Interview: Sarah Thornely
Photos:
Sarah Thornely
Matt Mario
Curtis England
Paddy Dowling
Sarah Thornely of SupJunkie has a chinwag with David Walker, the founder of Paddle Logger, an award-winning innovative watersport app to record your adventures on the water.
Easy tracking with… Paddle Logger
Hi David – are you able to let us know what Paddle Logger is please?
Hi Sarah – thanks for having me. Paddle Logger is a mobile app for watersports, we offer a tracking service designed to record your epic adventures, a logbook to help with training and heaps more. Our flagship service that we are pushing this year is PaddleLIVE (formerly Paddler in Trouble), designed – with no extra effort – to keep you connected on the water in case something should go wrong, or just help with logistics!
We want people to become better paddlers, our service reflects this. Paddling more, challenging comfort zones in a connected way, mitigating risk, and being able to see your achievements and improvements in a measurable way.
As one of the co-founders of Paddler Logger (together with Lewis Smith), you are yourself a paddler – this must mean that your passion fires your enthusiasm for your own product? Can you let us know a little bit more about how that process works?
Absolutely – when one of the drivers to run your own business is, “To have the flexibility to paddle all the time,” it makes sense to make sure it’s a key part of the process! I come from a SUP background and that really informed the initial idea and development.
When we started, there was nothing out there for me as a paddler, I was aware I had a phone, which was super capable. STRAVA had existed for a while but none of those products are built for paddlesports. Small buttons with cold wet fingers through a waterproof case – nightmare. So, when designing a product for me as a paddler, we had to start from the ground up and the big start button was just one of the things we had to consider. I find it amusing now, how many multi-sports apps just stick paddling in there without changing the UI.
Expensive electronics and water don’t mix too well so everything we design is about reducing friction. What I mean by that is the amount of times you have to interact with your device. We built things like a delay, meaning you can start your device on land and by the time you are on the water (with your device safely stowed) you are good to go! I am super proud again that we were first to bring this simple feature to the health and fitness tracking app market over five years ago. Whether independently or not, the ‘big companies’ certainly came after us on that. By reducing friction at every stage, we now have a product that will track your session, keep you connected, make you a safer paddler and connect with Apple Health – all by pressing just one button.
We want our users to concentrate on what they do best – paddling. Not on their tracking device.
Lewis comes from an app development background particularly in health and fitness, this means we have a lot of the bases covered when it comes to building an epic product for sports tracking. We are clear that we want to serve and provide an amazing product for our paddlesports community, so on top of our respective backgrounds, community engagement is very important to us. Our very first version was relatively simple back when we started – we could afford to be – we were the first looking to do this in this way. So, we put version one out and let the community tell us what we should build next. We still operate like this. We have a list of features we want to build and we want our users to tell us what they want. We built for our sport and our community. That won’t change.
Since the brand start up in 2014, how has the App grown from covering one watersport (SUP) to many others? Did that naturally occur or is it something you have worked hard to achieve?
Yeah exactly right. Our first market was very much SUP. I come from that background, I was competing on the circuit a bit, I had lots of contacts in the UK. It was natural as a startup for this to be our focus.
However, relatively quickly we had kayakers using Paddle Logger as well as sailors and wild swimmers! So, clearly there was a need to refocus our efforts. So, we rebranded in 2017 and while the name stayed the same, we started to be more sport agnostic. We wouldn’t specifically use SUP in marketing and draw imagery from a number of places. Still I think we were known for a long time as that paddleboarding app that other people use. Or, “Paddle Logger – that’s for SUP right?”
Once we started work on ‘Paddler in Trouble’ at the end of 2017 early 2018, we really started calling ourselves a watersports app. Our community was growing organically across lots of paddlesports and to be honest we have been led a bit by that! I think really this follows in many ways our relationships with ocean paddlesports. If you start out SUPing, you may very quickly find yourself trying out an outrigger canoe or surf-ski – I call it a bit of a gateway sport in that respect. It’s one of the fastest growing and most easily accessible.
Most recently we have put in a lot more work with the kayaking community, especially in the UK with British Canoeing and some of the top athletes across all paddlesports.
With very little money we have relied on word of mouth and rarely paid for marketing. What I find interesting is that while all paddlers are looking for a tracking solution, not as many look for a safety solution. So actually, we have found that once paddlers see what we are offering in its entirety, they tend to see the value in it – this is especially true of the PaddleLIVE service.
