Met through a mutual friend, we've skied Sunday River together nearly every weekend, every winter, for about seven years now.
Every one of those weekends, the same argument played out in the car: is it actually worth the 5am wake-up, or is that "packed powder" on the report just marketing copy? Resorts have an incentive to say yes. We wanted someone in our corner who didn't.
The first idea was bigger and dumber: buy a ski mountain. That lasted about a week before reality set in. So we looked at what we actually know, optimization and AI, and pointed it at the problem we'd already been living with for seven years.
Honestly, neither of us needs this at Sunday River anymore. Seven years in, we know its moods, its traffic patterns, and which trails hold snow better than any app could tell us. But most people don't have that, and the couple of times we've shown up at a mountain we don't know as well, having something like this would've been priceless. That's the whole idea: give visitors the local knowledge we already have. Then take the same data and hand it to resorts to help them run a tighter operation.
We don't work for the resort, and we don't work against it either. We measure real conditions, real weather, and real lift lines, and we report what we find. That's the whole trick. Honesty isn't a marketing angle for us, it's the only way the product works at all.
A slow Tuesday is bad for everyone. Our texts that say "conditions look great, go" fill midweek lift tickets, which is exactly what resorts want. Being honest about the good days is what makes skiers trust us on the bad ones, and that trust is what makes the whole thing useful to both sides of the mountain.
Fifty days a season, most winters, that's roughly how often the two of us are actually on Sunday River's lifts. We're not doing market research here, we're just describing our own Saturdays. It's also part of the Boyne portfolio, so if this works here, there's a clear path to more mountains next. One resort, done honestly, before anything else.
