Meet Tom Wahlin
World traveler & minimalist with a mission to share experiences and make travel more accessible
When did you start publishing, and what inspired you to create your site?
In 2015, I decided to leave my corporate job to travel the world and work remotely. I sold all of the items in my small New York City apartment and carefully selected gear to pack into a single 40L backpack, which ended up being my home for two years. I wrote a blog post sharing what I was carrying, and the internet took notice! From there, Pack Hacker was born at the beginning of 2017.
What do you love most about being an independent publisher?
The thing I love most about Pack Hacker is that we help folks travel smarter and live with less. Our impact on our community reminds me that, at our core, we‘re here to share our experience and make travel more accessible. It‘s also great to create career opportunities for our small but growing team. I love helping people find their path and improve their craft in a welcoming and collaborative environment.
How many people work with you on this site?
We‘re a team of six travelers, adventurers, and minimalists. Our team is small, but we‘re passionate about what we do and have a lot of fun getting creative with our content.
What can you tell us about interacting with your audience?
Since 2017, we‘ve developed a sharp audience that looks for the best ways to improve their travel experience and optimize the gear they carry. They‘re intelligent and appreciate our to-the-point approach that‘s objective and informative. At first, I didn‘t think there‘d be a large audience for what we‘re trying to accomplish, but millions of page and video views have proved otherwise.
How does advertising impact your business?
Advertising creates passive income and enables us to focus on what matters most: providing our audience with the best and most accurate content possible.
What else should we know about your site?
Our free guides and packing lists are great tools for people who want to travel more but don‘t quite know where to start. We also have hundreds of gear reviews, each written after a minimum of two weeks of testing, in which we break down important product features and why they did — or didn‘t — work.
