You may know VisitApps as your DMO's mobile, in-destination marketing tool especially for DMOs. Yet did you know that two of our Simpleview VisitApps crew, Director Geoffrey Schultz and Product Engineer Lance Tipton, each created their own personal apps before joining our mobile solution team. Geoffrey's is a helpful trail guide application and Lance's an amusing mobile game.
This week we'll tell you Geoffrey's story ... how a personal hiking emergency, a father-in-law's marriage requirement, and a creative mind, came together to bring Arizona hikers a useful and convenient Arizona trail guide app.
App: Trailvoyant
Description: Trailvoyant is a web app providing the most accurate information available for planning amazing Arizona hikes. Use Trailvoyant to discover incredible trails, get dependable directions, hike with confidence, and return home safe and sound. trailvoyant.com
App Creator: Geoffrey Schultz
App Inspiration: Many years ago, Geoffrey had to be helicoptered out of Finger Rock Canyon in Tucson, Arizona, after following bad directions that he found online. Since then, he earned a job as a hiking guide and learned the local trails and all of the amazing places they can lead. For example, did you know that there are remnants of a fighter jet crash on one of the Mt. Lemmon trails? Geoffrey wants people to know what to expect when they hit the trail so that they can have an amazing wilderness experience and return home safely.
About Geoffrey:
A true Arizona native, Geoffrey was born and raised in Phoenix, then moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona on an academic full ride scholarship. He graduated from the McGuire Entrepreneurship program in the Eller Business College with degrees in Marketing and Entrepreneurship. From there, Geoffrey put his smarts and schooling to good use and launched his first start-up: "essentially Yelp meets MySpace exclusively for local original restaurants."
After the startup closed, as they sometimes tend to do, Geoffrey took a job at Canyon Ranch as a hiking guide. His father-in-law told him to get a real job if Geoffrey wanted to marry his daughter. So Geoffrey ventured into business sales for a local custom software company for a couple of years before moving on to project management. He got married in 2009. In 2011, Geoffrey found a second home at Simpleview, working as a CMS Project Manager. By 2012, he'd moved up to Production Group Lead. In September 2016 he created Trailvoyant, and in November 2016 he was name VisitApps Director here at Simpleview.
He and his wife are expecting their third little girl in April of 2017.
Geoffrey's Cool VisitApps Mobile App Studio (MAS) Tip:
- You can use the User Notes draggable to enable app users to take notes on any part of the app. This could be used to enable them to write down their favorite dish or server at a particular restaurant, log important information for an upcoming event, or jot a reminder about which trail they took in a wilderness area.
- Alternatively, you could use the Blankify draggable to create "fill in the blanks" in the app. This could be used for taking notes for presentations or creating a destination passport where the DMO could prompt users to physically go to several specific places to discover keywords that prove they were there.
Another tip from our Director of VisitApps: "If there's anything that I can do to make your job easier, I'd be happy to help, so just let me know if I can be of service."
Your family, your hobbies, your work ... What inspires you?
Next week: Behind the Scenes at Simpleview: VisitApps, Part 2, or how a childhood on a farm, a determined engineer with a playful gamer's perspective, and Simpleview's VisitApps tool came together to create a fun and unique goat-rolling game. Yes, you read that right. We've got the latest on goats rolling down hills in barrels, next week.