Launched to crickets in 2013. On track for $1M ARR for 2022. AMA!
Hey y'all 👋,
I'm Curtis, founder/developer/designer of Slopes, a GPS tracking app for skiers and snowboarders. Think Nike+, Strava, Runkeeper, and those other apps runners use to track their runs, but for winter sports.
It's been a long journey (which I've tried to talk about in the open on my Slopes Diaries blog) that started in 2013 when I built Slopes over a few months of nights and weekends and finally launched it along side the iOS 7 launch as a paid-up-front $4.99 app (in a time when the "go $0.99 and make it up in volume!" was the snake oil for apps). That winter season had ... less than stellar results at ~600 downloads. But over 2013 and 2014 I got enough passionate users for the app that I knew I might have something here, even with it only being a side project for me at the time.
2015 I decided to "give it a real go" and figure out how to make it work as a business. I pivoted from paid-up-front to free download with subscription with a "Season Pass" (I like to think of myself as an "iOS subscription hipster", doing it before it was cool. This was back when Apple would only let dating and content apps auto renew so I was manual renew for the first year). Took a lot of inspiration from the SaaS playbook (y'all had figure out recurring revenue a decade before iOS apps even started to touch subscriptions), really focused on the user journey, figured out my free vs paid split, and relaunched version 2 in 2015. Even focused on building a mailing list of customers, which was 😱 back then for apps.
It has been a lot of experimenting and learning along the way, but that change in 2015 got me on the path of great YoY growth and sustainability. After that I launched consumable "day passes" (like ski resort lift passes) along side my yearly option to address a large part of the market, continued to optimize and work on industry-first features (like virtual 3d mountains you can play your day back on). Build out some privacy-first social features (no public profiles, no followers, no creepy DMs to block) that focused on mirroring the real-world network of friends you ski with. Last season I started playing with free trials for the yearly plan.
Milestone wise, 2016 I went full-time and stopped doing iOS consulting. 2018 or so first part-time contractor helping with customer support. Brought on a part-time dev in Aug 2019 to build out the Android app and finally tackle that market (important for Europe), which launched Dec 2020. May 2021 I hired my first full-time employee (product growth, marketing, biz-dev). At the moment I have 4 part-time people also working on some ambitious mapping project for some next-gen features.
It's an ... interesting ... market to be in. The natural cycle of the winter season means my revenue is just a few months of huge spikes, then nothing (some small amount from souther hemisphere winters, but that's an order of magnitude less than northern). So budgeting is fun 😅. That also means I have very short windows to run experiments in (which can be hard to test because of the natural bell curve of usage in he season). It's a good market though, small enough that it doesn't really get big VC plays often (and they tend to chase unreasonable expectations that never pan out so they fold). The ski resorts are kinda like Disney World now a days, wanting to own the whole experience and getting very expensive, but they're very behind tech-wise and fortunately skiers like to go to more than one resort so Slopes as a "works everywhere" app has a strong advantage.
I've always tried to run Slopes with a pretty scrappy mindset, playing concentrative with growing my expenses. It's never taken any outside investment, and the only investment I made in it was my time. It's been profitable since day 1. I try to stay focused on the long game and sustainability, and avoid a lot of "growth hacks" (like I could have focused the social stuff on more traditional methods of followers and activity feeds and digital addiction) in favor of creating opinionated software that is good for the users. It's a tough balance to walk in the consumer market.
I'm pretty open about most things (hence the blog) and I try to talk about both my successes and failures along the way, so ask away!
I don't have a question just want to wish you good luck and to say that I love the "Launched to crickets" phrasing!
Holy crap that is some serious dedication!
Was there any point after your initial launch where you were thinking about scrapping the project?
I know that in the past when I'd launch things, it'd be pretty easy to let the FUD take hold and stir up feelings of doubt about the project. If you did experience these sorts of feelings how did you work through them and persevere?
Knowing what you know now in 2021 -- what would you have done differently back in 2013 when you initially launched?
