Elevate Shredhead's Market Reach

My name is Donny McCauley, I'm a senior at CU Boulder and the founder of Shredhead. Shredhead is a lifestyle brand I created in high school around the outdoor sports community we all know and love.

Starting from a brand of clothing, from hoodies, t-shirts, beanies, and more, Shredhead has now been at the turning point of helping skiers and snowboarders find others to ride with.

The idea came from a time I went to Trestle Bike Park alone, had no one to ride with, and wondered if there was any way for me to effectively find other people to ride with in a mutual, yet ambiguous way.

I began looking at current solutions, but the reality was none of them provided an efficient way to find other people to ride with. Facebook groups don't provide a mutual connection (you have to manually join a group), Strava doesn't connect you based on skill, etc.

The following winter season, I began doing market research to see if this was a problem other mountain sports enthusiasts were encountering.

Initially starting as questions I would ask skiers and snowboarders on chairlifts, to surveys I would conduct, after over hundreds of chairlift interviews and hundreds of survey responses, the answer became clear: There needed to be a tool to allow people to find others to ride with.

I began utilizing artificial intelligence to assist me in writing the code for the platform (as a business student, my coding knowledge had lacked proficiency) and started building the application using Apple's proprietary coding software. After countless hours of modifying the code, I finally had a visual representation of what the app would look like.

The user interface clearly displayed options for users to input their name, age, what skill level they are, if they ski or snowboard, their favorite resort to go to, and what city they are from. It wasn't much, but it was enough to demonstrate the idea to people in the industry who could provide feedback.

I took this demo and began presenting it at pitches held by the school, illustrating that this is the minimal viable product (MVP) but there are plans to enhance the user experience.

The feedback was excellent. Everyone who heard about the idea immediately related to the problem, even if it was a problem they hadn't realized they had prior.

Adding fuel to the fire, I went back to the drawing board.

If I was going to make an app that people would use, it would have to be both easy to use and solve a real problem.

I started mocking up what future versions would look like, what kind of business model would align with it, and what kind of timeline it could have.

After more countless hours of mindlessly messing with Apple's coding software, I now had a user interface that was fluid and could engage the modern mind.

At this point, I knew that this idea was valuable, but I didn't know exactly how valuable it was. At a point where I didn't know much about what could happen, I decided to take a gamble and outsourced the development to a professional team of programmers.

They were able to upload the application to be hosted on a server and created a secure backend for real users to begin signing up. After a few short months, the application had undergone a full makeover and was ready to be published onto the App Store.

On December 20th, the app was published and I immediately started driving enough downloads for me to understand what users like about the platform and what they don't. I wanted downloads to gain consumer feedback, but I also wanted to remain in stealth mode. Driving too many downloads exposes the app to competitors who could potentially develop the same app in a matter of weeks, rather than months.

Over the next few months, the app gained thousands of downloads across a few countries.

I couldn't be more thrilled with where the app is and I'm excited to see where the app is going.

Since I now have a team of 4 people, including myself, working for Shredhead, we have been able to create a future for Shredhead that is more scalable and recognizable.

We need help getting the brand to the point that it can be marketable.

We would like to be a vendor at events selling our clothing and promoting the app's lively atmosphere. This is essential for the brand to gain a marketable status.

Since the majority of our seed investments have gone towards development costs and licensing fees, funds will be needed to allow us to get the necessary equipment and inventory to be at these cycling/future skiing events.

This is a brand that we truly believe in and we hope that you believe in it as well.