RV LIFE Podcast

The RV LIFE Podcast Evolution

• RV LIFE • Season 2 • Episode 1

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In this kickoff episode for season 2 of the RV LIFE Podcast, Jim welcomes RV LIFE founder and CEO Andy Robinowitz to share exciting news: The RV LIFE Podcast is merging with The RV Entrepreneur Podcast. Hear the story behind the decision, a look back at each show’s legacy, and what’s ahead for the new combined format. 

From RV industry insights to travel tips and inspiring RV entrepreneur profiles, this next chapter promises to bring even more value to your RV lifestyle. Plus, Andy gives an inside look at RV LIFE’s mission to make RVing simple and the tools, community, and innovations that are driving it forward.

NOTE: This will take time. Please stay tuned as we refine the future of the RV LIFE Podcast to better serve you.

Meanwhile, let us know what you think!

RESOURCES:

https://rvlife.com/magazine

https://podcast.rvlife.com

https://therventrepreneur.com

https://www.rvlifenetwork.com/

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Speaker 1:

I'm really excited In a couple of years when we look back, I think we're going to have connected a lot of the dots.

Speaker 2:

Hello RV Life listeners. It is an honor to share with you my conversation with RV Life founder and CEO, andy Rabinowitz. But wait, who am I? Where's Patty? What's going on? Don't panic, we have answers for you. I'm Jim at RV Life, and some of you maybe have heard my voice on the RV Entrepreneur Podcast. My co-host and I have been sharing stories and profiles of some amazing people working from the road for a couple of years now, since RV Life acquired the show. Meanwhile, patty has been providing incredible content for this audience, and now the time has come to merge our two programs. We can't thank Patty enough for her contributions and wish her the best in her future endeavors, and we're very excited about this evolution of the RV Life podcast.

Speaker 2:

You'll soon be hearing all about the RV lifestyle, with industry insight, travel tips and more RV entrepreneur profiles. This is going to take some time, so we hope you'll stay tuned and keep subscribing to get notified about upcoming episodes with our new format. But RV Life is much more than a podcast. You may know about our Trip Wizard app, or maybe you subscribe to the RV Life magazine blog, get link in show notes. But did you know that RV Life hosts various content sites and dozens of RVing discussion forums. There's a huge community and more exciting developments in the works to fulfill our mission to make RVing simple. Hear all about it right now in my discussion with the man behind the curtain at RV Life, andy Rabinowitz. Andy, thank you so much for doing this. This is long overdue.

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to be here today.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it's a pleasure, and listeners may not know our voices and they might have heard me on the RV Entrepreneur. I'm really excited to share what's going on here, but it may come as a surprise to some listeners, so maybe you could first give us a quick introduction about yourself and why you decided to do this episode with me today.

Speaker 1:

Sure sure. So my name is Andy Rabinowitz and I'm the founder of RV Life. I started the first website that became turned into what is now RV Life about 20, 25 years ago or so. So it's been. It's been a while and you know we've got a lot of over the time. We've had a lot of evolution and stuff, and so you know, getting to join the call today and talk to you about that, it's going to be fun and exciting.

Speaker 2:

It is. I'm excited about it and I want to get into all that and this is the RV Life podcast and I know we exist to make RVing simple. But what is RV Life? What is RV Life?

Speaker 1:

Well, RV Life is a platform for RVers that allows them to simplify the RV ownership experience, and so it all started with forums a couple decades back, and then it evolved into a campground directory, which was called RV Park Reviews, then Campground Reviews and now called RV Life Campgrounds, and we also have RV Trip Wizard that was brought into the fold. We acquired a tool called Maintain my RV, the RV Entrepreneur Podcast and various other RV-based websites and tools.

Speaker 2:

So let's take a little step back here and give a little history lessons. Why RV life? What inspired that and how did that evolve? You were in this discussion forums quite a bit and I think you might have dabbled in some other niches, but what inspired you to go forward with RV life?

