Sēkr- HELP US START A NEW CHAPTER

Sēkr- Help Us Start a New Chapter

We are looking for new leadership to take Sēkr to the next level - read on to learn more about your next great opportunity!  With just under a 100,000 lifetime downloads, 60,000 email subscribers, a well architected and scalable app, 60K IG followers and a UGC database of close to 100,000 campsites and other waypoints, Sēkr is ready to rock the van and car camping worlds.

For almost 10 years I have been following the journey of what started as The Van Life App and eventually rebranded into Sēkr.  I long admired the drive, vision and determination of original founder Bre and then the emergence of the larger team that came in to support an expanded vision.  In the Summer of 2023, I noticed the app had gone silent for most part and I was saddened as I genuinely believe the world needed what Sēkr offered - I always thought if it as iOverlander with high integrity social components - a way to help people love their van (or RV or camper van or whatever) road trip experiences while making connections, forming community and deepening relationships along the way.

In December of 2023, I found out that Sēkr was shutting down for good - final taxes had been filed, key stakeholders alerted, and the servers were slated to be turned off.  Saddened by this, I reached out to the woman responsible for the final unwinding and offered to keep it on life support and even try to resurrect it. Against the wishes of the Peace Vans CFO (somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment), I wrote a check just before the end of the year and folded all of the Sēkr assets into my van company - Peace Vans.  

As an entrepreneur and small business owner, my job - essentially - is to dream big, shoot for the stars and - usually - come up short and go on from there. Speaking candidly, this is where I am with Sēkr right now.  From January of 2024 through June of 2024, I invested significantly in bringing Sēkr back to life.  With a good friend in tow, we rebuilt the app from the ground up (miraculously, the app still worked quite well despite no maintenance on it for almost 18 months!), built in a very cool AI road trip planning tool, fleshed out our new features, and began the process of updating the user generated database of almost 100,000 unique waypoints and campsites. 

In the Summer of 2024, I made the hard decision to pause a formal re-launch of the app. While it was a much more robust app with hundreds of bugs fixed, faster load times, new features it still felt Beta to me. I simply did not have the resources to relaunch it in the way I wanted to.  In the fall of 2024, life began to get very busy at my core business Peace Vans and I was simply unable to give Sēkr the resources it genuinely needed.  Since then, we have had Sēkr on auto-pilot and over the past few months it has become obvious that I am not the right leader to try and bring this very cool, very much needed resource back to life. Honestly, I wake up each morning wishing I could do more with it.

In that spirit, we are looking for a new person, new team, new organization, to take over Sēkr and try to do what I could not do - realize the original vision of the app and take it to a whole new level. The pieces are there:

• A completely functioning app re-architected on the best stack and built to grow.  Including the UGC database

• A lifetime installed user base of close to 100,000

• Social media and email lists of over 60,000

• Clever and smart branding (this can be debated, but I stand by it’s a good brand)

• Continued organic discovery and trial (with zero marketing over the past 3! Years, Sēkr still gets 400-500 downloads and install per month)

We don’t want to see Sēkr die and we want to support someone(s) to take it on.  I (Harley - owner of Peace Vans) am more than willing to stay on and serve on a board of a new entity offering strategic counsel, product insight, industry networking, etc.  The new person(s), however, will be 100% independent and will acquire all of the assets of SEKR from Peace Vans and roll it into an existing entity or create a new one..  We are open to a variety of creative structures to make this a seamless and successful handoff to a new team.  Our only requirements are you have some resources (time and money) to make a go of this with the giant jumpstart that is already in place.

Reach out to harley@peacevans.com to learn more.