BackcountryChecklist

Some time last year a friend of mine sent me a post on Instagram of an illustrator asking for help turning his backcountry skiing checklist PDF into an app. Right as I got this message, I happened to be waiting for a friend to go on a bike ride when a migration for work started going horribly wrong. Well, I had some time on my hands. So I figured, "why not see what I can whip up while I wait", and broke out my laptop.

I built a web version of his PDF that only looked good on desktop, recorded a Loom, and sent it off to this random person. Turns out this random person (Cy) was psyched and we collaborated on making the design of an app-version of his checklist way better than what I originally whipped up.

Unfortunately, after this initial stoke, the app kind of just sat on the back burner. Client work took my focus. Other side projects drew my attention when I had free time (ooo shiny!). And summer time made me not think about skiing related things. The app only needed a few things to be "ready" for the world, to promote it (in my mind). But it just sat.

Then I happened to move to the same town that Cy lived in and we met up one day to chat and started talking about launching backcountrychecklist.com. I got stoked again and made the final push to make it launch-ready.

We launched on Dec 8, 2023 with Cy writing articles on Powder.com and Newschoolers.com and both of us promoting on Instagram. We got an awesome initial influx of visitors (3.4k on day 1) and the feedback from the backcountry skiing, snowboarding, and snowmobiling community was super positive.

Traffic has leveled out but we're averaging about 285 unique visitors a day. With the mellow start to the winter that we've had and no additional marketing beyond our Dec 8 push I think that makes sense. I'm excited to see what happens when we add new activities and new features.