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0:00:16.9 Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. This is the podcast about things that are happening at HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan, my username is Rock Chalk and I am one of the 90 or so lackeys that works at HQ in Seattle. And next to me, we’re not even doing the usual intro thing, we’re just going right into it because this is an exciting topic today. We don’t want to waste any time. And so I have, I’ll just call you a co-host today.

0:00:47.1 Bryan Roth: All right, I’ll be a co-host. I’m happy to be a co-host, Chris.

0:00:51.4 Chris Ronan: Bryan Roth is here with us and Bryan is the president and co-founder of Geocaching HQ and we bring him around when we’ve got an especially big thing to talk about. And that’s what we’re doing today. As I understand it, the big news, Bryan, is that you have decided to become a Formula 1 driver and you’re leaving HQ, you’re leaving Geocaching.

0:01:12.4 Bryan Roth: If they will have me, you bet. I’d be happy to do that.

0:01:17.3 Chris Ronan: So we can just talk about F1 for the next hour.

0:01:19.6 Bryan Roth: Not sure which team I would drive for.

0:01:21.9 Chris Ronan: You aren’t really. I would have thought you would have had that figured out.

0:01:25.4 Bryan Roth: A couple years ago it would have been Red Bull. Leclerc just had a nice race. McLaren had their year last year and even the year before.

0:01:33.8 Chris Ronan: So you’re gonna keep your options open.

0:01:34.0 Bryan Roth: I’m gonna keep my options open.

0:01:35.2 Chris Ronan: Okay.

0:01:36.3 Bryan Roth: We should probably not talk about F1.

0:01:38.0 Chris Ronan: We could probably talk about F1 for an hour, but instead we’re going to talk about the real big piece of news today, which is that HQ’s announcement of Shareables, which Shareables are custom pieces of digital artwork that players can create, collect, and share with the geocaching community. This has been a very large project that a lot of lackeys have been working on for quite a while. We’re very excited to share it with the community. And Bryan, you’ve been very involved in this project. So what do Shareables mean to you? Why are you excited about this announcement today?

0:02:14.6 Bryan Roth: There are so many reasons that I’m really excited about this project. One of the things that I could say, as you already mentioned, is that this was a really big project for the team at HQ. I would say this touched every single aspect of the company. Almost everybody was involved, whether it was design, development, copy, testing, ideation, and more. We also had a lot of support from the community volunteer translators, got feedback from the reviewers. This has really been a long time coming. We’ve been working on this for quite a while, many, many months, and it’s been a really significant project. But the cool thing is this is something that we think geocachers are really gonna enjoy. And so just to get into it real quickly, the way it works, the basic concept is that you can design a piece of art. We have a design tool where you can upload an image, there’s some templates, you can basically create something that is a symbol of personal expression. So you could have a picture of your dog, or you can have something relating to an event or a specific cache, and you go and you produce this art using our toolset. There’s three things that you can do with it. The first thing is as a cache owner, you can associate your Shareable with an individual cache or up to 20 caches per Shareable. And then everybody who finds your cache will collect that Shareable. So it’s a really cool way to incentivize people to come visit your cache and check it out. And there are ways through filtering and stuff that people will be able to look for caches that have Shareables. So it’s just a nice way to make your cache a little bit more fun and exciting for finders.

0:04:08.8 Bryan Roth: The second way, as a finder, when you find a cache, you can gift your Shareable to the cache owner as an expression of gratitude for the cache or for the experience that they’ve created with you. So as a cache owner, when you have a cache out and people are finding it, if they like your cache or if they’re being kind or they have a Shareable and they decide to give you their Shareable, well then all of a sudden you are collecting Shareables just by virtue of having a cache out there. So it’s a fun incentive to create geocaches. And then the third way is in-person sharing. And this is really about community. And we know that at events, people are trading cards and tags and trackables and those kind of things. But now you will be able to trade your Shareable in person with other geocachers. So the way that that will work is using the Geocaching app. If they’re running the Geocaching app, you will make a connection with them via Bluetooth or there’s a backup for QR code. And then you can say, “I want to share this particular Shareable of mine with this cacher.” And because it’s unlimited, you won’t run out. And it should be a really fun way for geocachers to connect with one another at events and out on the trail.

