What’s Coming To Carv Next Winter?

For a lot of you skiers, it is summertime and perhaps skiing is not really front of mind, but it's starting to creep up there. Well, down in South America at the moment, the Carv team are actually there right now working on upgrades and changes that are coming for the next winter. I caught up with them and wanted to find out more about what these changes are. So in this episode, you're going to discover what is coming for next season in terms of the coaching side, or how they are helping you to improve, what's coming in terms of the community side. So they're wanting to keep the, the fun side of things and interaction and not interrupt your day on the mountain. There's some really neat things you'll hear from Damien about on that topic, as well as like some of the, the stumbling blocks they've had along the way, and the fact that they just don't stop trying to improve this product, which is the biggest thing that I admire about this, uh, this brand and this company. So tune in to this latest episode of the Big Picture Skiing Podcast and find out what is coming with Carv for the next winter. Hey, so with over 50,000 Carv users now, like, it's, it's pretty clear people are, people are into improving their skiing, they're into measuring it. You've made some big technology advancements with Carv 2 behind me. You've taken out the insole, uh, but this season there's a different focus. You're, you're more sort of honed in on helping people, like, with the how. So where did this, where did this come from, Jamie?

So the mission of Carv is to increase the overall enjoyment of skiing and to do that by making it easier to improve at technique. I think, you know, with Carv 1 we had huge steps and with Carv 2 we did that because it's just so much more accessible. But one of the things that we kind of keep coming to is people kind of understand how we're measuring technique, but we're not making it really easy and simple to get that next step of improvement. And so the big kind of push this year is to make the way we talk about coaching much, much more accessible to, to the average skier. So it kind of relates to how they might already think about how they can improve their skiing.

Yeah, because did you find like the early adopters of Carv probably had a bit of an understanding of, of sort of details of metrics and skills and technique, whereas you're getting more and more people that don't have that background? So were they giving you feedback? What was—

where you know. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. So I think probably, you know, when we first kind of designed Carv, it was very much from a kind of case of what exactly can we measure that is a very good indication of if someone is a good skier. And that's kind of where the metrics came from. And, and they're great things, you know, we can measure them well with the system, and we can basically, um, and, and they're great at predicting if people are good or bad skiers, you know, things, you know, things like edge similarity or, um, early forward movement, these. But The thing is, when people think about skiing, I should just backtrack. And so that worked really well for our kind of like more technical customers because they got into this whole system that Carv had made that was very, very powerful at defining technique. But what we're trying to do now is basically, you know, that system that we defined was kind of unique to Carv. And what we want to do now is really make it much, much more relatable to how people think about their own skiing, even if they don't know about Carv. So, you know, maybe they're trying to just get better at carving, or maybe they're trying to tackle moguls, or maybe they're trying to tackle steep terrain, and trying to relate how they already think about skiing, kind of marry that with the metric system. So that's kind of how we came to where we are now. And as part of us, like, becoming much, much more accessible and kind of appealing to a broader audience, it's really important that we make that change. And so we're really excited for, for the impact it's going to have this season.

So where do you start? How do you, how do you begin there? So, you know, I've got a lot of experience coaching, but you guys get to start afresh. Like, was there— did you, John, was, was there like involvement of other people? Uh, like, yeah, how do you build this part of the, uh, of the Carve experience to become better? Where did you start?

Yeah, we started with discussing with a lot of instructors, reading a lot of instruction manuals, and then talking to a lot of people to find the gaps between them. And then we also brought a lot of coaching expertise from other fields. In general, one of the biggest things that you need for great coaching is a great framework. People need to know how everything knits together. And so we, we did those interviews, we talked to everyone, and then we built a framework and we said, all right, great, we've got this thing called SkiIQ. It's awesome. It makes, it makes it fun to evaluate your technique and you get it as you go. Really awesome, but it's really up at the top. It's integrative of so many things. And then we have these metrics that break it down, but they're way at the bottom, super granular. And take an example that probably is the one we see more than anything, which is people initiating a carving turn. It's one of the hardest things for people to learn that are at that phase. Like, how do you have the patience? How do you, how do you start the edging with that inside leg? And there's all these things. And the way we did it before is we give you a tip about early edging with the inside leg, and then we give you a tip about being patient in the turn and making a, a nice S-shaped turn instead of a Z-turn. And then we give you another tip, but it's all in these little fragments. So what we discovered from talking to everyone is what we need is the thing in the middle, right? The nice sweet spot. Which is how people think about skiing. It's, and it's, it's how to initiate the turn and put those things all together. And we call that a skill, right? And now that becomes the centerpiece. The skill helps you get better at SkiIQ. It packages up a number of metrics into a meaningful group so that then we can measure them and say, how well are you doing at initiating the turn with multiple metrics at once? We can put it more in user-friendly language. We can align it more with the way instructors coach, but then we can use the great things that we have, those more granular metrics and the higher SkiIQ, and stitch it all together. And it makes it so that you can, you can really get people much more accessible feedback. You can give them a path of what to expect. How do you need to progress through this? And how can we take you on that journey? And so that, that's really been the path. I'll hand it over to Damien because he did a lot of those interviews. It's not easy. There's so many different opinions. So let him talk about that. I brought more of the structure of coaching and how do you put together these frameworks. And yeah, let me hand it over to Damien to talk a bit about how he, he managed that, that web.

