One of my co-founders, Gabe, and I grew up together, playing soccer in Western Colorado. We were both adventurous and outdoorsy and had this amazing playground of mountains and rivers where we’d go camping with our families.
We stayed in touch over the years, always bouncing entrepreneurial ideas off but pursued pretty different paths. I worked in finance, and Gabe dove into professional guiding, working for a leading active luxury travel company. That’s where he met our other co-founder, Trevor.
Moterra is very much a side hustle becoming the main hustle story. They were living in Jackson Hole, so we started with one van based there and grew the business mostly by word of mouth. Then, when Covid hit, all these reservations got canceled at first. But as people started getting cabin fever, camper vans became the perfect escape. We went from a small team to 25 or 30 people pretty fast and had this huge demand that required basically zero marketing.
We knew it wouldn’t last, so by 2022, we got proactive about our marketing efforts, and started focusing on streamlining our operations. Around that same time, I was watching many peers in my very tech-oriented community making impressive progress with AI and began experimenting myself.