Sorry for the boat load of questions, this is a very inspiring story :)
No worries! That's the point of an AMA.
I had a lot of doubt going into Slopes, I talked myself out of it for months in 2012/2013 before starting. But I don't think I ever really thought about giving up once I started. I certainly felt the sting of not getting traction fast enough, going unnoticed by the iOS tech press, etc. F'n sucked to watch other people launch apps to big splashes. And there were some dark days trying to learn OpenGL among all that 😅.
I think part of what helped me persevere was trying new things. I didn't have just one chance to get Slopes right or else, no big launch that makes or breaks my ability to keep going. I'd just keep on doing iOS consulting to pay the bills and keep iterating where I could carve out time. I'd focus on trying to improve for next season -- work on new features that I needed, play with the business model, whatever. An experimentation mindset is key; you aren't failing if you're learning.
I'm not sure I could have done much different when I launched. 2013 was likely a bit too early for subscriptions for a consumer mobile app; maybe possible, but much harder to get users to accept it. I don't think I could have done much better with the press: the iOS tech press (as I've learned) largely doesn't ski and Slopes won't appeal to their main audience, ski resorts don't care much about third party apps and don't want to support 'em, and traditional advertising in the ski market is expensive.
I mean, boy, do I wish I knew what I know now? Yeah. My design skills have evolved a ton, my business sense is better, I know my market better. So I guess the answer might be "ship a v1 that sucked a lot less"? Avoid some design and feature dead-ends. But there was no massive mistake that held me back; a lot of the smaller mistakes and dead-ends were just things I needed to do to learn the market, and in the end that's ok.
Agreed on the experimentation mindset. I've noticed the most growth seems to happen when you're executing with an almost scientific process: analyze, make a hypothesis, act (perform experiment), test against your initial hypothesis.
I'll be checking out your blog, thanks for doing the AMA!
Thanks for sharing Curtis!
What do you think has been the most important driver of your revenue growth year over year? Marketing? Improving your purchase funnel? New features?
Good question! My marketing has been pretty slim, tried IG ads (but removed the FB SDK a few years ago) with some success, and App Store Search Ads have been great ROI for me. But I've never turned on the fire hose with those, I've spent $30-40k over the lifetime of Slopes on ads. I've found for Slopes they help most when they're super targeted (at the resort level) to help seed a core user group somewhere to get some traction.
I think it is largely due to strong word of mouth and a constant focus on experimenting and improving the funnel. There is certainly a bit of network effect when enough people at a resort use Slopes (people chat on the lifts), so making sure it is an app people love helps a lot there. I'm redesigning my main paywall at least once a year, I just tweaked my onboarding process again a month ago. Get something out, see how it works and measure it, look for user patterns, and improve.
I've actually realized it often isn't new features that'll help with growth. As a dev, it is certainly my first instinct! But more often it is finding all the ways you're shooting yourself in the foot already and improving those parts of your app. Listen to your users, see where their pain points are. Sometimes a new feature might unlock a new segment of the market, or encourage a new growth loop, and those are the ones worth chasing.
Great advice, thank you!
What would be your recommendation for someone without 0 coding experience looking to build their own iOS app?
Congrats on all the success, too, Curtis. Well done.
Download Xcode and get started, today! When Swift came out a few years ago it was a good reset that leveled the playing field between existing Objective-C iOS devs and new people coming in (everyone had to learn Swift). We're seeing something similar happen with SwiftUI, Apple's new UI framework. It can still be a bit rough around the edges, but it is a lot more modern. You'll be less demotivated when you see all us existing "pro" iOS devs curse on Twitter as we struggle to figure out SwiftUI just like you are ;). There are a lot of good resources out there: Ray Wenderlich and Hacking with Swift are great sites with tutorials and the likes, Meng To has been posting a lot of good new SwiftUI stuff.
