Snowology first launched on October 15, 2018. We have now made it a full 5 years and we are just entering our 6th season of winter weather and news coverage!
It's been an exciting 5 years to say the least. We started immediately into "Snowvember" with a series of nor'easters that piled snow up so high that resorts were opening 100% on natural snow by mid-November. Then Vail Resorts purchased Triple Peaks, and then later Peak Resorts causing a fundamental shift to how passes are sold along with dramatic changes in visitation patterns. The next season COVID hit and shut down the entire ski industry prematurely and placed limits on operations in the following season. It's been an exciting 5 years to say the least.
I started Snowology as a complete outsider to the ski world, but we ended our first season with 5,000 followers, and doubled our following every year until last. We now have about 75,000 followers across social media and our Facebook Group, the Snowology Community where skiers and riders from across the Northeast share trip reports, news, and stoke, is 53,000 members strong and the largest regional ski and ride group on the entire internet and a crowdsourcing powerhouse!
We've finally taken some big steps this last summer to move our long-form content over to our site and using a subscription model to support our efforts. We've kept the price reasonable at just $29.99/year and are well on our way to our seasonal goal. Our site has now opened doors to not just better formatting and presentation, it has opened up new capabilities that we have been eager to explore. Our development team now includes myself, Luis, and Deane, and we've been tweaking things and developing new things like a way to provide unique coupon codes to our subscribers for various things related to skiing and riding.
We still have a long way to go, but getting there is really only a matter of time because we know we are capable and we know that people want access to accurate and timely information specifically focused on skiing and riding. We will start to introduce deterministic weather this season and hope to overtime automate the things like wind hold forecasts and even driving forecasts. We don't want to be another weather app, we want to be a purpose built ski weather app that doesn't just inform people but provides actionable information so that people can plan around the weather, or when it dumps big they can maybe plan to be inside of that weather.
Now we wouldn't have made it 5 years without the support of the community that we help foster. We operated under a free to use and voluntary to support model for the last 3 seasons, and this was just enough to keep us going up to this point. Over 3,000 people have contributed at least once in order to support our coverage. Many more have contributed to the community and created value while supporting our fellow skiers and riders. Although we've broken from social media as our main planform, I truly wish to maintain what we have already created and is special. Snowology was always a combination of us and you!
Thank you all for joining us on this journey and helping us get here!
Knowledge Is Powder!
Matt
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