How Cache_Seven Connects Adventurers to Local Guides Who Know the Outdoors Best

While the company launched only a few months ago, it already features hundreds of guides who are ready to share their experience. For travelers, it’s a great resource to find guides you can trust. For guides, it’s a way to monetize their passion through tours and affiliate gear commissions.

We caught up with Cache_Seven’s founder, Kevin Luzak, to learn more about how his company brings outdoor professionals and adventurers together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Kevin Luzak: Cache_Seven is a platform that brings outdoor pros together with adventurers of all experience levels across eight different activities, including hiking, cycling, and rafting. We help adventurers take the first step in planning an excursion, and we make this step as efficient as possible by introducing them to industry professionals with deep expertise and knowledge in their areas of interest. We help those pros build out Cache_Seven websites that showcase their backgrounds and interests in an effort to help expand their client base. The sites also present a list of the gear that the pros recommend for their clients. We have an affiliate marketing network of thousands of brands. If visitors make purchases off a gear list, then the pro receives a cut of the transaction.

We do not require credentials, but we encourage pros to include detailed descriptions of their experience and expertise on their Cache_Seven sites.

We have been building up pro participation through direct outreach, social media, and, to a lesser extent, through sponsoring events where they congregate. At this point, we have onboarded more than 250 individuals since we launched in early June. With this group on the platform, we believe we are gaining a critical mass, and have recently begun marketing to adventurers. We are reaching them through social media and event sponsorships.

The most popular vertical on the platform right now is fly fishing. We attribute at least part of this skew to the fact that we launched during fishing season in two markets — Jackson, Wyoming, and Sun Valley, Idaho — where this sport is huge during the summer. We have also gained significant traction in cycling as well as some of our ocean activities like kiting and sailing. We are open to adding activities down the road, but we feel like we have our hands full at the moment.

We hope to become a truly global platform over time and feel that there is a tremendous demand for access to foreign pros. Adventurers tend to have an idea about how to coordinate local trips, but often have no idea where to start when the trip involves different countries. This buildout can be done organically to a large extent — US pros often spend time guiding in other countries, which gives us a foot in the door. Our current European relationships have generally developed along these lines. We also intend to build direct relationships with non-US guides once we get the US business off the ground.

We are very focused on community — the community of pros and adventurers is our primary focus as a platform — but we are also involved with the physical communities in which the activities that we are trying to promote take place and the communities of people who are dedicated to the activities that we focus on. We want to use the Cache_Seven platform as a way to highlight organizations within these latter two communities that make them better, so we have added a ninth spot in our matrix that is dedicated to philanthropies. We help them set up Cache_Seven sites and use these sites to describe what they’re doing and to drive visitors to their websites (and ideally convert them to donors). For those organizations that are associated with activities, we help build gear lists and direct 100 percent of any affiliate fees to them.