Speaker 1:

Well, yeah, originally the very first site that I ever started was on Airstream trailers, and that's kind of how it got going. And then, after working with Airstream forums for many years, I sort of became a forum expert and started to reach out to other RV forum owners or in some cases, they would reach out to me owners, or in some cases, they would reach out to me and often it was a matter of adopting a resource that wasn't going to be able to stay online unless somebody was able to host it for them. And so, before you knew it, I had a handful of RV forums and hanging out with RVers all day, every day, on the forums, and then it was there that we just try and listen to our members and hear what they're doing and what their needs are, so we could serve them. And we actually tried to set up a campground directory on Airstream forums and it worked okay, but the mindshare was too small. We needed more people to contribute to have anything of substance.

Speaker 2:

So I want to get down deep into those forums a bit. A lot of people don't realize how many different forums RV Life maintains or facilitates, but you mentioned RV Trip Wizard and some people may be aware of that. At the core, rv Life is a suite of products. We're making RVing simple and help people journey with confidence. Many people might be aware of Trip Wizard, the trip planning app but can you give us some kind of overview of what all that RV Life Pro has to offer?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so RV Life Pro is a subscription service that we have that provides some of the tools that folks are, you know, help them get on the road. So basically you can turn your phone into an RV safe GPS, a trip planning tool that accesses, you know, our deep catalog of campground data and it also has access to the maintenance program and we have some masterclasses and other things that are part of that subscription service and it's just certain features of RV Life are behind that subscription to help us generate revenue so we can keep building the service.

Speaker 2:

So there's a lot behind RV Life Pro. There's the apps that people are using, but really RV Life is a content company or a media company. We've got the content sites and blogs and discussion forums and podcasts. Maybe, aside from the magazine at rvlifecom, can you paint a picture for us of the RV Life content network and how that's evolving.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so that's really where our roots started. Um was in the forums, which is really a user generated content type of content. Uh, then we got into blogs. I bought do it yourself rvcom and when I bought that side I got to meet your lovely wife, jim, who happened to be a writer at do it yourself rvcom. And so I got to meet Renee and that was awesome and that was the firstrvcom. And so I got to meet Renee and that was awesome and that was the first blog I ever bought.

Speaker 1:

And so at that point we switched from just running forums to running forums and blogs. And so now all of a sudden we had editorial needs, which is very different than like moderating user-generated content. So we grew to like seven blogs that we run now and In that time it was really an ad-supported business. You have forums and we put ads on there, and you have blogs that have ads on there. Then it's with those funds that we pay to have articles written or build a directory or build tools. For the RVing audience grew, rv Life Pro started to grow and that started to change the business model of our company. So we were turning a little bit less of a media company and a little bit more of a software company that has to manage the software that we built the GPS turn-by-turn directions in your phone and trip planning and stuff like that and so we had to evolve from an ad-supported media company over to a subscription-based software company, and that has been interesting, challenging and rewarding.

Speaker 2:

And I keep thinking of community. It's a big thing that keeps coming up on the RV Entrepreneur Podcast and forums really are a way to foster community. I mean there's probably dozens of RV Life forums at this time. I often tell people if you can think of a forum or website about RVing, rv Life probably has something to do with it. But we're talking forums about specific brands or travel lifestyles. So the community aspect how does that drive the you know the software company or vice versa? How is that supporting each other there?

Speaker 1:

Well, that's probably personally my favorite part. So, since I have 25 years of working with forums and many of the people on my team or people I've met on those specific forums, we have a lot of experience running communities and we took that and we applied it over to the campground reviews, photo submissions, you know, and trying to take what we learned in the communities and apply those same techniques into other areas to try and grow the number of submissions. And so if you look at the number of reviews submitted to RV life versus a dirt or a road trippers kind of thing, you're going to find significantly more number of reviews that are hot, more detailed, have more nuances, specific for RVing, and so for us, the community is really everything, and you're going to see in the next couple of years that we're going to be connecting all the dots. So we grew in this kind of crazy way that allowed us, you know, first was forums and we knew how to run forums. Then was blogs. We knew how to run blogs. Then came software and we started acquiring different software and now we've got this huge portfolio of things and we're connecting them and so we'll be taking all the knowledge from our forums and all the knowledge from our blogs and all the knowledge from our campground reviews and putting that in AI, you know, and that's going to be really fascinating to see what we can come up with when it's trained with all that information. You know, and we're also doing things throughout our software that will be connecting the different pieces.