Sure. Thank you, John.

Damian, I'm curious because, you know, I was, you know, we had some chats and I was trying to ask, I was like, what do other people think about this? Because yeah, you, you're there hearing from all these people like, well, we think you should start here and you should focus on this, and then other people are a bit different. How did you collate all that together? Like, what did you learn from that experience of like, tell me, how do we teach carving?

Yeah, yeah, great question, Tom. I think probably the main thing I learned was that there isn't one specific route through, through that journey. And all these skills, they really— it's not a set progression. It's more that it's like there are multiple things you can work on, not necessarily in any particular order. There is an order in some cases, but it's more about where the individual skier is and what is it that's going to help them the most at that moment. And I think, yeah, for me, kind of the way that we were able to do this was, firstly, as you said, jumped on a load of calls with you, with yourself, with other of our ambassadors, other pro team members. Uh, just essentially getting everyone's feedback of what, you know, all you guys have spent your careers developing your own personal way to teach these things, which is like super, super impressive and so helpful for your clients. And, and for us it was about collecting all that information from you, really learning from you guys what, what are the things that really have worked. Like you talking me through examples of when you've unblocked your clients and things like that, and, and me digesting that and thinking, okay, how can we bring that into our world? Because obviously we don't have the same information that you do. We've got these metrics, right? So, so, uh, we need to put our own lens on this and understand how can we, how can we create a progression from the metrics that we have. Um, and, and really I think the main thing we were trying to think about through this, this, uh, project was just trying to have the user goals in mind at the top and, and understanding, you know, what is it that our users care most about improving in. So That's why we've settled on the progressions of carving, steeps, powder, and moguls as the kind of main areas that our users are really interested in improving. And then obviously we're starting out with one progression in each and we're trying to cover off, you know, what for most of our users, what is the most impactful thing we can be teaching them for each of those things. And so it was about kind of listening to all you guys, getting your opinions and understanding what progressions you have. And then building that into our world with, with our users and their ability in mind.

Can you, can you give us a bit of a preview, you know, at all about, say, what maybe a couple of the progression steps might be?

Yeah, for sure. Um, so maybe let's talk about, uh, the Steeps one. So in Steeps, we're going to be mainly focusing on short turns at the start of this progression to help people, uh, unlock a new movement for a lot of, a lot of people that have just been maybe, maybe starting to carve, moving on from parallel. Um, and so yeah, the first skill in that is about starting to ski within the parameters of a short turn. So we've developed a new metric that we're calling turn corridor, which is looking at the, the width of your turns essentially, and how, how wide, uh, a corridor you're skiing in. And then we're looking at your turn tempo and also what at the moment we're calling exit angle, uh, just essentially to, to define that, those rotation movements within the right, uh, corridor and tempo basically. So, so that progression will, will take you from a parallel turn and, and work you through using real-time feedback into skiing narrower and narrower, shorter and shorter turns, until you're starting to make those movements. And then, yeah, I can keep going to the next one. So the one after that is about separating your upper and lower body. So, uh, obviously with Carv we only capture what the feet are doing, but we can get a good signal of what the upper body is doing from, from the movement of the, of the skis. So in, in this, um, in this skill we're looking at essentially your turn rate. Can you— can you— are you able to unlock your lower legs to be able to rotate quickly under your upper body? If you've got an upper body that is, you know, leading the turn, you're, you're quite, um, static in terms of your— that separation between your upper and lower body. It's very difficult to make those fast turning movements, as I'm sure you've probably seen many times, Tom, in your teaching. So, so that's kind of a flavor of the first couple of skills. Then we move on to introducing more kind of edge engagement at the start of the turn in the short turn. Uh, yeah, go for it.

