2021: The Genesis of Infinite Degrees
2021 was the genesis of Infinite Degrees and for giving context, insight, and progression analysis to action sports.
After brainstorming, ideating, performing customer discovery, and market analysis throughout the summer of 2020, in January 2021 an action sports database and a simple set of APIs were made to provide a platform for the creation of a product that powers extreme sports athletes the ability to progress and gives insight into what everyone is doing in these sports.
Along the way, Infinite Degrees LLC was born, we were connected with many people from athletes to coaches to businesses throughout the action sports industry, partnered and interacted with the US Ski and Snowboard team, and formed a line of communication and on going interest with investors and companies.
In between all of this, 7 different services were deployed with a few libraries powering them. They were dockerized and are all running in the cloud with probably around 50000+ lines of code between all of them combined. AI powered searchable indexes were developed, a video storage and streaming service was created, and databases were autonomously managed and populated with data. Also a user permission model, management system, and analytics provider was integrated. From a front end standpoint, a power user and coaches web app was developed along with a lite mobile web app that anyone from around the world can use from on the chair lift to their homes to learn and discover new tricks along with gaining insight into action sports. 500+ tricks linked to video, trick attributes, competition results, and athlete info can now be viewed and studied on the platform and games around competitions can be played to win money.
The culmination of this was two things that I think will propel Infinite Degrees into a moneymaking profitable business. The first was attending US Ski and Snowboard Camp at Copper and interacting with coaches and athletes in which I gained valuable feedback along with establishing a core set of users. The next was having a post on reddit go semi-viral 300+ users by the end of the year using the app.
These two feedback experiences made me realize that more than ever, we need an iOS mobile app that people can download to access these tricks. Everyone is on their phones - from coaches to snowboarders. It is hard to type stuff into a website and have that tab open, especially in 10 degree powder storms. We also need more tricks that are basic, a glossary to easily find tricks, and tricks from historical past riders so that people can view those. We also need to tie in the lingo of snowboarding into the app and the tricks, along with people to search for different identifying features of jumps and rails.
Doing these will establish Infinite Degrees into the niche marketplace of snowboard tutorials and learning, which we can easily dominate other competitors due to the scale and platform we have built. From there, it will be easy to expand to other action sports and hopefully start generating profits though subscriptions. From interacting with coaches and companies, we can put fuel in this rocket ship and partner with athletes to advertise the platform on social and the mountain. Along with gaining investors, refining pitch decks and a business plan, this will be the main focus of Q1. Acquire users, listen to the customer, and continue building an incredibly valuable platform for everyone involved.
What I am most excited about too is we have such a unique dataset to possibly train one of the world's smartest pose estimation classifiers and integrate ourselves throughout all industries who need pose estimation for their needs. The first obvious industry being action sports broadcasts because very few people have any idea what is going on but also things like manufacturing and construction to prevent injuries and enable more productive building.
The future is exciting and we hope to give more updates soon. This has been a crazy experience and I can't wait for what 2022 has in store. Thanks for everyone's support and feedback so far. Don't be afraid to reach out at brendan at infinitedegrees dot xyz for any questions, comments, feedback, or ideas. To infinity and beyond!
--Brendan
