Company: Snow Explore
CEO: Daniel Lynam
Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Snow Explore lets your customers know the mountain before they take on the mountain. We give resorts the tools they need to sell the resort experience. We let resorts and their customers capture multiple forms of content and then share this onto an interactive and user-friendly ski resort trail map.
2. Problem & Solution
There are 100’s of ski resorts in most major northern hemisphere geographies making it challenging for ski resorts to differentiate themselves from their neighbours. The only way to really differentiate is through CONTENT – Beautiful images, immersive videos and real customer comments. We provide an interactive trail map web application that is embedded onto your ski resorts website. Users can explore your map, view images, watch videos and read customer comments about the varying bowls, ridges, chutes and groomers at a ski resort. Our interactive maps also provide previous visitors to the mountain with a way to share images, videos and comments. Think of it as a Trip Advisor, Youtube and Google Maps all rolled into a neat package for your ski resort.
3. Market
There are about 80 countries in the world where skiing takes place. Among these, roughly 70 countries offer open-air ski areas, with more than 2,000 ski resorts identified worldwide. This equates to around 400 million resort visits worldwide. Our core market is ski resorts and travel websites that want to improve the way they use content to promote their resorts to these 400 million skiers and boarders. We are currently in discussions with a number of ski resorts in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere.
4. Business Model
Snow Explore offers an affordable monthly subscription model. For a small monthly fee we provide a fully hosted interactive map service to our customers. We also offer discounts for yearly subscriptions and flexible rates for multiple maps covering both winter (ski trail maps) and summer (mountain biking trail maps). We also offer a map framework that can support golf courses, accommodation / town maps for travel agents, cruise ships and national parks just to name a few.
5. Management Team
Daniel Lynam – CEO / Founder
Masters of Commerce from Sydney University – lifelong snowboarding traveller and tech startup fanatic.
Luke Hymann – Marketing Manager / Co-Founder
Bachelor of Business with Distinction at University of Technology, Sydney – ambitious snowboarder with little or no actual skill.
Blake Van Delft – Co-Founder
MBA from Rotman School of Management, and lover of snowboarding.
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Our interactive maps were built with a mobile first approach. With much of what customers do now being on Smartphones, we have put a primary focus on our maps being mobile friendly meaning if your customers are travelling to work on the train, sitting on the lounge at home or even about to hit the powder at a ski resort, your ski map is now digitalised on mobiles, completely interactive and ready to be explored!
Furthermore, our maps can be incorporated into any Ski Resort webpage within just minutes. We provide you with a short embed code, then you simply copy this and paste it into the source code of the page you want the map visible, and you’re done.
We have found customers respond favorably to being able to go on a self guided tour of your resort where they can view real content from real resort visitors. A/B testing of Snow Explore maps on an Australian Travel providers website has shown a 5%+ increase in enquiry intention when the map was present (versus not present).
Bonus Question:
If you were to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be and why?
Nick Woodman – the founder of GoPro. A few reasons, a) I have read a lot about his startup challenges and would love to hear about it more, b) GoPro’s are awesome so it would be great to talk sport and GoPro’s and lastly c) I would love to ask where he sees GoPro cameras developing in 10 years. d) Our product is incredibly complementary to user of the GoPro, so I think there is a good business opportunity there.