What was interesting, because I did a little bit of testing of that one. Yeah, uh, of this upper lower body separation. I was like, how, how are they gonna figure this out? And I was trying, I was like doing some upper body rotation turns and then doing it without it. And for me, there was a definite, like, it was pretty close. It was pretty dumb. Like, I was impressed at how you, you'd sort of figured out. Yeah, to do that. So yeah, I think that's, that's awesome because as a coach, I think the best thing you can do for someone is kind of give them a task to go out and then you give them freedom. And I think this goes back to you, Jamie. Your original concept behind CARB is like, give them something to do and let them go do it. Like, don't get in the way, don't keep stopping them, go out and have a crack at it. So yeah, I love that. I love that new metric because you could play around with it. It'll encourage you, like, what if I change this? What if I do try and turn my legs more? And, and, and then it gets— you get this immediate feedback. Yeah, I was impressed with that.

Yeah. And the really important thing with that one in particular that highlights where we're going with SKILS is our metrics are all measured at the boots. And that's very important, right? That's the end of the, of the biometric or the, the biomechanical chain, right? It all comes down to your boots and skis in the end. But To date, Carv has done very little coaching about the upper body, but our skills are talking about the whole body. That's a big point. They're attached to people's goals. They're attached to how instructors instruct, and they think about the whole body. So we can really start giving people more instruction about that. And because we have a billion turns now, our ability to make some of those inferences between what's happening at the boots and the skis with the rest of your body keeps getting better and better. Right. And so that's a huge unlock here. Something we hear from, from users all the time is like, well, sometimes people are telling me that I should keep my body down the hill and move my legs more. And sometimes they're telling me that I should keep my body following the turn. What do I do? And so that's the big solution here. The carving pathway teaches you more about your body staying along the path of your turn. The short turn pathway teaches you about upper body and lower body separation. So now we have this really clean story and the, the plan is to have about 6 main skills for each of these main pathways. So 6 main skills for carving, 6 main skills for, for short turns. And we help you find which one is right for you at your journey. Based on how you're performing. And really one of the big things here is we're watching you ski all the time. So it's not just while you're training these things, we're watching all the time and showing you where your gaps are and then saying, all right, let's lean in on this gap. Or maybe you're feeling like something different today. You can jump off that track and choose one of the other gaps that you want. So it's also giving people choice and helping them to understand and not just feeling like they're, they're on a ride without knowing where that ride's going and, and without their ability to pull some of the levers sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, would— can you speak to perhaps how you find the majority of users have currently been, you know, interacting with the Carv app and, and the experience? Um, I guess I'm leading towards like, are you trying to help steer them away? Because it's— I think a lot of people are just attracted to SkiIQ. Like they just go in and then that, you know, they go straight to not trying to be coached on anything. Is that fair? You have— did you find that?

We don't want to steer away from it at all. Ski IQ is still, is still that measure that, that helps you connect with how you're improving overall. But what we want to do is help you move that Ski IQ and know how to, right? The Ski IQ wanted to own, to deconstruct that. Yeah, maybe some people who are more advanced just by having that feedback can, can improve. But the majority of people cannot. You really need to break the problem down into bite-sized bits that make it feel less overwhelming and give you better feedback that then you can reconnect back to SkiIQ. And with metrics, we had quite a bit of that. And last season we made a lot of advances with having your focus metric score every time you stop. And on the lifts, more and more tips about a focus metric. But the gap between SkiIQ and the metrics was so large, right? You really needed to have a lot of knowledge. By introducing this in the middle, it's something much more accessible to more people. It's whole body thinking. The metrics are underneath fueling it all, but it just makes it— it makes it easier to coach that way. But SkiIQ is still the ultimate thing that we're helping people to improve. And we constantly make the link. Every time you stop, you still help make the link between them, right? But it's just, it's just giving people a way to break it down into something more accessible.

You recently sort of announced the, some of the upcoming improvements and changes to, to, to CARV, and one of them is this rolling. Maybe you can talk to that one, stopping, because I, I think a lot of people that got into CARV would sort of try and hack it so they'd explain that?

