Getting Ready

By Alan Murray,
Uncharted Staff

Starting a new venture is an amazing experience. It’s exciting, challenging, educational and fun. On occasion it can be discouraging.  Taking an idea and transforming it into reality is a rigorous, but very rewarding undertaking. Sometimes ideas turn into what you least expect. When we founded Uncharted several years ago, we were really just thinking of publishing a magazine for travel and the outdoors focused on the Intermountain West. Back then, we were just a group of colleagues from different areas of the country who shared a passion for exploring our world. There was no Uncharted. It was just an idea without a name. Our search for a name led us through over 40 possible candidates. After many long discussions, Uncharted took its rightful place at the top of the list and a new venture was born.

Through Uncharted’s history, most of us have worked full-time jobs in industries such as journalism, engineering, graphic arts, and the sciences. As we have worked to transform our ideas into reality after work and on the weekends, we’ve seen some great successes and some setbacks. Each experience has helped us learn and grow. Each day, we can see we’ve come closer to reaching our goals.

Since our founding in 2005, we’ve released two or three versions of Uncharted. Each time our idea evolved into something unexpected. Each iteration was successful in its own way and provided valuable learning opportunities that have helped bring Uncharted to where it is today. Our followers have been very supportive. They have stayed with us through each of those iterations, giving us feedback, sharing their adventures, and motivating us to keep moving ahead.

We’re very excited to announce that we are now testing the latest iteration of Uncharted. For the past two weeks, we’ve opened the new site up for a select group of volunteers to try it out and give us feedback. Not only have these volunteers given us a fresh perspective, but they’ve also shared their adventures from around the world. Some of them have been with us since the very first release of Uncharted’s online exploration community back in 2008. In just a few short days we’ve seen experiences from Malaysia, Australia, Ghana, India, Canada, and various parts of the United States, to name a few. We’re extremely grateful for their support and enthusiasm and we’ve already begun to implement some of their suggestions.

We would like to invite you to help us get Uncharted ready for launch. We’re excited to hear your feedback and see what you think of what we’ve come up with so far. Sign up today and our team will get you set up for a behind-the-scenes view.