Season one ended with 1,000+ downloads in 15 countries and 40 paying users.
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.
- 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. 2.0 adds a snowboard mode with its own coaching phrases in four languages and snowboard terms in the results (Edge-to-Edge, Turn Flow).
- Show me where. A score tells you how the run went; it does not tell you where you lost it. GPS Run Replay draws the session's GPS track, coloured by speed, on an OpenStreetMap map. The track is stored on the phone; the map background needs a connection.
- Show me the season, not the run. Season Intelligence: score trend, speed progression and personal bests.
- Give me something I can hand to my instructor. A PDF report with a score gauge and charts.
- 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.
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. Session data stays on the phone. The only part that uses the network is the map background in Run Replay.
This is a deliberate constraint. 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 2.1 test group is open: three sessions and one bug report earn PRO Lifetime.
SkiCoach 2.0 is out now on iOS and Android, in English, German, French and Italian. The free tier stays free forever.