0:05:34.6 Chris Ronan: Yeah. So a lot of different ways. And I think one thing that I always try to remind myself of here at HQ as we’re working on things and as we’re announcing things is that we often don’t think of all the use cases. The community is so creative that it comes up with ways. And so I’ve had my own ways that I’ve used Shareables as we’ve been testing. For instance, I assigned it to one of my caches. I created a Shareable that was themed after that cache. And I thought, “Okay, I could do that with,” as you said, “X number of Shareables, however many that I have in my subscription.” But I know the community is gonna come up with ways to use this feature set that maybe we even haven’t thought of before. And I’m wondering what you think of because there is that creative aspect to this toolset, that people get to. And maybe you want to talk now about kind of how it works with creating your own Shareable and just how people do have a lot of flexibility in being able to bring their own creativity into what these digital items look like.

0:06:47.1 Bryan Roth: Yeah. So there’s really a number of ways that we are looking at creativity going forward. As with everything, we expect that the community is gonna show us things that we have not thought about, which is fantastic. So for what it’s worth, the launch of Shareables is the starting point because we’re gonna be listening, we’re gonna be learning, we’re gonna be participating as well. And the goal is for us to see what does the community do with these? How can we make this feature set even better than it already is? And I’ll say we have spent a lot of time working through all of the different permutations of what might happen, but we know better than to think that we’ve gotten them all. And the reality is that the community is gonna help us light the path ahead. In terms of the creativity for design, what players will find when they visit the Shareable design center is that they can upload an image of their own. They can modify that image in a variety of ways. They can use templates to make it look like a woody or a dog tag or some other template. And in doing that, they’re creating something that represents them in the game or, as you said earlier, represents a particular geocache or represents attendance at an event. So for geocachers who have traveled far and wide, so many of the caches out there that when you find that cache, you end up taking the banner and you put it on your profile. And when you look at people’s profiles, you get an idea of all the cool caches that they’ve found.

0:08:34.2 Bryan Roth: Well, Shareables is something like that because our expectation is that when people place great caches, they might want to subscribe and get a Shareable that they can associate with that cache so that everybody who finds that cache can go and collect the Shareable. And one thing, this is, I think, pretty important to note is that for caches that have existed for a long time, people have already found them. So the question arises of, well, I can’t log it again. Can I still get the Shareable for that cache if I found it a year ago or three years ago? And the answer is yes. The way that we set it up is you can visit the cache page of a cache that you found previously, and if it has a Shareable, there will be a button that allows you to collect that Shareable. So we don’t really want anybody to feel left out, like we started the timeline and it goes forward. Another thing to note is that you can only collect a Shareable if it is actively associated with that geocache. So, for example, if somebody has a Shareable and it’s active for a year and they decide that they’re gonna remove that Shareable, the next person to log that cache won’t get the Shareable if it’s not in the cache. If they decide to put a new Shareable in the cache, sure, they can go collect that Shareable. If you’re trying to collect a Shareable for a cache that you found previously, you can only get the one that is actively associated with that cache at the time that you log it or collect the Shareable.

0:10:06.1 Chris Ronan: And as we’re getting into details here, I will just say almost a disclaimer. Be sure to read the Geocaching blog. There is a lot of information about Shareables there, a lot of details. We won’t be able to cover everything here in our conversation, but there’s a lot more that you can read in the Geocaching blog, and there will be an FAQ and so lots of stuff there.