Also keep in mind iOS has a lot to it, and you don't need to know it all. UIKit/SwiftUI is your bread and butter, but you might never have to touch CoreLocation (GPS stuff), CoreBluetooth, HealthKit, HomeKit, Multi-peer Connectivity, AVFoundation, CoreData, CloudKit, and a lot more. Make some bite-sized projects and don't feel like you have to learn it all at once.
Congratulations! i am pretty sure it will work well. Keep up, bro.
https://cricfacts.com
Hei Curtis, nice project!
What I would do (I am an avid skier, marketer by birth, european):
Cheers
Curtis, love your writup. I tried Slopes, Ski Tracks, and Snoww for a season and ultimately went with Snoww because it was easier to add family and friends (tie into Facebook).
However, as I look at the app this season, Snoww hasn't been updated for a year and you are really on top of things. I'll switch. Seems like adding a Facebook login would really make the growth and sharing easier. What's your take on social logins and friend finding?
👋 Curtis. I'm interested in learning about your biz-dev initiatives.
What biz-dev activities are you doing? Partnerships with resorts seem like the obvious thing to me.
Do you have other revenue streams beyond users in the app?
Resorts don't care much about Slopes -- they like to own the whole experience so usually have their own app (with a pretty sub-par tracking experience) that they'd rather encourage users to use instead. That way they have access to all user location data, etc (which is something I don't want to give, I'm big on privacy). Haven't quite cracked that nut on how to find a symbiotic relationship. At most they just view Slopes as another product that they'd expect to pay advertising and sell in their stores.
But, one example we started this season was partnering with Indy Pass. They're the third-largest multi-resort pass system (behind the two mega-corporation ones, Epic and Ikon) and this year we're their official app. You get two Premium days through Slopes when you buy an Indy Pass for the season.
We also partnered with the ski instructor association this season to offer a discount to their members. That's something I want to cultivate a lot more (ex: something in-app for ski instructors making it easy for them to give out day passes to students / etc).
We've had ideas of partnering with ski-specific tourist companies, just haven't gotten around to trying that out yet.
Hey Curtis. Thanks for being so inspiring!
Can you describe how you plan your product roadmap and how it dictates your day to day work? You're doing almost everything alone in the app, so I was curious about your process and organisation and how you split your days between the different tasks such as design, dev, marketing, etc. Do you have any kind of a routine? Also, can you tell us a little bit more about the tools you use t
Honestly I just go with the flow. I try to stay pretty adaptive with my roadmap, not thinking much further than the next release. I mean don't get me wrong, I have a good idea of what features I should work on, but I don't plan things out that far. I've found it works better for me to be aware of the features, what their effect will be (growth, revenue, user emotional effects, etc), and pick based on my current perceived weakness.
Like the feature I'm working on now, a major one I've wanted to do for 5 years, we decided upon just two weeks ago because the timing of a lot of things coming together worked out well. We were trying to solve a problem using something else and I was saying that solution felt shoe-horned, which meant it was time to take a step back. Doing to let me see it was time to tackle this big feature.
But a week before that I had to take a week to deal with email deliverability and some other stuff. Totally unplanned, but that was the fire that needed attention.
This means my day-to-day is a mix of mozying through work to an elevated "shit gotta work a lot, wanna ship this in 5 weeks."
Congratulations!
Curtis, this is an amazing story!
I'm a snowboarder but primarily a rock climber. I'm currently trying to build the right product for indoor rock climbers – something like Strava for rock climbers. There are SO many similarities to your experience.
Since I'm an engineer in early stages of the product, I'm on the hunt for a biz-dev/growth/marketing co-founder. It's funny to hear you mention exactly that skill set as your other full-time team member. I've also been grappling with VC/angel/self funding tracks. I'm about to quit my job and go full-time on the product in a couple of months.
I feel like I have more to learn from you, any chance I could get 30 minutes of your time?I'd love to hear from you!
I love this story. I'm warming to the idea of "this but for this" type of apps.
But as you point out, you need a lot of dedication, and follow the formula without backing down. Awesome read thank you!