Speaker 1:

So in the future you'll see our app right now is very I call it very functional. So it's it's for, it's for GPS, turn by turns and researching campgrounds, but in the future I want it to be more social, more community-oriented. So almost think of our village. Our village got shut down, but it was a good utility, it had a lot of people, and so what we're hoping to do is provide that kind of social experience inside our app.

Speaker 1:

But on the other end, it's really connected to our forums in the background, and so the forums in the background they're active, they have moderators, they have, you know, we have Winnebago owners moderating the Winnebago forums. We have Airstream owners moderating the Airstream forums, and that's been something that we've done since day one, you know, to keep it authentic. And so when we take those teams and those websites and we then bring them into a feed that looks differently, it'll look more like social media and I believe that we'll be able to increase the engagement significantly, because there's certain people that are foreign people and there's certain people that are social network people, and so we're trying right now to find a way to merge both of those seamlessly so the forum people enjoy that interface that they've always had, but if you're into Facebook or Instagram, or maybe you were on our village in the past and really liked it, well, when you get to our homepage, you'll be able to see a feed of all the things that people are doing, things that people are doing.

Speaker 2:

That is fascinating, and one of the things that you mentioned almost didn't mention is the podcast. So, in addition to this, all of the content and the forums and the communities and the gatherings that they hold, there's the podcast. So maybe we talk about the big elephant in the room here. There's the RV Entrepreneur Podcast that I've been doing for two years now and the RV Life podcast, which is evolving, so maybe we talk about the evolution and the future of what people are listening to right now.

Speaker 1:

Sure, sure, yeah, just like the rest of the stuff. I think both podcasts came into our network right at the same month or two. I had been friends with Heath over at RV Entrepreneur for quite a few years and after he sold his campground booking company to Good Sam, he approached me about RVE, basically saying, hey, I think we'd like to sell this and we're going to move on to some other stuff, and so we acquired the RV Entrepreneur podcast podcast, and it was literally that same month. I think that when I took the idea to patrick, who is one of my colleagues, he said well, I've been working with somebody else and we already have a rv life podcast set up to start. So what we did was we did both and we're just testing to see how it does, you know.

Speaker 1:

And so for the last couple of years we have had both of these podcasts running in parallel, and what we've decided to do is to try and to streamline our operation, and so we also have one of the blogs we bought was Camper Report, non-camper report. We have Bob and John who are reporters and do a YouTube show, and what we're going to try and do is take, as we tried, all these different efforts, and none of them are really huge projects. You know grand slams or anything like that, let's just call them each base hits. Well, we want to take each base hit, put them together and hope we'll get a home run, you know, and so that's what we're going to try and do here. We're going to try and take the RVE podcast and the RV life podcast, merge those into a single podcast that we can then focus on a little bit more and see what happens.

Speaker 2:

I see a grand slam in the works and I can't thank you enough personally because I'm honored to be on board to help shape this direction, and I see the RV Life podcast as encompassing all things RVing, like RV Life, like the apps and we will hope we will present segments with these industry experts and voices that some people are aware of, like John and Bob and Rose and Glenn, talking about industry and travel and destinations and maintenance, and roll it all into that one content delivery platform for the podcast that fits in with the apps and the forums and the blogs and I can't wait to get involved and make that come to fruition. But listeners need to know this is going to take a little bit of time. Meanwhile, the RV Entrepreneur Podcast. Please go ahead and subscribe to that because while we may be sunsetting it as a show, it will evolve as a segment on this RV Life Podcast. So definitely stay tuned for that.

Speaker 2:

But, andy, I understand you might have some other things in the works at RV Life, so definitely stay tuned for that. But, andy, I understand you might have some other things in the works at RV Life. You're always juggling so many things. What's going on with maintenance or other aspects of RV Life that listeners might be ready to hear about.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, maintenance is a really exciting one. That one, Patrick, who previously was overseeing the RV Life podcast with Patty and stuff. He's been with us for gosh six years now or maybe even longer, and he's been gracious enough to sort of take on any project we threw at him. And I think it was last year. We found the need that we needed more of what's called product owners, and these are people it's kind of like a product manager but it's a product owner, so you're kind of owning and defining what you're going to build in the area that you're in control of.