0:10:28.1 Bryan Roth: It’s a really good point. The feature in general, it is simple in theory. So the things that you can do, the ways that you create a Shareable, the way that you can purchase a subscription to make your Shareables active, it’s very simple in practice. But the nuance, all of the things that are built to surround this feature set get kind of complicated. So it’s not stuff that everybody’s gonna necessarily encounter, but over time, I think as people dig into the feature, they’re gonna realize just how much work we’ve done to make it a robust feature set on the back end. So, for example, for those who don’t want the Shareable notifications, you’ll be able to turn those off. For those who don’t want Shareables at all, you’ll be able to turn the feature set off so you won’t even collect them. If you get a Shareable that you don’t want, you’ll be able to basically say, “I don’t want this Shareable,” and it won’t show up in your profile. If you get a Shareable that you consider to be a violation of the terms of use, it’s objectionable in some way, you can report it, and there’s a reporting process where we will evaluate those and you don’t have to see it again. And so that kind of functionality isn’t really top of mind for creating these and then sharing them with the three ways, but when there are challenges, when there are sort of those nuanced problems, I think what people will find is that we did a lot of thinking about what could go wrong, what else are people gonna want, and we built that functionality upfront so it’s present in the feature set at launch. And that’s something that, seeing the amount of work that went into this, I’m really proud of the team. I’m really proud of everybody that contributed. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of thought with the very best of intentions because we’re really trying to bring something special to the game. And I think that people are gonna love it. And again, this is the starting point, so there’s more to learn and we’re looking forward to seeing what folks think, what people do with it, what they like, what they don’t like, and then we have the opportunity to iterate and to find ways to make it better or maybe solve for things that we didn’t think about in the last many months of development.

0:12:50.6 Chris Ronan: You mentioned it is a subscription service. This is not included with premium membership, which is different for HQ. So maybe talk through that decision and why this is a subscription-based feature.

0:13:05.3 Bryan Roth: Sure. So yes, it is a subscription. The way that it works is you can buy two Shareables, five Shareables, or 10 Shareables at launch. There is a discount for premium members. So the price at launch for two Shareables will be $11.99 for one year.

0:13:26.9 Chris Ronan: That’s for basic members.

0:13:27.8 Bryan Roth: That’s for basic members. $9.99 for premium members. The price for five Shareables is $11.99 for premium, $14.99 for basic. And the price for 10 Shareables for a year, again the subscription, $14.99 for premium members, $17.99 for basics. So the difference between two Shareables at $9.99 and five Shareables at $12.99 is $2 for three more. The goal is for people to have the amount that they want. And if you start out with a two-pack, let’s say, and you decide that you want five or 10, there’s an easy upgrade path and it’s prorated. And we’ve tried to make it easy to upgrade. If you want to downgrade, you can downgrade, but the subscription lasts for a year. And so something to note is that when you create a design, in order to have it fill one of your slots, your two slots, five slots, 10 slots, you basically have to finalize that design. So you could work on it as much as you want, and when you are ready, you finalize the design. And that means, “Hey, this is the design.” The name, the description, the text associated with it, and the design are final for a period of a year, and that is the subscription for a year. And what we tried to make it similar to is if you go and you design a trackable, for example. It’s not like you buy 100 trackables and you’re gonna give them out, and it’s not like, “I’ve given out 20 and I’m gonna go change the design for the next 20.” We really didn’t want people making a new design every day or a new design every month and sort of flooding the geocaching space with Shareables. We really want them to be special. So we want people to create things that they’re proud of, that they’re excited about, and then you release the Shareable. Again, you can share it, and after, at the end of one year, you can archive that Shareable, you can create new Shareables if you want to continue your subscription.

