MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

video clips and my sponsors loved it. Some pros understood it better than others—Sansalone was one who understood the whole game, and how much exposure you could get. Kevin Sansalone was a professional snowboarder and filmmaker. Kevin: We used it to promote film premiers in other towns. We’d show up in Banff and the snowboard.com members there would have tons of people come out, and lots of girls. Whistler was a sausage party and suddenly we were getting all these girls coming to premiers. We joked that it should have been a dating site, but it was everything—social media, chatrooms, dating, promotion. People were using it for ridesharing to the hill, or finding places to stay—like Airbnb but just crashing on couches for free. Dano: It started out as just a bunch of our friends but then it broadened the scope of snowboarding in ways I couldn’t imagine. I remember planning a trip to the Kamchatka Peninsula and I was on snowboard.com talking to a girl in Russia who was giving us hints on how to put the trip together. This was before Google, when information was one-on-one, so it felt really DIY and punk rock, digging for info from regular snowboarders on the other side of the world. Dave Birnie was the marketing manager for Timebomb Trading. Dave: Once one guy was on it, everyone was.That was howwe communicated. You’d get into the office, turn your stuff on and go to snowboard.com. See who looked at your profile. It was addictive—the bad parts of social media were already there. Colin: At one point I was genuinely addicted to snowboard.com. I would wake up and check my page/ messages—whatever it was called before the term ‘feed”—and go down the rabbit hole for hours. At one point, Dano came to the city and gave me shit and told me to get off the computer and get back to my roots and actually go snowboarding. Maybe he saved me from becoming a social media victim before Facebook and Instagram turned the whole world into victims. Thanks, Dano! Kyle: Some industry brands understood it right away. They would pay for connections or content or to have their riders featured or host events with us. Endeavour Snowboards was a company that totally got the tech, they created vlogs, mini-series shot on Nokia phones, they made a ton of content. At the same time, we were getting traffic and selling banner ads and campaigns. Adam : I think that was our biggest struggle. Being accepted by the snowboard brands. Rick: The snowboard industry was never interested. You would think they’d return our calls—their own pros were begging them to talk to us, but they never did. Our revenue came from third-party brands that wanted to be associated with snowboarding, not from the industry itself. Kyle: There was money coming in, I had a credit card to just go have fun. Driving around in a big branded F-350. It was awesome—pull into a parking lot at any resort and there’d be a flood of people around us, all stoked. Dave: I know we bought some banner ads on there but it was so long ago that no one looked at it as a media site. Brands saw it as shit-talking and hitting on girls and they didn’t know how to make money on that. Once they started doing pro interviews that changed a bit, but it was still hard. Kevin: Snowboard.com was our outlet, teaching us about digital and putting stuff online. And they were as authentic as any brand. They gave back to the community and you’d see them on the hill. As they expanded, they moved out of the house and into an office space in Function Junction (Whistler’s industrial park). I remember seeing all these desks, it felt like there were 50 people in there. Like, whoa, these guys are getting ready for a takeover. By 2007, snowboard.com had over a million members but other non- niche social media sites were beginning to lure users away. Add in a global economic meltdown and it made for difficult times. Rick: As the other social media sites came online we came up with “colonies” which were still organized by your interests—skateboarding, mountain biking, tattoos, snowmobiling, whatever—but you wouldn’t have to create a separate account to go from community to community. I still think that is the way to go. Joe: WheneveryonefromFriendstermigratedtoMySpace,wewantedtobethenext destination. Our goal was to get everyone. When Facebook introduced the news feed we were impressed—to program that is tough, it has to aggregate info from all these other places. Adam got that up pretty quick though. But it all takes funding. You’d get into the office, turn your stuff on and go to snowboard.com. See who looked at your profile. It was addictive—the bad parts of social media were already there. Cashless Inc. Renegade Wildcats Dave Cashen (LEFT) and Pete Anderson (RIGHT), with Dennis Bannock sending it back. RUSSELL DALBY