For sure. Well, maybe I could start at the beginning of how we used to do SkiIQ. So, um, we used to just have SkiIQ at a run level. So at the start, you'd ski a whole run, you'd get on a lift, and you'd hear your SkiIQ. Um, but there's a lot of challenges with that because in a run you might ski a variety of different pitches, a variety of different terrains. You might be trying for some of the time, you might get tired and take a break and just, just try and like survive for a little bit and then go back into trying your best. And by the time you get on the lift that SkiIQ has been quite muddied by all those different, different things, and it ends up not being super meaningful. So a few years ago we made a change and we went to segmentation, uh, which, uh, was an awesome change for our users. It was one of the most impactful things that we did, um, in the product over the last couple of years, uh, and this was a change that, that basically meant that instead of getting a SkiIQ for the whole run, now every time that you stop, you've created a segment and you'll hear a SkiIQ for that segment. Which meant that you could be selective about the parts you wanted to attempt the top score on. You could find a pitch that you know you really liked, go ski your best turns down it, stop, not get that SkiIQ muddied by other parts of the run, and hear your score, which was a great step forward for our customers. But we created a bit of a monster here. And what ended up happening was that because people love the SkiIQ game so much, and all they want to do is— a lot of people was just go out and, and try and beat that number every day. Is that, you know, it ended up being that if you're skiing with a Carv user that wanted to do this, uh, it would be a bit of a nightmare because, because they'd be stopping every 10 turns. They'd find the pitch they liked, ski for the minimum amount of turns required to get a score, and then wait for that number and see if they beat it, and then go again and again and again. And it meant that it was quite disruptive to the ski day. So while we'd made a big step forward in terms of making it easy for users to try and do their best skiing and get feedback on it, we made it a lot harder in terms of being a natural way to fit into their day. And so for the last couple of years, we've had an idea that, you know, has— we've put out to the user base and has got great feedback, but it has its complexities to implement, so which is the reason we haven't done it yet. But we are taking it on this summer, which is what we're calling rolling SkiIQ or top 8 turn SkiIQ, which essentially Uh, means that now what we're going to do is we're going to look at your run and we're just going to go and find your best 8 turns for you. We'll go, we'll go look across your data, look at those consecutive turns that scored highest and pull them out, and that'll be your SkiIQ. So you don't have to stop and tell, to tell Carv when, what to look at. We'll go and find the right thing to look at. Um, and we've been testing over the last couple of days, uh, even yesterday myself, Jamie Salter, and Charlie from the team, we went out and had a little SkiIQ off. And we all found that we were skiing completely differently. Like, we were just doing runs top to bottom, which for the last couple of years, if you're trying to game the system and get a high score, we never happened. So it was really refreshing to see that it actually really had a big impact and a change on, on how we use the product ourselves. Um, and the fun that we had was, yeah, it was, it was a great, a great morning because of that change. So yeah, we, it's a big move for us and we're excited for the community to, to be able to use it.

That, that is really cool to hear that. And like, you can hear in your voice the fact that you— the fun is back, there's no interruptions, just go.

Yeah, we get so many people who say, please, Carv, do this because my partner won't ski with me anymore, or my friend won't ski with me anymore, or I'm, or I'm afraid I'm going to cause an accident on the ski slopes because I just can't— I just have to stop. I have to So this is gonna be a lot more fun. And the other cool part of it is we're also looking at the prospect of if you're skiing different types of technique as you go down, we'll pull out the top 8 of all of them. So say you hit a steep bit and you fire off some short turns and then it levels out some more and the snow is nice and grippy there and you just throw some big carving turns. And then later on there were some moguls along the way and you hit them, you could do that all top to bottom without stopping and get scored on each. There are some things we're working out in that in terms of how we want to present it, but that's what we want to do. We want to say, do your thing, flow down, ski how you want, and we'll find all the golden nuggets for you. And the cool thing is we've got it working now. We've got a you know, tune it up, but we're all having, having a blast with it.

Hey, just a slightly different question that came to me right now. Jamie, you yourself, uh, Pruth is in the background there, you know, this was your idea like, you know, years back. Can you share like anything that you've learned in terms of like building like this, this idea you know, something you're really interested, which is, you know, technology, business. Yeah, what, what have you learned now? Reflect. Like, you're there, you're in Chile with the team, this huge team, you've made these changes and, you know, you're changing skiing and you're having to figure out all these things along the way. Like, what if you reflect, do you think to yourself, wow, geez, like, this is so cool because I've learned this? Or, yeah, I'm interested.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's definitely quite a wide Um, a wide question. Um, I think one thing that, you know, people say is important, I think we've actually done it very well, is, you know, we've always really had the same mission. You know, we always wanted to make a really powerful product that made skiing more fun, uh, and that did that through technique. And I think, you know, staying cool to that mission and basically like hiring amazing people around that mission and like getting like the first customers who would tolerate a very poor product in the first years of Kav, but were excited by what we're working on. So they would actually kind of be kind enough to give us the time and help us improve it, I think has worked very well. And where we have kind of made mistakes, which I think we should have learned from, is when we've kind of like deviated from that or we get excited by something else, which is quite different to what we're actually really set out to do. And although it sounds exciting in the, in the, in the, in the near term, because it doesn't align with this, like this momentum that you've built across like the people and the user base and, uh, the investors, like every, every part of the, of the business is kind of aligned towards that, then it, it, it doesn't actually work very well. So when we've tried sort of projects that are kind of a long way out from our core, core mission. So, um, yeah, there's definitely many learnings in like all different parts of business that, you know, and mistakes we've made and that I've learned from. But I think, you know, the thing that has kind of resonated with me is like, you know, being very clear about what you're trying to do and, you know, and being very clear about the long-term where you're trying to get to, but then being very flexible about all the details in, in, in the near term. So you try something, it doesn't work, okay, you scrap it. You try something else, it doesn't work, you scrap it. But, you know, being flexible about how you get there, but being clear that you wanna make a very powerful experience for every skier that helps them get better and helps them have more fun. Has been very powerful. So I think, yeah, that's my— if I had to give one piece of advice.