Speaker 1:

And Patrick graciously accepted another role which was to be the product owner of the maintenance system. And so previously we acquired a software called maintain my RV, and maintain my RV was a platform for RVers to keep logs of their RV maintenance. We then made that the maintenance component of RV life. The problem was it was written on a different software stack we weren't able to upgrade. It had some UI issues and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

So we have now completely rebuilt that um and that will be coming out uh later this year and that will allow our viewers to track all their maintenance and uh fuel logs um, ultimately, in the long run, to each of your drives so you'll be able to see you. You know, like my ultimate goal there is that you have a log of all your drives and every drive has all your tire pressure monitoring info and all your transmission temperature info and it's basically a dashboard of your entire drive and then we can take that and crowdsource it into some actionable information to find out when people have you know, if we know that most F-250s are running at a certain temperature and somebody's up running kind of high compared to everybody else, we can let them know. You know, proactively kind of thing. And so there should be a lot of really neat stuff in the maintenance area coming out and that will start with the basics, which is basically just adding you know your rig and then, as you do maintenance, you can add each of those maintenance records to it, and then we'll be working to find a way to make adding the maintenance records almost seamless. You know, basically imagine sending us your info. We entered it for you, kind of thing.

Speaker 2:

So RV life really does make RVing simple. And you mentioned kind of an evolution and a goal for the future of there being this one kind of social feel app that has everything integrated with podcasts and all of this. So is there anything you're hiding? What is like the ultimate vision? Did I address that kind of closely?

Speaker 1:

oh, definitely, definitely. It's basically from the minute somebody drives off the lot at an rv dealership to the minute they sell their rv. We want to be there along the way to offer support, you know, and have that community behind you. And so it's not just us as rv life, but when I say we, that means the rv life, the community. So you got a question ask, you know, um it, the, the communities are really. The forums are just special places and, uh, but they're not for everybody and so, um, you know, I think that it's, I think it's, you know, it's going to be a lot of fun to watch.

Speaker 1:

I'm really excited. In a couple of years, when we look back, I think we're going to have connected a lot of the dots. You know, if we bought up 30 or 40 different RV websites and services right now, they're still functioning A lot of those kind of individually and we just constantly try to connect more dots. You know, and by connecting dots I'm talking about, you know, making the system so if you open the app while you're at a campground, it knows you're at the campground so it can check you in automatically, and now that made check-ins easier, right? And so you just have to open the app and it'll automatically check you in.

Speaker 2:

And I see it helping to build community because within that app it may recognize other forum members from you know, either it's based on the model of RV that you have or the lifestyle choices that you make and be just really connecting it all together. And I think pulling these two podcasts together is a great start industry and lifestyle and maintenance and product reviews and entrepreneur profiles of people working on the road, without having to describe to it to a bunch of different shows. So, andy, I can't thank you enough, kind of pulling back the curtain a bit and showing us what's going on at RV life, how we began and where we're going. Do you have anything else for the listeners?

Speaker 1:

No, just stay tuned. We appreciate each and every one of our listeners and we look forward to, you know, keep evolving and keep trying. And you know patience too, because not everything we try is something that sticks for good, and so it's a constantly evolving thing. And you know, we just appreciate each and every member we have.

Speaker 2:

I'd like to reiterate that as well and encourage people to get in touch with us. You can go to the rventrepreneurcom and, you know, leave a voicemail message or leave a comment there or on either of the shows. Drop some comments, because we want to know what you want to hear and what you think about where we're headed and make sure we're going on the right track. So, andy, once again, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for having me, Jim.

Speaker 2:

There you have it, folks. You heard it here first. I wish you knew what an honor and privilege it was to sit down with Andy for that long and have him share the history of RV life and where we're headed. There really is some exciting things in the works, starting with this podcast. We really are grateful to have you along with us for the ride and we hope you understand this will take some time as we refine the format of the show to best serve your RVing interests. Speaking of which, please let us know what you think. What do you want to hear? Let us know on the RV Life Podcast Facebook page or at podcastrvlifecom. Together, we can help make this show better than ever before. Please stay tuned.

Speaker 3:

Are you ready to elevate your RVing adventures? With RV Life Pro, you're not just getting a service. You're gaining a reliable companion for your journey, from planning your trips with precision to navigating with confidence and even connecting with a vibrant community of fellow RV enthusiasts. Rv Life Pro is your all-in-one solution. Don't just dream about the perfect adventure Live it. Visit rvlifecom today and discover how RV Life can enhance your RVing experience.