Dude this is super interesting and inspiring, thanks for posting.
Firstly. How do you keep up the positive energy in the down season to be building stuff when there is no one using the product. Are you able to get much input from users during this time and how?
(also have you tried going to South America / NZ during summer to find users and enjoy more pow)
Also if it works for snow-boarding do you do anything for mountain boarders as that seems like the app should work just as well for that and be more bespoke than strava.
You mention not having such a worry from VC or competition but are you not worried about Strava and Apple fitness, fitbit etc... as they support more sports modes? Would you consider selling to any of them or have you ever been approached?
Finally - Great job on keeping up the writing practice for the blog. Do you think that reflecting helped you?
Have you considered a podcast for people who are too lazy to read everything but would be interested in hearing your story as your building?
The lack of usage in the summer is actually nice, less fires to put out day-to-day and I can really focus on the much bigger feature sets that take months of work. Then come winter I can focus on lots of little wins. The constant stream of big and small updates gets a lot of customer love.
Not too worried about Strava or Apple, there is a lot of stuff that goes into a great ski app and the market is too small for them to make a super serious effort for IMO. They'll do enough to check the box off for "supports skiing" but that is it.
And why yes, I have considered a podcast ;) https://independence.fm we retired it two years ago, but lots of good stuff in there over the corse of 66 episodes.
That's cool to hear. You make me feel kind of jealous now about the break.
As someone with too many apps I'd prefer to have Strava be great at skiing and have one source of my fitness tracking than download new apps. But then skiing is only an occasional thing and I guess your main market is people that ski regularly.
Looking forward to catching up on the pod. How come you stopped?
You'd almost hope we'd address that in the last episode, wouldn't you? ;)
Almost...
It's in my queue but the queue is a little long 😅
Cool to see you here. I've been following you on Twitter for years.
Ha, yeah, long-time lurker first-time poster.
Congrats Curtis! I believe you were a customer of mine a while back so it's awesome to see this!
Hi Curtis... Thanks for the inspiring story!
I was wondering: did you have many 1-1 conversations with your early customers? Were your decisions to modify the app based primarily on customer conversations or your own intuition about what was needed?
A lot of it has been intuition based on what I'd want to see in a ski app, yeah. I've talked to a handful in person (on a lift, etc) 1-on-1, and I did a big survey a few years back on my customer base to get a big-picture idea of what areas I might be blind to. Working front lines in customer support helped in the early years, that kept me in tune with customers as I built out the core. But I've tried to avoid being too reactive to specific customer requests unless it fits my overall vision, and more look for patterns / pain points.
Well done Curtis, very nice success and open sharing. We had a founder at the coworking space that was in the "walking app" space for over a decade now.
I'm curious, on the free trial, what is the length of the trial, and when the trial ends to they need to opt in again to pay, or does it auto charge based on info they've already input to start the free trial? (back in the day we developed a similar trial program for GoToMyPC, 14 day trial (I think, maybe 10), with a CC charge on day 15)
Again, well done.
The trial is based on Apple's IAP system, so it is opt-out for renewal. The trial conversion rate is ~80% in the early season -> ~60% in the late season, and the refund request is always well under 1% so I don't think we get many accidental renewals. Trial length is 7 days.
It was a nice concept, since you started. Your constant work on your startup is the main reason behind your success.
Legend among legends
Congratulations. It proves that persistence pays off.
What books did you read that helped you?
I have a terrible habit of not reading books.
Hello from Longmont!
It sounds like you’ve grown through a focus on building a really strong product rather than a marketing heavy approach. As an engineer, that sounds awesome — congrats! That said, were there any channels in particular that helped you get out there when getting started?
More of a “for fun” question: what do you think of cross platform mobile tools like react native and flutter? Guessing it wouldn’t make sense to switch or anything but is it a path you’d consider if starting over today?