0:15:32.6 Bryan Roth: One of the questions is, why do we have a subscription for Shareables? Why is it not included with premium membership? And one of the things that we’re trying to do as a company, for those of you who don’t know, we’re a bootstrap business. And so all of the revenue that it takes to operate this company of 90-ish employees comes from the geocaching community in the form of premium memberships, merchandise sales, some of the partnerships and promotions that we do. As many of you know, we had the same premium membership price for over 20 years, and a couple of years ago we changed the price. We raised it from $30 to $40 a year in USD. And when we did that, we allowed all premium members who were on existing premium memberships and basic members who wanted to convert at that time, we locked them in at essentially a legacy price where we didn’t change the price of premium membership. So the majority of our premium members are still paying that $30 a year, which is the price that we launched in February of 2002. And not to say that we won’t have to raise premium membership prices again in the future because we actually might, because the cost of everything has gone up so significantly in the past many years and it certainly feels like the pace is increasing. Perhaps the home audience is experiencing the same thing. I think every business is experiencing that. But before we go and we make a change to the premium price again, we really wanted to experiment and say, okay, this is a feature set. Not everybody’s gonna want these, not everybody’s gonna love them as everything, but we believe there’s enough people that are really gonna enjoy this, that it could become another way for the company to generate revenue so that we can continue to support the geocaching community while keeping premium membership as reasonably priced as we possibly can.

0:17:31.0 Chris Ronan: And I think too, you and I were talking before we started recording, there are certainly some people, and I’ve been one of them, in that, yes, I’d like to create a personal token or some sort of swag that I can give out, but I look at the cost of that and think that’s… It’s pretty expensive and I don’t know that I can do that. Whereas maybe with Shareables, I can find a plan that might fit the budget for me. And it’s not a physical item, but it is still conveying something that I want to convey. I either want to give people a reward for finding my cache and hey, I can’t maybe fill my cache with 100 geocoins ’cause I would go broke pretty quickly, but I can fill it with a Shareable. I can fill many of my caches with Shareables and do that in a way that is maybe something that will fit my budget.

0:18:26.5 Bryan Roth: Exactly. And I think a lot of us really love trackables and as Lackeys we get to give them out at events, but there’s only so many you can fit in a suitcase when you go to a Mega. And I find, having just been at the first Italian Mega, which was incredible by the way, at some point, I traveled there with 400 founder tags and by the second day I had given all of them out. And I hate when people come up and they ask, “Hey, do you have an extra?” and I’m like, “I’m so sorry, I’ve given them all out.” And so the prospect of having an unlimited amount to share with the community is really, really nice. And personally I’m really excited about that. The possibility of having caches out there where people are giving me their Shareables, what a great incentive to place caches. And of course, as geocachers we want more great caches on the board. And so if I’m gonna make a Shareable that I can give to cache owners as a token of gratitude, I can make a couple different Shareables. Maybe there’s one Shareable that I give for my very favorite caches and there’s another Shareable that I give for all of the caches I find just because I appreciate everybody making an effort to place something out there. And so there’s really a lot that we’re gonna be able to do with them. And like you said earlier, I can’t wait to see the way the community starts to play with these. Another example is we’re gonna make them available to Mega events as part of the Mega package. So in the future, when you go to Mega events, to the extent that they’re opting in to do this, they will be able to create a Shareable for that Mega event so that everybody who attends the Mega event, yes, you will get a souvenir, you might get a treasure, a geocaching treasure, but you can also get a Shareable for those Mega events. And it’s altogether possible that some of the smaller events, if somebody’s hosting a special event once a year, a Stammtisch or something like that, maybe they create a Shareable for those events that everybody who attends will be able to collect. So it’s just another way.

