book and taught myself. It was surprisingly easy.
Eventually, though, I realized that my programming skills weren’t going to cut it and it’s more fun to work on a business with a partner. I advertised on a few forums and websites about the fact that I was looking for a co-founder. A few people reached out to me, but there was one person who was clearly more passionate about the idea than the others. He’s now my equal co-founder. He takes care of the technical side of the business and has been an absolute pleasure to work with. I’m very lucky.
Did you have to use much of your own money to get this thing off the ground… or investors… or were the costs minimal?
The costs were pretty minimal and we’ve invested only our own money so far.
How has Unanchor been going?
Things are going well and are getting exciting. We just announced our public launch. We work with writers around the world now and have over 90 itineraries and cover 75+ cities.
Along with our public launch we’ve also released a new way to view our itineraries. You can check out an example for New York, San Francisco or Paris.
What’s coming next for Unanchor?
We’re always looking for new local experts to work with. We’ll continue to come out with new itineraries. Finally, we’re really excited about our new iPhone application. We’re putting the finishing touches on it and it should be out towards the end of January.
What are some challenges you faced building your website while living in Asia?
One of the hardest parts is the lack of an extensive entrepreneurial network. I’ve been able to connect with a few other entrepreneurs while living in Seoul, but on a recent trip to San Francisco it really hit me as to why the Silicon Valley has the reputation that it does. There are so many people building businesses and launching websites. It’s easy to network, get advice and meet others that are in a similar situation.
Other than that I have no complaints. The Internet in Korea is unbelievable. The lifestyle here is also great. It’s a wonderful place to live.
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