I found some places online people congregate online, like the /r/snowboarding subreddit and /r/skiing. Can be hard to self-promote sometimes in reddit communities, but for example I tried to include them (50k members in each back then!) when I'd have questions about what other people would like. My one friend always makes fun of me that I'm such a terrible IRL salesmen because I'm stuck with people on a lift for 10min at a time, perfect opportunity!
I think those tools have their place (just like Wordpress), but no way in tell I'd touch them with a 10 foot poll for Slopes. React is going to be a much bigger drain on battery than native (js interpreter) and when I'm aiming for running Slopes 8hr+, yeah, no go. Plus most long-term projects I see talk about React say how it's easy to get going, but eventually you end up with a lot of platform-dependent hacks anyway that slow you down. That said, I've heard good things about Flutter, but I haven't dug into it yet. I'm very happy with my native-on-each-platform (iOS: Swift + ObjC (2013!) + UIKit, Android: Kotlin + Material) and my customers appreciate a polished experience. Reviews like "the ski app Apple never made" I just don't see possible unless you're native, and that's my goal.
My brother in laws (yes 2) run an app development shop with a few employees. They were always developing native, but once they used Flutter they never looked back. I didn't use it myself yet, but seems a real pleasure to work with. Especially since you can support 2 platforms at the same time.
This looks like a great app, congrats on the progress. I just downloaded it and am excited to try it snowboarding this year!
I have used a few tracking apps several years ago (for example Squaw/Alpine had a tracking function in their app), but found that it was a pretty big drain on the battery. I'm curious how you have tackled this problem and if you are still finding this part to be a challenge?
Also, do you integrate with the Ikon app or Epic app?
I optimized for battery life day-one, Slopes gets 8hr - 12hr on a full charge (assuming you aren't streaming music at the same time / etc -- using cell network w/ weak reception can tank a battery).
Resorts, especially the big groups like Ikon/Epic, are like Disney World. They want to own the experience end-to-end. They want you in their app so they can market to you, get your location data for advertising (user X is skiing near the waffle hut, send a push!), etc. I've talked to the folks at Ikon, but we haven't come up with anything yet.
Thats great, especially with the cold weather that tends to drain batteries faster!
Yes, it definitely seems like they want the whole experience, but if you have enough of their customers using your app it might be something they consider. Just curious if that has been an issue for you since most major ski resorts in the US are either on Ikon or Epic.
Issue? No, if anything it helps me 😅. People start tracking with Epic Mix, but it is super limited (no distance, speed, etc, just vertical) so people quickly want more. Plus, Epic/Ikon apps don't work at other resorts, or with friends that ski at other resorts so you can't compare. People end up wanting an app that works everywhere.
Really enjoyed this and congrats on the success. One thing that I found interesting was the ‘day pass’ concept. We run an application that would likely be more suited to one off payments or credit bundles but presently have monthly and annual recurring payments. We are worried about cannibalising our revenue with a day pass equivalent approach - how did that work out for you ? Did you see a lot more volume of people purchasing the day option ?
A good amount of people buy it, but I do price it so that the year pass makes a lot of sense if you go more than a few days a year. The day pass was a bit more popular when it was $1.99 and the year was $19.99, but now is is $3.99 and $24.99. In past years a lot of people would grab a day pass or two if they started using Slopes towards the end of the season, and then upgrade to the year pass the following season knowing they liked Slopes. Worked great as a paid trial.
Look at your usage patterns and make sure you price anchor appropriately.
That said, having the day / week passes (consumables) + the season pass (yearly with trial) does make the upsell funnel a little harder to design. I've been trying to lean more into the trial this season as the primary entry point, and then have the day/week options if they don't go with the year after the trial. I have a huge advantage that ski resorts price their access same way (day, multi-day, season), so this lines up with users' expectations from IRL.
