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Comment by bgraves | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly a gym rat, but there's an excellent bouldering spot nearby. I'm not too interested in top-roping or lead climbing...it gets too expensive too quickly.

I know this is off-topic, but I've contemplated this question for years. Why aren't there better technology services/products for outdoor sports in general? I've attempted a few "adventure sport" themed projects, but they never seem to take off. I think there's a paradox between my love for technology and my love for the outdoors. I enjoy both immensely, but they don't go very well together.

Best of luck! I would be interested in hearing some stats (daily reach, submission stats, etc.) when you have them available.

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I second your experience in getting traction for outdoor sports apps/sites.

My own site, Bouldr, has had a bit of traction, but nothing significant, and monetizing seems to be a really tough problem in this field. Our FB page has > 17K fans, and there are a few thousand registered users on the site, but it's got to the stage that I'm not really sure if I should continue the app (I'm going to for the time being, but the thought of closing up has crossed my mind more often recently). Dr. Topo closed for similar reasons.

Anyhow, if you like, I'll Tweet and post on our FB page about your app - hopefully you'll have more success than me :)

Hello Matt, I assume you want some feedback on the app so I will give it here, if not you can disregard. My buddy showed my your app and it was at a stage where you had to download all the routes that you were interested in before hand on a computer. I think a really great thing about the iPhone is the discoverability of things while you are on the go. For instance we went to pirates cove in corona del mar on a whim and we didn't have all of the routes downloaded so we couldn't use the app as we really wanted to. I do like the aspect of caching the climbs so that when you are off the beaten path you can get to the saved ones without service. I really like the routes showing up on the screen with a picture and the actual line going up the face. That kind of beta helps a lot and it's easier to find the climb than a drawing of the face. On the website I do like the map aspect but I don't know if I like that as the main navigation. you might want to cultivate the areas a bit more like how mountainproject or rc.com does things. Cheers to your app and I hope that you find success with it! I love rock climbing and anything that brings some exposure to it is a good thing.

I wasn't looking to threadjack here, but thanks for the feedback :) I'll have a think about that - the app did originally just get climbs in your locality from the web service, but I changed to the cache-only due to coverage problems. I'll see if I can come up with a hybrid.

That would be awesome!

I checked out your site and I have some suggestions if you'd like:

- Organize by area instead of climb. Usually climbers will stay in one area for the whole day, so it'd be nice to have a list of boulder problems or routes that they can quickly access or print off.

- Seems like this could be a great way for new areas to be documented! Have you thought about lettings users enter more specific data? Things that climbers care about include: sport or trad, # of draws, grade, weather conditions, rope length required, etc.

Unfortunately I've got no advice for monetization, but since you are pretty far along already I wish you good luck and hope you'll keep at it!

Cool beans, cystan!

I'll get those posts up now :D Thanks for the feedback - I have a new design in the works, so I'll see if I can work in your suggestions.

Bouldr is DEFINITELY one of the sites in the "Should be incredibly popular, but isn't" category. I'm a member and can't really figure out why it's not as popular as it should be.

Best of luck! Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the kind words - I think you may have saved the site.

Technology seems to be made for more technically inclined subjects before being brought to other areas.

For example, when I was an undergrad, math and CS subjects had great coverage on the internet (great wikipedia articles, downloadable pdfs), whereas Biology was much more spotty.

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