all for the love of climbing.
spent 15+ hours at the gym today preparing for the SCS Comp… painting, cleaning, taping routes, prepping score cards, taking bookings, organizing/rearranging the gym for the bake sale and registration….. and now I am falling asleep on the couch in the lobby, only to wake up in about 3 hours to get the gym open!!
honestly, I live for this shit! man, I love my job!
#Abs13 Video feed
Hi all. I wanted to provide some nuance to my post ‘bouldering nationals - screaming at the screen.’ According to a comment I received, a climber decided to set up his own web camera due to the fact that USA Climbing wasn’t providing streaming.
So I’d like to edit my past post and say thank you very much to said climber. USA Climbing, if you’re listening, please give climbers like this more support at your next event.
August Status Update
The last few months have been really busy at Sender. We’ve been heads down working hard and haven’t been as communicative as we’d like, so here’s a brief recap of what we’ve been up to.
June was mostly spent kicking things off and getting the company setup. Bank accounts, office space, phones… a lot of “not terribly exciting, but necessary” tasks that we were glad to get out of the way. In between all of that, we managed to talk to route setters, coaches, and climbers (casual, competitive, pro - the whole gamut) about what they were looking for in a training tool.
July started off with an awesome trip to Stone Summit in Atlanta for the 2012 SCS Youth Nationals. In between watching the kids crush some seriously hard routes, we spoke with coaches and athletes from across the country about how they trained and the tools they used for tracking progress. We got to show early mockups of Sender and the response was overwhelmingly positive. We received a ton of great feedback and feature ideas.
We’re looking forward to seeing everyone again at ABS Nationals next March - ideally with version 1.0 of Sender live and in climber’s hands. If you’ve never attended a regional or national climbing competition, you should really check one out. The dedication and athleticism is inspiring, and the excitement when someone finally sends (on a route that was set specifically not to be sent) is incredible.
The rest of July we took everything we learned in the previous 6 weeks and tried to figure out just what Sender needed to be for an initial 1.0 release. Our early mockups showed a lot of functionality: goal setting, customized workouts, detailed analytics, etc… and every discussion with a climber uncovered another cool new idea. If we’re going to launch anytime soon, we needed to pare it down to something simple (more on that in another post).
With a clearer idea of how to proceed, August has been spent in full development mode. We redesigned the landing page, and in doing so came up with a design language and framework for building out the rest of the site. We then setup the blog and started writing content. And while you can’t see it from the outside, we’ve been cranking out the first set of features: user signup, friend management, activity feeds, etc…
There’s a lot left to do, but now that we have the blog in place we plan to post regular status updates. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or just hit us up in the comments - we’d love to hear from you!
