How It All Began…

Let me start by saying my name is Mārtiņš, I was born and raised in Latvia, but currently I live and work in Germany. I'm a Latvian with a slight touch of German lifestyle. Throughout my life, I've developed quite a unique mix of interests and passions. I'm very interested in the latest technologies, their possibilities and development, I've been captivated by long and very long walks in various terrains, I like the little yellow Minion characters from the animated series "Despicable Me", and also, as a fairly experienced service engineer, I have a tendency to look for solutions to every situation and problem.

What happens when such a mix lives in one head? This is the first post in a series that will be a kind of small summary. In the next posts, I'll try to tell my adventures in more detail.

From my first commitment to walk at least 10,000 steps every day to my first 50km mega-march, during walks I've had a lot of time for reflection. Although walking is a fairly democratic form of recreation, over time I realized that you need some kind of equipment, and as a technology fan, I wanted some tech gadgets too, and long hikes also have their own requirements. Since it took me a long time searching, testing, and experimenting with different equipment, I decided that with my experience, I could save this process for other walking enthusiasts. And as a convinced walking fan, I wanted to infect others with this activity too. Problem clear, let's start thinking and working on a solution.

Of course, we have to start with a team. Here my latest technology researcher instinct kicked in, along with the realization that there are still enough resources on my home server for another project, and my digital assistants were created on the OpenClaw platform. By pure coincidence, the platform where I've been experimenting with investments for several years announced that they had the opportunity to create a separate investment portfolio designed for trading using virtual assistants. Thus was born my first virtual assistant - accountant Stuart. The second to join the team was director Dave, to start working on the walking equipment problem. Then came the idea of "The Hoking Club" - a club that would offer information related to walks, where I could share my experience and where there would also be a small online store where you could buy equipment that I find interesting and useful. To gather as much information as possible on the topic that interests us, researcher Bob was hired to scour the depths of the internet and find various tools that would be useful for walks, find interesting routes, and explore other walking-related things. Since this project started to grow larger and larger, we needed someone to organize times, schedules, monitor the calendar, and remind about unfinished tasks. This duty was entrusted to administrator Kevin. The team was now ready, but the adventure had just begun. The first task for each team member was to search for information about their character and create their personality based on this information. Thus my team acquired a very unique approach to things and problem-solving. When I realized that I wanted to share this experience publicly, I decided that I would like to associate my team members with specific characters and contacted agencies representing the copyrights of these characters. When I had explained my situation and asked if it would be possible to obtain rights to use these character names in this way, I received a rather direct answer - "I'm sorry but we'll never get approval on this."

Once the team was formed, work began on creating our internet club/store. If I thought finding my own equipment was the hardest part and now I could simply choose the best and most affordable to offer other walking enthusiasts, the reality turned out to be quite different. It must also be said that our budget for this project is very small, not to say minimal. It's like with everything - if funds are unlimited or very broad, then finding good products is not a problem. The problem arises when you want good products at affordable prices. And then various factors appear that make everything even more interesting - taxes, product countries of origin, customer location, and other interesting things related to operating an e-commerce business within the European Union. So we with our team are slowly working in this direction. We already have the store at https://www.thehokingclub.com but the virtual shelves are still empty for now.

So this story will be about my adventures in three major themes. Walks and my impressions walking in various places in Europe. During walks I've photographed various things and places that I find interesting - director Dave, who is responsible for marketing and social media content, has committed to regularly sharing his opinion on these photographs. Dave, like me, can communicate more or less in Latvian, English, and German, so all the content we create will be in these 3 languages. I will describe my experience in walks and creating the online store together with my virtual team in Latvian, and my assistants will translate it into English and German, and Dave will format it and prepare it for publication on social media. What will come of all this, I have no idea. Grab some popcorn, follow us on social media, comment, criticize, or simply enjoy!

See you soon!

Mārtiņš

Translated by director Dave 🍌