Yeah, no, I think so. I mean, I certainly would agree with that. As soon as you come back to, you know, your North Star, why you're really doing it, things just tend to work out. You know, you're meant to learn from mistakes. But yeah, okay, thanks for sharing. I mean, you're in Chile at the moment. You've got a bunch of— you just arrived. Down there. I don't think people realize what goes on sometimes behind the scenes, you know, these, these pretty intensive missions you've got to make to, to test this stuff. And, and, you know, yeah, so, so what is the goal of this week, for example, uh, down in South America?

Yeah, well, um, we're actually here for a whole month, um, yeah, so, um, you know, and we try and do this every year and it's just very powerful to have, you know, it's great the team can make the time to come out here, but we kind of come down here for a month, uh, and we're pushing, you know, we're all in the same place, we're all working as hard as we can to make a really awesome product for next year. Um, and what's nice is we're, we're able to test with people from, uh, Santiago, just like, you know, 2 hours away from us. And so every weekend we're kind of testing and we're kind of, you know, getting feedback from customers to improve the products with the goal of like releasing some elements of the products, um, kind of mid of the Southern Hemisphere season. Uh, the goal next week is to, um, is to test the, uh, some new tabs. So this will be internal testing, not public, but we'll be testing, uh, new versions of the Ski tab and new versions of coaching tab that involve a lot of the concepts that John and Damien have been talking about.

Yeah, cool. And then so from there, uh, like John, I imagine making sure people like, they pick up their phone and they open Carve and they go, like, what do I do? I can't even imagine, like, where you have to start with the user experience in such, like, an in-depth, you know, product.

Like, how do you— Before the trip, we, Damien in particular, did a lot of calls with users on some of these concepts. So after we had talked to the instructors, after we had aligned with some of the coaching best practices, all our own thoughts. We put together prototypes of that before we came here, and we did phone calls with folks. And we also built a prototype that several of us skied on some of the real-time feedback prior to this. And then to prep, then we took all of that and all the user calls, and we took our first stab at a minimum viable product of what the new coaching tab and what the new ski tab would look like. When you introduce this concept of skills. And basically we give people a visual map of each thing— their carving, their, their short turns for the steeps progression, their moguls and their powder skills. And then we give— we pick one as the thing that they should most focus on based on what their goals are and then give them an experience skiing. So we build a first pass at that. And then we say, all right, that wasn't very good. You know, we go out and ski on it. We try it. We let this past weekend, we skied with about, about 30 people here who had never used Carv before as well. So we got a lot of people who have a lot of experience on Carv and people who haven't. And then you realize all the holes that you have in it and all the things that aren't very intuitive. And then you make another pass and make another pass. And that's the beauty of being here, is that every day one or more of us are running up, getting some skis on, testing some things, running back and saying, hey, data science, we need help on this, or hey, software team, we need to fix this, or hey, design team, we need— this interface is totally confusing people. And it's just a super rapid iteration cycle, something that, that is very hard to do at bigger companies. So I was— before this, I was at, at Google. Awesome working there, great experience. But this kind of rapid iteration you get when you get a bunch of people that are frothing about skiing and a small team where you can put everybody in a room and just crank away. You can produce some pretty amazing stuff in a short period of time.

I might just, uh, add a few things more onto that, uh, about your question about the UX, Tom. So, uh, yeah, you're absolutely right. We, we're introducing, uh, a lot of layers now in terms of multiple skills, progressions, all these things. Um, and there is a potential to cause overwhelm if it's not surfaced correctly, right? Um, and so kind of the way that I like to think about it, um, and not just this problem but for lots of problems about carbs, is I just think, what would you do? How would you, um, present this to your clients, right? And you, in your head, you have this map of, of knowledge of all the different progressions you've worked on, where your client fits into those progressions, but you don't expose that to them. You don't, you don't tell them all of that in one go and be like, figure it out. You'll create a tailored, fun experience for them that picks the right things from your mind that you know about the progressions that you've built and surface it to them in the right way and the right order, and, and not in a, in a way that's overwhelming, but in a way that's fun and really helps them. So that's— we're trying to take that principle of what the best ski coaches do and bring that into the product and the interface. So that's, that's the approach we want to get to.