0:20:37.8 Bryan Roth: I’ll say when we have been testing this feature set over the last few months, as a player, when I have found a cache, and in this case a cache owned by Lackeys, ’cause that’s the only way we had Shareables, but when I found the cache that had a Shareable and I collected one to see that the Shareable was associated with the cache and it had some messaging about that cache, it was a really cool feeling. It added to the excitement of finding a cache. And so given that that’s just one way that people can celebrate these and experience them and enjoy them, I’m really excited to see people using them in all three ways. Like what’s it going to look like at events when people are trading Shareables? “Hey, can I get yours? Can I get yours?” I think it’s going to be a fun way to have people interacting in person at events and then also sharing through their caches or finding caches as a token of gratitude for the cache hider. Again, a fun group of ways to share and not just share anything, but share something that is personal that you have created, that’s an embodiment of the way you like to cache or a special cache or your event or something meaningful to you, like some of the physical trackables and tags that are shared. This is a digital version and as you mentioned, of course, it’s a lot less expensive than creating something physical because physical materials are costly. And so for the price of a geocoin at one of the shops, you can create two Shareables that you can give out to the community. At a price of some of the more expensive geocoins, you could have 10 of these that you can use throughout the year. And I think if we find that people want more than 10, we can always open it up further. But again, this is the starting point. Cannot wait for people to experience them and to start creating them and to see what people make. And I can’t wait to start collecting them myself. It’s actually funny because as Lackeys we’ve been playing with this, I know I mentioned, just for a couple months now, and I’ve collected, I don’t know, 15 or 20 of them, and I really like my collection. And as part of this release plan, we’re wiping the data set clean. And so all of the ones I have will go away and we’re going to start fresh like everybody else. And as I said to you, Chris, I’m sad about that. I don’t want them to go away. I’ve already taken screenshots just for my own posterity, I don’t know if “my own posterity” really makes sense, but just so that I could say that I had them. But I can’t wait to start collecting them and see what people create. And if you make one, please come up to me at an event and give it to me and I will certainly have one for you when I see you out there in the geocaching world.

0:23:33.3 Chris Ronan: And one thing I do want to mention, because I’m into exclusive stuff myself, is that if you purchase a Shareable plan before the end of 2026, so before December 31st, you will receive the Founding Creator Shareable design template. So almost a little bit like being a Charter Member of Geocaching at the beginning, you can’t go back and do that now, but if you were there at the beginning, you are a Charter Member, and so now if you’re here at the beginning of this, you’re a Founding Creator.

0:24:02.7 Bryan Roth: Yeah, it should be interesting. The use cases, as I said, we’re very excited to see what people create. Having a template like the Founding Creator template will be really cool. The concept of templates is something we’re just starting with, we’re just scratching the surface, and I think that there’s a lot that can be done there. And again, we’re going to put that in the hands of a really creative community and look forward to seeing what folks come up with.

0:24:32.1 Chris Ronan: Well, as I said, be sure to check out the Geocaching blog. We’re really just giving a primer right now.

0:24:38.8 Bryan Roth: Scratching the surface of what this has to offer.

0:24:41.2 Chris Ronan: And I suspect we’ll maybe in a couple months we’ll come back and do another episode, maybe try to answer questions that have come up in the early going because we know there’s gonna be questions. People are gonna start using this and as much as we at HQ, the Lackeys, have tried to play with this and test it, the community will find some stuff they want to ask about and you and I can talk more about that then because, yeah, I again, I just I never underestimate the community and what they will find and what they will come up with and then we’ll be able to talk more about it later.

0:25:16.0 Bryan Roth: Yeah. And at the end of the day, we just hope it brings more fun to the game, more delight, when you find a cache and you get a souvenir or you get a treasure. It’s one of those add-on moments where it’s like, “Oh, okay, not only did I find this cache, but I got something special.” And we think that Shareables is gonna be another one of those add-ons that makes finding caches or hiding caches or meeting people in person just a little bit more special. And that’s what we’re trying to do as a company. We want people to enjoy this game and celebrate this game in a variety of ways. And so here’s a new one to play with and let us know what you like and let us know what else you want to see and we’re gonna do our best to bring it to you.

0:26:02.1 Chris Ronan: So now you know a lot more about Shareables. That was Bryan Roth, the President and Co-Founder of Geocaching HQ. To learn more about Shareables, you can, first of all, go to geocaching.com, go to your dashboard and look up Shareables and you can find a lot more there. You can also go to the Geocaching blog, that is at blog.geocaching.com. We’ve got a whole introductory post about Shareables, an FAQ, tons more details than we were able to cover here today. If there is something you would like us to cover here on the Inside HQ podcast, please send us an email. The address is podcast@geocaching.com. Thanks for taking a few moments to listen to our podcast. Until next time, for me and Bryan and all the Lackeys at HQ, happy caching.