You have, for a fairly new Brand, had some fantastic support, reviews and awards – can you let us know about those please?
When we started it was very much a side-gig hobby. Whereas now, both Lewis and I are able to dedicate time to it – and with that we have indeed had some epic rewards! The best is the reaction from our community – we still have a core group of people who have been with us when it started and continue to use the product and have seen it grow and helped shape it. Our community reviews speak for themselves. We have an incredibly innovative rounded product now – we fix things very quickly – one recent review noted that they didn’t think we ever slept!
We have also had some excellent industry recognition. In 2019 we won SUPConnect’s Gear of the Year – Accessory and also TechSW’s Cluster Award. In 2020 we have been shortlisted for the Sports Technology Awards in Most Innovative App, we are alongside Manchester United, Sail GP and the New York City Marathon. Epic company!
Can you let us know about recent collaborations and what they mean to Paddle Logger?
We have been very fortunate to work closely with a number of organisations over the past few years. Notably last year with British Canoeing, working with how we can improve our safer paddling service for all paddlers, operators and rescue services. In the UK we have been fortunate to work with GBSUP, by sponsoring their race series and having these types of organisations on-side is valuable in growing our brand but more importantly getting more paddlers on the water, becoming better paddlers and safer more responsible paddlers!
In 2020 we are proud to have become a 1% for the Planet partner. What this means is we have committed 1% of our sales, not profits, to environmental non-profits. It is our belief, that our industry has a duty to protect the environment that it relies upon people wanting to spend time in existing in a healthy way. No environment, no one wants to spend time in it, no sales. At an economic level, the feedback loop is particularly shorter for the watersports industry. We want to lead the way in sustainability and sustainable environmental thinking being part of normal business practice.
PaddleLIVE appears to be one of the easiest ways to connect to friends and loved ones whilst you are out on the water, something that might seem more prudent whilst we have currently been in lockdown due to Covid-19 – can you explain a little more about this and how you think it relates to us now and in the future?
I think we as paddlers all know we ought to tell people where we are paddling and how long for, but hands up, who honestly does? One of the reasons for this is the effort – that may sound ridiculous, but if you are going for a quick 30-60 minute rental on holiday, you are very experienced and the water looks lovely, you don’t expect to get into difficulty. I am the first to put my hand up and admit I am guilty of this, but we all know the water carries inherent risk and can change at the flick of a switch.
Right now, Paddle Logger is leading the way to making this type of connected safety accessible – what I mean by that is that it is easy to do and doesn’t mean your paddle is spoiled by admin. You don’t need a piece of £400 specific hardware or qualification and it shouldn’t be complicated. It should be as easy as pressing one button. That’s what it is with us.
What is interesting now with Covid-19, is that in whatever time we are able to paddle regularly again, we will be recommended to paddle alone. Social distance for a period. This makes it more important than ever that you take a phone with you, better yet start a PaddleLIVE session and share your LIVE location and data log with your loved ones. If not for yourself, but their peace of mind!
Do you believe the PL App could be used in the virtual racing world – even when we are back on the water, this may be a thing of the future, particularly in the winter months when it is not so easy to get on the water?
Racing is super interesting. I remember years ago putting together a detailed plan of how we would do Paddle Logger race events. It has since sat on a dusty shelf, while we have concentrated on other features. Now though, we are seeing more virtual events and for good reason! So, at Paddle Logger we have a super easy .GPX export and functions so you can enter any event. It’s so easy, just like going for a paddle, start your tracking – end your paddle after you have done your required distance – upload.
That doesn’t mean to say we may not also do our own version in the future. A lot of the platforms being used have, like the trackers, been built for running and cycling. So, for paddlesports, some elements will need to be built from the ground up and purpose built!
Even if it’s not a race league though, there are numerous challenges out there. Designed not to compete but complete. We want paddlers to be better paddlers, you do that by paddling more, sometimes a challenge is exactly what you need to push you on those cold winter evenings. British Canoeing have a great ‘Winter Paddle Challenge’. This year we had planned a monthly target challenge, however circumstances have put that on hold at time of writing.
Thank you David for your time and we wish everyone a safe and happy time on the water – we look forward to speaking to David again for our sister publication, SUP Mag UK.
