The opportunity
Planning a trek in India usually means piecing information together from tour operator sites, forums, old blog posts and social media. Difficulty ratings disagree, altitude figures vary, and it is hard to compare treks side by side. Global trail apps often cover India thinly.
CoolTrails is my answer: one place to find, compare and plan treks across India, starting with the Himalaya.
What it does
- Search by trek, city or region.
- Trek pages with difficulty, distance, duration and maximum altitude, plus itineraries and practical details.
- Browse by type: lake, peak, pass, valley, fort and pilgrimage treks.
- Regions including Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.
- Maps, reviews and trip reports from trekkers, and a “find my trek” tool.
- Guides on the blog, from the best treks in India to monsoon weekend trips.
My role
I am the founder and I run everything except the heavy lifting in code: product decisions, the trek data, content, SEO and testing. I call myself non-technical, and CoolTrails is where I learned to build anyway. I write the specs, AI assistants write much of the code, and I check every screen.
How it is built
CoolTrails runs on Next.js with the App Router, Supabase for the database, sign-in and file storage, and Vercel for hosting. The blog used to live on a separate WordPress install. I moved it into the app itself, with its own editor, structured data and an automatic table of contents, so trek pages and articles share one site and one set of internal links.
A few rules keep a non-technical founder out of trouble:
- Audit before building. Check what already exists in the database and code before adding anything new.
- Only add CSS, never rewrite it, so a fix in one place cannot break another.
- Every field must appear in three places, the database query, the type definition and the page, or it is not finished.
Where it stands
CoolTrails is live and growing. Trek pages, reviews and the blog are public, and accounts are open. Some features shown on the site, such as map creation and offline maps, are still being built.
Results
The trek pages already bring in organic search traffic. I will publish numbers here once there is a full trekking season of data to compare.
What I have learned so far
- Moving content between systems is an SEO project, not a technical chore. Every URL needs a plan before anything moves.
- Structured, consistent data (altitude, distance, difficulty) is what makes pages useful for people and understandable for search engines.
- Building a product makes me a better SEO lead. I now know exactly what “one small change” costs a developer.
Explore it at cooltrails.com. The technical choices behind it are close to what I describe in my technical SEO guide.