Yeah, wow, impressive. I, I always respect like how many different like things you have to cover. It's not just improving people's skiing, like what goes into that, like the technology, the, the app, user experience, the audio, uh, the language used, you know. Like how much detail versus how little. Like, yeah, just overwhelming for my brain. So like, yeah, that's why you got a team, right?

Yeah, and folks like you that, that help us to make sure that things align. Because our goal with Carv, you know, we haven't talked about it in this call, but you and I have talked about it a lot, is it's a, it's a yin and yang. Carv helps, uh, augment what great ski instructors can do, and great ski instructors augment what Carv can do. So the more they speak the same language and use the same approaches, but each have their own strengths, the better. Right? Carv has this advantage. It can be with you on the hill all the time and help you do your homework and make it fun. Right? And we more and more can figure out more and more about the whole body, but we can't see everything that an instructor can. Right? So we want to emulate as much as possible, but not in the, not in the vein of replacing, but in the, in the vein of, of working together and, and augmenting.

Damon, you mentioned like how fun it was that you went skiing, you know, you and a couple of the guys, uh, yesterday, and that fun part. And there was a bunch of you, you weren't just on your own. And I know community is also sort of an area you're trying to improve and, and focus on as well. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And it's a great point. Like, we've had experiences in the team. Yesterday is a great example of when you ski with others that are using Carv, it can be really fun and it adds a new element of competition and excitement to the whole experience. And we've seen this happen organically, kind of in the wild, in our community over the last, you know, the whole time that Carv's existed really. We've got some of you, I'm sure, will have seen our Facebook community where people are engaging daily, posting videos of themselves skiing. Getting feedback from our other users, posting their best ski IQs and being like, can you try and beat this one, guys? That sort of thing, you know, that kind of mentality. We also see it in resorts, you know, in our major hubs in the US, places like Park City, Deer Valley, Whistler. There are big communities, groups of Carv users that have found themselves a little kind of tribe in those areas. And they go out and ski together with a product, compete, try and beat each other's scores, help each other out with, with different tips they found to help them influence metrics and that kind of stuff. Um, and yeah, it's all been amazing to see and a great signal for us that there's something really powerful there. Uh, but to date we haven't really— well, not because we haven't wanted to, but more just because of time and prioritization— that we haven't yet brought this, um, amazing kind of stuff that's going on naturally into the product, uh, experience itself. So, so this year we're making a change to that and we're introducing, um, friends into our community, which is the first step. So You'll be able to add all your friends on Carv. It's kind of a follow-up from groups, is what we had before. We think friends fits kind of better with, in terms of like kind of the skiing, the way people naturally ski and have mates that they ski with. And maybe sometimes your friends aren't skiing with you, but you still want to see what they're doing, what they're up to. So that's the first step. And we're going to be introducing a friend leaderboard and other things you're able to compete with your friends on different achievements and making it really part of the ski day. And a big part of your actual ski experience when you're with a group. So this is going to mean that there's going to be features in the ski tab while you're skiing around. We're going to be automatically figuring out who you're skiing with and creating little fun mini games and challenges to compete with, with your friends while you're, while you're out skiing with them. So you don't have to do that outside of Carv now. We're going to bring that into the app experience.

Wow, that is very cool. I love that part because recently we were in Parrish and my son Archie, he had these school race competitions going on. There's this big interschools competition in Australia, I think it's the biggest in the world. And so you've got just kids and families, uh, you know, on this resort. And, you know, the race experience doesn't take up the whole day. So then what I just found was cool for me is, is experiencing skiing again with friends and re— and, and having a lot of fun. And like these little mini competitions I, I did with, you know, Archie and his friends to try and help improve their skiing. And I just think that part is like so, so important. And so if you bring that in, so someone can be at a small resort, you know, on the East Coast of America, or, you know, in New Zealand or something, and maybe join up with someone and have that kind of side of the interaction, you know, maybe not just so laser focused like, oh my God, my edging, my balance, and you bring in the fun factor. Yeah, I think, I think that's just really important inner ski experience, because, you know, at the end of the day, that's what a lot of people are doing it for. It is a very fun sport. So yeah, kudos to you guys for bringing that in. I, I love hearing about that.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I mean, I think it kind of brings back— brings us back to the core mission, right? Like, fun is a big part of your lessons, I'm sure, Tom. You try and make sure they stay fun and engaging, and that really helps your clients want to improve more, right, and stay engaged with the sport and, and try harder and all these things. So it's not just about, you know, um, well, obviously we want to make the product more fun, but we really want to bring it back to our mission of helping people improve more. And we think that bringing this friends experience and this social experience into the product is actually going to have a real impact on people's SkiIQs going up and them improving their skiing, because it's such a big part of the sport of staying engaged and having fun and motivating you to try harder, right? It's all part of the community experience as well.

