The spring 2024 camping trip to Linville Gorge had been planned for weeks, but when the day came, only Kris Valzone and Adam Steinhoff showed up. The pals were left wondering why—and that question inspired them to create something that’s building community today.
In January, Valzone and Steinhoff launched Yerp, an outdoor adventure app meant to get its users off the app and out into nature.
Facebook groups are littered with posts from hopeful adventurers looking for buddies, but those posts quickly get buried, Valzone says. Folks are then stuck asking themselves what he and Steinhoff asked each other that day: Why don’t we have more people around our fire? “We came to the conclusion that there’s got to be a better way to connect with people,” Valzone says.
On Yerp, users can find a list of outdoor events—mountain bike rides, climbing trips, waterfall rappelling trips—to join in their area. Users can also connect and chat with fellow users, post about the adventures they’ve been up to, and create events for others to join.
Yerp is still in its early stages. But the fruits of their labor are starting to come in the Carolinas, they said.
“When we hit 300 users, we saw, ‘Okay, this thing’s neat, but there’s just not enough happening. Then we hit like 750 users, and it got to the point where you can pretty much jump on an activity any weekend—it may not be mountain biking when you want to go mountain biking, but it’s something,” Steinhoff said.
At 1,200 users, he said, there was a notable shift: Whatever a user is looking for, they can likely find it in the next seven days if they’re within the Carolinas.
“We’re getting to the point of people going, ‘I would not have gotten out this week if Yerp didn’t exist, and I didn’t meet so-and-so through the app,’” he said.
As of July, the app had expanded beyond its Carolina home base. User groups in Oregon, Washington, and Colorado have started to “wake up,” Steinhoff said. But the growth has its own challenges.
“I think we’re onto something, but I believe we’re still early days, and we need a lot of help getting the word out,” he said. “The more people that know about it, the more powerful the app becomes.”
That’s the obstacle in starting something like Yerp—someone has to be willing to be first in a region, and they have to be willing to put in the effort to get it going locally. They’re up against something Steinhoff referred to as “the cold start problem.”
“There’s this tide that kind of has to happen, and there needs to be the first initial users in their particular locations that are the connectors and the inviters and the people who are patient enough for it to materialize, and in some cases be the catalyst to it happening,” he said.
He and Valzone incentivize them, sending out free stickers, free T-shirts, and promoting the new areas on social media.
At its current stage, Yerp is “a living, breathing thing,” Steinhoff said. They’re pushing updates all the time. Upcoming features include location services, where users will be able to find trailheads and river put-ins near them, and—similar to Uber—the ability to rate an adventure partner, which Steinhoff contends is important for safety.
“I don’t want to just go out and hike in the woods with some rando,” he says. “I want to know that this person knows somebody I know, or I can look at their rating and 12 people have rated them as a reliable partner who’s safe,” he said. “Those are all features that people have told us that they want, and we’re going to get done as quickly as we can.”
What is a Yerp?
It started as a simple moment between friends. One says, “You in?” and the other answers, “Yerp.” According to the app founders, to Yerp something means to commit—to a plan, a crew, a climb, a trail, or a new experience.
Download Yerp from Apple’s App Store or Google Play, and find out more at yerp.co.
