Season one ended with numbers I did not expect: 1,000+ downloads in 15 countries, 40 paying users, a 4% paid conversion — several times the app-store average for a new consumer app — and zero euros of marketing spend.
Forty people is not a large number. But forty people paid for an app with no reviews, no press at the time, and no guarantee it would still exist a year later. That is the only market research I trusted, so version 2.0 was built almost entirely out of what they asked for.
What they actually asked for
The requests clustered into six things. Not twenty. Six.
- Stop talking on a timer. The v1 audio coach spoke at intervals. Skiers wanted it to speak when something happened. 2.0 fires tips on sensor events, in three intensity modes.
- Do snowboarding properly. Not a ski mode with a different label — wider-arc turn detection, board-specific scoring weights and its own coaching phrases.
- Show me where. A score tells you how the run went; it does not tell you where you lost it. GPS Run Replay draws each run as a speed-coloured track on offline maps.
- Show me the season, not the run. Season Intelligence: score trend, speed progression, personal bests and an opt-in, anonymised benchmark.
- Give me something I can hand to my instructor. A 3-page PDF report with a score gauge, charts and season context.
- Let me pay for one winter. Not everyone wants lifetime. The Season Pass is €19.99 for 1 October to 30 April, with no auto-renewal and no card kept on file.
What we did not build
No accounts. No cloud sync. No social feed. No streaks, no badges, no push notifications engineered to pull you back in. The only network feature in the whole product is the benchmark, it is opt-in, it sends anonymised aggregates to an EU-only endpoint, and you can turn it off and never notice.
This is a constraint, not a feature list gap. Everything that runs on the device runs in airplane mode, on a cold phone, at the top of a lift with one bar of signal. That is where the app is actually used.
The half I was missing
I can measure a turn. I could not tell you, with any authority, what a good turn feels like or how to phrase a correction so that a skier changes what they do on the next run. That is a different discipline.
In September, Bernhard Ratschiller joined as co-founder: Austrian state-certified ski instructor (Arlberg, 2015), three years in technical leadership at Snow51 in China building its education system as the company grew from 30 to 500+ employees, innovation award at the Beijing Winter Expo 2021, co-founder of a ski school in Hokkaido. He owns snowsports methodology, the coaching phrase library in four languages, and ski-school partnerships.
“Good instructors and good ski schools keep track of their students’ progress. SkiCoach makes that progress available to the one constant in skiing: you. Instructors change, conditions change and mountains change, but your development stays with you.”
Bernhard Ratschiller, Co-Founder
The forty
Every skier who bought PRO in season one has been permanently upgraded to ELITE Lifetime — snowboard mode included — at no cost, automatically. They do not have to ask, and there is no expiry on it.
That was never a growth tactic. Forty people took a risk on software from a stranger in Graz. Giving them the top tier forever is the least I owe them.
What’s next
The team is in the Science Park Graz Academy, an eight-week pre-incubation programme; the incubation decision comes in December. Instructor Mode pilots with Austrian ski schools are in progress. And the 2.1 test group is open — three sessions and one bug report earns PRO Lifetime.
SkiCoach 2.0 is out now on iOS and Android, in English, German, French and Italian. The free tier stays free forever.