Nice. Hey, so maybe as we get close to the end here, can I ask each of you if you have a tip for the Carv user? You know, maybe something they're not utilizing in the app or the way they're approaching things or for this coming season, like, you know, hey, please try this way or hey, have you tried that?

Or— Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, uh, I'll maybe speak to something that's going to be new for next season that I'm quite excited about. I think will bring a lot of impact. With the skills and obviously that we're, that we're making, we're going to be making, uh, brand new instructional videos. On each of these skills, which are going to be led by you guys, Tom, and the community. We've already spoken about this a bit on calls together, but yeah, I'm super excited about them because I think it's kind of the first time that we've had, you know, coaching that's really related to users' goals, that is going to be served to them in a really digestible and informative way. And I think just diving into the app and exploring the content and the videos in there is going to be really helpful for people next season to really understand what they're trying to do with these skills and how to unlock the new body movements to do them. And it would just set them up really well going into these games. They're going to be able to play in the app and the real-time feedback with the, with your guys' great coaching in their heads while they're going into it. So that's probably my biggest tip.

Yeah, sure. For me, it's the, the real-time feedback. There are certainly many of our users who use that, but many users who have never tried it. And we know a lot of the reason why that is. Two seasons ago, we had about 18 different modes. So there were so many things to choose from last season. By the end of the season, we had 8. It's still a lot to choose from. This season, we're aiming to reduce that more at the high level to probably only have 3 modes to choose from. And it makes it really easy to say, well, do I just want to hear things when I stop? Do I hear things when I stop and I'm on the lift, or do I get real-time feedback? We're not going to lose all the cool stuff that we had in there, but we're going to package it up much easier. And the hope is to get more people to use that real-time feedback. We don't expect people to use it all the time, right? Sometimes you're skiing, you're not going to want to be that engaged. You want to just hear things here and there. But once in a while when you can make that connection right as you're doing a turn and you can hear the bing, bing, bing, bang, right? You create this great, great learning opportunity. That then when you turn it off and go into one of the other modes, you still have some of that connection. So we're doing a ton of things to make those real-time learning modes more accessible. There's going to be more of them for more ability levels. That was a big reason that a lot of people didn't use them in the past. They were at a higher ability level. And so, yeah, I think it's going to be really exciting for more people to dig into and get value out of that.

Yeah, I'm kind of— I'm going to echo John's lines, kind of cheating, but add a little bit to it. Um, yeah, I do think, you know, one of the big ideas behind Carv was this concept of, um, if you can get feedback as you finish a turn, then you can create a feedback loop that isn't just when you get to the end of the run and you have like a tip from a friend or a ski instructor. You can actually essentially develop an intuition for a very important concept in skiing, and you can do that turn by turn. And so, um, to John's point, like, one of the things that makes me really sad is if, if people haven't tried real-time feedback and You know, it does mean that you need some good headphones, like, um, you can use AirPods, but, you know, even better is if you have these headphones that fit into your, um, helmet, and then you can just get such an elevated experience of KARV, and you can really experience this very, very powerful and unique coaching paradigm that we've basically created. Um, and it's— and yeah, and I, I feel like, you know, this is probably still sort of 10 or 20% of KARV users who aren't kind of trying it at all, and, um, I, I do kind of feel they're missing out. And, and then I'm going to cheat a little bit and add another one. Once you do have those headphones and you do have real-time feedback, please upgrade your voice to the best voice. So in the settings, it's very obvious. It's a little kind of like sort of person speaking. And behind that, you can basically upgrade your voice. And we would love to do it more integrated into Kavv, but because we wanna keep Kavv a small app, we don't wanna ship a really big heavy voice with the app. So we let people upgrade but that does mean that they need to go and download the voice and it's so much better. You know, it's kind of 500 or 600 megabytes, but it's a really good, cool sounding voice. It's very relatable versus I have to admit that the default voice, which is from Apple or Android, is a bit of a robot. So yeah, please get some good headphones, do the real-time feedback and upgrade your voice.

