THE BEGINNING
Bouldering is addictive. If you’ve never tried it, stop reading, find your local climbing centre and book your induction. Get. It. Done.
For those of us who have tried it, we all know that bouldering is more than just climbing from the bottom to the top of a variety of walls, using all sorts of holds to get there.
Bouldering is about challenging your mind and entire body. Bouldering is about problem solving on your own, or with friends, or with total strangers.
Bouldering is about talking to a whole bunch of people who would only ever be found in the same space together inside a climbing centre (or outside, staring at a real boulder).
There’s always something new to work on, a new challenge to master.
What does this have to do with Mike and Jo? Well, these guys are two people constantly striving to improve and measure their progress. To do that, they need to be speaking the same language. To know which wall, route and even hold the other is talking about, so that improvements and strategies can be agreed.
This is all fine when the wall is in front of you, but here’s the other thing about bouldering: you can leave the wall, but it doesn’t leave you. You might only have 6 weeks to complete a route set before it’s gone forever.
You don’t always remember the routes you’ve completed, but you always remember the ones you’ve yet to complete. Language is a glorious, tricky beast. People remember and describe things differently – Mike and Jo found themselves talking in circles, not knowing which bits of the wall the other was talking about.
SO WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT?
We decided to create an app. Not just for us, but for everyone. We wanted it to be fun, easy to use and to look cool.
We had no idea what we were doing – the first spec was an embarrassing 40+ pages long. We spoke to a bunch of development companies, and took the page count to fewer than 10 – we’d distilled everything down to our MVP (minimum viable product).
The deeper we went, the more we learned. An app would be expensive – we’d have to create everything twice. If we built website instead, the development, hosting, testing, etc. would all be simpler – but would it work for our climbers?
To keep costs down, we did everything but the development ourselves. We still do, with a few exceptions now and again.
Everything we build, each time we make a change, we test everything across a whole bunch of devices – it’s really important to us that the website works – for everyone.
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
We did it – simianclimb.com exists!
It supports tracking progress, connecting with friends and running competitions. There’s more, but you get the idea. We’re pretty proud of what we’ve made and we hope that you like it here!
