Curtis Herbert runs a software company out of a Colorado ski town, and the company is mostly him. The product is Slopes, the app skiers and snowboarders open at the top of a lift and check again at the bottom of the mountain, where it tells them how fast they dropped, how far they carved, and how many vertical feet they earned the right to brag about. It runs on iPhone, Apple Watch, the Mac, and Android. In 2022 it won an Apple Design Award in the Interaction category, the kind of trophy that usually goes to teams with marketing departments.
Herbert has no marketing department. For most of Slopes' life he had no employees at all. What he has instead is a habit that makes him unusual in an industry built on bravado: he tells you the numbers. Real revenue. With the Y-axis labeled. When he announced that Slopes had crossed a million dollars in annual recurring revenue, he framed it less as a victory lap than as a public service - proof, with receipts, that a single person can build something durable in the App Store without venture money or a viral moment.
The honest version is slower than the legend. Slopes made $10,600 in its first two years. Herbert did not quit anything to chase it. He built the first version on nights and weekends through a spring and summer, then took two months off from consulting work to finish before the snow fell. Then he did it again the next season. And the next. The line on his chart only looks like a rocket if you stand far enough back.
He came to apps sideways. Before iOS, he was a web developer. His first real product, a server-monitoring tool called Isis, shipped in 2010 and sold roughly five copies - a number he repeats without flinching, because the failure is the point. He spent the next couple of years consulting, learning what people would pay for, before betting two months of unpaid time on an app about snow.
That bet has a strange origin. Herbert was on a winter trip, eating a late dinner at a Denny's, when he pulled out the ski app he was using and tried to find the one stat he cared about. It was in there, buried under graphs and maps, spread across three screens that each held a piece of the answer. The product he wanted did not exist. So he sat on the idea for about five months, then built it.
What kept Slopes ahead was where Herbert looked for ideas. Not at other apps - at web businesses. Subscription mechanics, retention emails, the unglamorous machinery of keeping customers, all of it borrowed from a corner of software that App Store developers mostly ignored. The clearest example is how he charges. Skiers already buy season passes every winter without blinking. So Slopes sells a season pass too. Same word, same mental model, almost no resistance. "Why can't I just do the same thing," he reasoned, "and call it a season pass inside Slopes?"
The growth, by his own telling, was not a growth-hack. It was a community that liked to talk. Slopes spread the way ski recommendations spread - on chairlifts, in group chats, in the parking lot at the end of the day. "A lot of it was word-of-mouth and luck," he has said. "The ski community, they're going to talk share." He leaned into that with shareable end-of-day cards and emails written like they came from a person rather than a faceless corporation, because for the most part they did.
Herbert is candid about the friction, too. Slopes lives in a blind spot: the people who cover beautiful apps mostly do not ski, and the people who ski mostly do not read tech blogs. "Not a lot of Apple people ski," he has noted, which made it hard for the usual app press to justify a write-up. He worked the seam between two audiences that rarely overlap, and built a business in the gap.
It is also a brutally seasonal business. Slopes earns most of its money in a four-to-five-month northern-hemisphere window, then goes quiet while the mountains melt. Operating costs run near six figures before Herbert pays himself. He plans his year around weather that does not care about his roadmap, which is its own kind of discipline.
Underneath the charts and the trophy is a plainer ambition. Asked what "making it" meant, he did not reach for a number. "My goal is to be able to keep doing what I'm doing," he said. "Make a living on products I can be proud of." He is, by any reasonable measure, doing exactly that - and writing down how, so the next person does not have to guess.
