Its a crowd-sourced terrain park conditions app.
It lets you see what the park setup is like at any mountain.
If you’re on Newschoolers, I bet you’d like it.
Download it here - ullr.ski
The Story:
It turns out that making the app is the easy part.
I began that process last October.
I felt like it was harder than it should have been to figure out where had a good park.
It was with these things in mind that I decided to make Ullr.
An early sketch of Ullr
I started out with a few goals:
1.
Minimize reliance on resorts to provided data.
Thats where the concept of being King of a feature and having a photo feed came from.
Though it already seems like I may need to revisit those ideas.
Support iOS and Android.
Automate as much as I could about maintaining and running the app.
Id much rather spend my free time skiing than maintaining an app.
If anyone is interested in the tech-stack, let me know.
I think it’s pretty cool.
Ill omit the details of the next 14 months.
The perfectionist temptation to withhold the app until it was technically flawless was strong.
I know very little about marketing.
Ive had mixed luck even getting in contact with people from resorts.
And I worry that feedback I get is skewed by non-response bias.
With the end of this season looming, I deemed these sayings wise.
I decided to make a big push in February and set a release date of March 1st.
The pre-release task board.
The weeks leading up to March 1st were hectic.
We celebrated the release Thursday night with tacos and margs and I gave myself a break this weekend.
I got two awesome spring skiing days in with my girlfriend and a buddy that came to visit.
It feels good to be exhausted from skiing instead of coding.
Go skiing with your friends
So how did the release go?
My goal with Ullr is not to be the next big start-up or even the next Newschoolers.
My shorter term goal is to get some traction and gain some users in whats left of this season.
Then use that momentum in talking with resorts and tweaking the app this summer.
Then come into next season really strong.
With those goals as measuring sticks, I think Im off to a decent start.
Moving forward, many of the same uncertainties remain.
I know that next season I need to make a much bigger marketing effort.
But the biggest uncertainty with Ullr has been and will continue to be getting people to adopt it initially.
If anyone has any ideas or opinions or advice, I’m always happy to hear it.
Especially on marketing and reaching the right people at resorts.
Thanks for the support!
Download for iOS
Download for Android
Website
