Introduction of RouteBeta
RouteBeta is a climb tracking app inspired by the challenge of finding beta for a route.
Posted by
Esko LaaksonenRelated reading
Manual route updates demand a seamless workflow to keep things running smoothly.
Introduction
RouteBeta is a climb tracking app that started from the struggle of finding beta for a route. "What if there was an app or website that listed videos of people completing these routes?" It sounded simple enough to build, so I started building it.
Listing routes
First thing to build was a list of routes that is easy to keep up to date. Before I started paying attention to route updates, I felt like they weren't updated that often anyway. Initially, I manually tracked the routes that we were spending majority of our time climbing. That was enough to realize that tracking climbs seems useful, but it also showed that routes were being updated much more often than anticipated.
Luckily, I discovered that our home gym publishes its active routes on their website. This made it relatively straightforward for RouteBeta to read and merge the routes into the existing database. However, some manual intervention is still required, as updates aren’t always timely, and occasional errors creep in. For now, it’s a workable solution until I can convince climbing gyms to subscribe to RouteBeta and use it as their primary route publishing platform.
Tracking climbs
Having the routes listed in the app sparked the idea of tracking climbs, as it felt important to know which routes we had sent or attempted. It also seemed like a low-hanging fruit compared to the original video feature, so I decided to build that functionality first.
The first working prototype of the climb tracker completely transformed how I spent my time at the gym. Previously, my routine consisted of a few warm-up climbs, followed by working on my project route until I either sent it or became too tired to continue.
With the climb tracker, it became so much fun to discover new routes and mark them as done after a send. Even with just a few of us using the app initially, we started to see the value of tracking our climbs. It was exciting to watch our progress and see the number of climbs we had completed. Features like the heatmap and a summary with key stats motivated me to show up consistently.
Beta videos
Sharing beta videos on RouteBeta became a reality on December 4, 2024, when the first video was uploaded to YouTube and embedded in the RouteBeta app. While marking routes as completed is satisfying, sharing beta videos with your climbing buddies takes it to the next level. The best part? It works seamlessly even asynchronously!
More to come
I am actively building the RouteBeta app and would love to hear your feedback or feature requests. The easiest way to reach me is via email. Happy climbing and sending!