Yeah, just to build on that, it's free and it's just built into the OS and people always say, Carve, your voice is so robotic. We're like, no, that's the voice from iOS. You just go in and change the settings. So we made it really bold this year. But I'll also add on, there's many people— I'm so surprised many times they say, oh, yeah, I've never even tried using any audio with Carve, not just the real time, but they never tried putting headphones on. I think sometimes because they're intimidated, they think like, oh, well, I'm skiing, I don't want to— And I just want to reassure people that most of the time, and you have control over this, you only hear something when you stop or on the lift unless you decide to get turn-by-turn. Some people still have the impression, oh, it's going to be talking to me all the time, and they never use headphones. And we're like, oh, there's so much of the experience creating that feedback loop each time you stop. And now that you don't have to stop to get great scores, you can just you know, ski around top to bottom, even more reason, you know, give it a try with the headphones if you haven't, because it's, it's a huge, huge part of the experience.

Yeah, nice. Yeah, that's, that's great. Helpful tips there from, uh, from everyone. I would say, can I share what I would encourage people to try next time? I've just— yeah, I think I've seen so many people blocked at a point because of their equipment. And so there's probably the two main ones is they're either their boots or their skis. And you guys can probably speak to this, but I was just even speaking to Rosie and how she said, you know, I just tried these Stöcklis and my SkiIQ went straight up from my 95 underfoot skis. And then, you know, when we were in Hintertux, I tried these other Fischer skis and voom, my SkiIQ went up. So I would just encourage people if you get the chance to demo, rent, try some different skis, I think it's like— what is super cool is you can obviously feel the difference, everyone will notice that, but having some data on it and be able to see like what, what metrics change, what don't, what improves, I think I just encourage people to go and experiment with some different skis. And then boots, you know, I think, uh, just you can only be as athletic as what you're sort of contained within inside your ski boots. And I've just seen so many times when it's sort of almost like unblocking, like a cast around your leg, and just, you know, allowing it to— for you to stand a little bit more naturally for whatever height or, you know, size or flexibility you are. And then suddenly things all start moving up, up higher. So I just think if you're ever at a point where you're a bit stuck try skis of a different kind, maybe check out your boots, go see a good boot fitter, or, or look into it. And even the simplest thing I would say is like, just try unbuckling the top buckles one or two rungs so you can move your lower leg and see what happens, uh, would be my, my tip and takeaway.

So yeah, yeah, that's such a great tip, Tom. We were actually joking the other day, uh, with Charlie that We were thinking about, you know, how are we going to do these tips for skills? What, what, what's going to be the order? What the— how are we going to make it an awesome system? And Charlie was like, well, maybe we just scrap that and just tell people to sharpen their edges because that'll probably dial up their ski IQ more than, more than the tip would. So yeah, it's such a good piece of feedback for our users and, and for all of us to make sure our equipment's at the, you know, where it should be to have us performing at our best. Makes a huge difference.

That's right. I mean, I even stopped at the Dubai Indoor Ski Center on the way over to London to try and break up the trip And, and I didn't take any of my own gear. I, I rented boots and skis, helmet. I looked like an absolute dork, so I did not feel cool on, on skis. But I would say it was a really eye-opening experience, especially to be in rental boots that I couldn't stand athletically. For one, I was very upright, uh, which sort of made it not easy. I mean, I, I knew how to flex my ankle so I could work towards it, but I saw both Jenny and Archie, my wife and my son, regress straight away because they're not as strong and, you know, as aware of that. So the boot just put them back, and then the skis were just so blunt. And so, you know, I immediately just didn't have any trust in, in the edges. So you're absolutely right, tune your skis, try some different pairs of skis, and, and make sure your boots are set up right. So, uh, yeah, great one there. Hey, I've really enjoyed catching up with you guys down in, in South America. And hearing about what's coming and, and what you're working towards, it's always, uh, yeah, really inspiring to know that you, you don't just stop where you're at, you keep trying to make the product better. Any final, any final words before we, uh, before you say goodbye and you guys need to get up on and get on snow?

Yeah, well, just, yeah, thanks so much for me, Tom, and I'm sure we'll be in touch over the next few, um, few weeks on some of this skill stuff. And yeah, looking forward to diving in with you.

Yeah, thanks, Tom. We're, we're on the same journey as all of our customers, maybe me more so than everyone else, as I'm one of the weakest skiers of the group. But we're users of the product just like everyone else. So we're just as stoked to get out there and make it even better for improving our skiing. And we want to hear all their ideas so we can embrace that in what we're doing here. So thank you and thanks to everyone in our community.

Yeah, just to say thanks, Tom. It's really awesome to work with you. Like, I think we're kind of kindred spirits in that You basically looked at skiing and you really tried to understand how the body is moving and how that relates to good skiing. And so it was so fun kind of getting your feedback on the products. And yeah, thank you for working with us on that one.

Really appreciate it.

Yeah, you're welcome. Hey, enjoy, make this— make some turns for me and we'll catch up soon. Thanks, guys.