At least for my market, the yearly pass alone doesn't make sense because many skiers only go a few days a year: 60% of my market skis for less than a week per year (especially in Europe). I didn't want to do monthly because that'd be dark UX for a ski app (having people forget to cancel over the summer). So that left me with this hybrid consumable/subscription approach, or just giving up on the occasional skier market and leaving them feeling "Slopes isn't for me because I don't ski enough, even though I love the sport", which I didn't want to do. I'd rather cannibalize a little bit to get a sticky user vs alienating.
I'm on Android and I'm going to check this out.
Every season, I feel like I have to find a new app, bc the one I used the prior season is gone or went through some crazy redesign. There was one I was using for multiple seasons, and I thought it was going well for them. Then they came out with hardware, and now disappeared/pivoted?
The last few seasons, I've just been using my Garmin watch, but it's not really snow specific, so I don't get the fun snow-specific stats.
Ah, yeah, that was Trace (used to be "Alpine Replay"). They were the main player when Slopes launched in 2013, but they never got their monetization under control (made some big "what is free vs what is paid" mistakes IMO). They then tried the add-on GPS hardware accessory and had a successful kickstarter, hoping the $200 puck would be their answer. Didn't keep them going though (that's a hard sell IMO, and you have to come out with a new version every X years a la GoPro to keep alive).
The fun bit of the story is that they pivoted to soccer and seem to be doing great over there. They used the custom-built GPS+accelerometer accessory expertise they got with the ski stuff, + some new camera stuff, to do something interesting for teams/coaches in soccer.
(FYI Slopes can import your old activities from them: https://getslopes.com/import/trace)
But yeah we've had quite a few come-and-go. SnoCru was funded (self funded by a VC?) but also never got good monetization going, eventually getting toxic trying to squeeze a bunch of money from users with dark UX. Snoww is still out there, but that seems to be a "go free and grab the market so you can get acquired" kinda strategy and they've largely gone dark with development in the last 2 years (and their Android launched to 1.3 star average and they seem to have abandoned it).
Thanks for the inside info. I did find that soccer site and was amused how hard they pivoted. Great for them, since I know of another startup that tried to get into HS/college soccer video highlights.
I did try out your Android app, and the first UI thing I noticed was that search results flash a bit as I type out my search. Is that unavoidable? I don't really notice that effect with other Android apps.
I see building out the Android version of Slopes as a dual benefit....obviously the potential for more revenue, but also exposure to a new audience who might be more willing to tell their friend about the app because it's on both platforms.
Curious what percentage of iOS revenue you see the Android versions leveling out at and are you starting to see more referrals simply because Slopes is available on both platforms?
Thanks for sharing your journey!
It's going to be quite some time for Android to catch up - Slopes has had over 1.2mil downloads on iOS, and only 31k on Android (getting the word out has been surprisingly hard, Slopes was iOS only for a long time). So hard to math out that question, but I'll try. Android is lot more popular in Europe (Alps), but skiing over there is a lot cheaper too. So I'm not quite sure where Android will level out at. I've heard from others in the fitness space 10% of total revenue will come from Android.
I talked about my logic behind adding Android when I expect iOS will be funding it for many years to come here on my blog. TL;DR: it was getting to the point that not having an Android app was holding iOS growth back.
The first Android year the Android revenue per download was 60% of iOS was per download (ignoring the renewal revenue on iOS and only looking at revenue from new iOS downloads that same year). Trial conversion rates were similar across platforms, which was surprising. But obviously I don't have a handle on Android churn yet.
I don't expect the % revenue share to stay so high (37% of total revenue per download assuming equal user base sizes) as Android grows, these were early adopters vs mass consumer market users on Android (more prices sensitive as my market gets wider).
Curtis, this is amazing! What's your goal with the business? With the slow growth stance, I assume you're not looking to exit anytime soon?
Nah, I'm pretty anti-exit. I love what I'm doing, and if I sold Slopes I'd just want to build something else inside of a year. I'd be chasing the success the Slopes already has.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
I'm full-time iOS dev / web dev / design. 1 other full-time as of May 2021 doing growth, biz-dev, and marketing. 1 part-time android dev, 1 part-time customer support. That's the core team.