Pistl

Innsbruck & Salzburg · Season 25/26

Find
your
crew

A mobile web app that answers one question for young skiers in Austria: who is riding today, where, and can I join? Today that gets negotiated across a dozen WhatsApp groups. Pistl puts it in one place.

Try the prototype Read the codeBuilt by Philipp Fuchs, 17, Saarbrücken

Early access is open: create an account or sign in.

The problem

Seasonal workers

Four months on the mountain, all the free time in the world, and no local network.

Solo locals

A season pass and nobody free today. Skiing alone is the fallback, not the plan.

Split-ability crews

A group with mixed levels that cannot ride together and has to find sub-groups.

Pistl is not a tracking app like Strava, not a location map like Snapchat, and not another social feed engineered to hold your attention. The big platforms are built to keep you scrolling. Pistl is built to get you off your phone and onto the mountain with the right people. It is the coordination layer of the day, and it is crew-first.

The product

Every screen is clickable in the prototype, running on sample data.

Pistl Feed screen — Feed
Who is riding today, where, and how many spots are left.

Pistl Public events screen — Public events
Open rides anyone can join without knowing a single person yet. The resort is public, the meeting point unlocks on joining.

Pistl Map screen — Map
All resorts in the region, with riders split by riding style, not just a headcount.

Pistl Carpool screen — Carpool
Two-sided board: drivers offer seats, riders ask for one.

Pistl Crew screen — Crew
Friends, squads and chats that are attached to a ride or a carpool.

Pistl Add people screen — Add people
Search by name or handle, send a request, answer the ones you got. Minors are flagged, because that changes what accepting them means.

Profile

Season record: days, resorts, streak, stamps and a regional ranking.

What actually works

This is a working prototype, not a launched product. The honest split:

WorkingSign-up, e-mail confirmation, sign-in, sign-outSupabase, server-side sessions, protected routes

WorkingRow Level Security on the profile shellwith negative policy tests (pgTAP)

PrototypeFeed, Events, Map, Carpool, Crew, Profilerendered from a local fixture file, no database behind them

PrototypeMeeting-point visibility ruletested logic in the frontend, not enforced on the server yet

NextPayments for trips and carpool seatsthe revenue model above: designed, not built, nothing is charged

PrototypeOnboarding answers (region, style, name)written to browser storage and never read back

NextRides, crews and chats on a real schemaneeds tables, RLS and negative tests first

NextSnow depth and fresh-snow alertsOpen-Meteo covers this: verified, free, no key

NextLift status per resortno single free source; per-resort feeds or community input

LaterVertical metres, heatmapsneeds a native app, because iOS suspends background JS in a PWA

Business model

Coordination stays free. All of it: feed, map, carpool board, crew, public events. A coordination tool is worthless if half your crew is behind a paywall, so charging for it would break the product before it earned anything. The money comes from transactions that already happen today, badly.

3% of the volume handledUniversity ski club tripsmain driver

Clubs run semester trips for 50 to 300 people on Excel, a WhatsApp group and private bank transfers. Pistl handles signup, seat allocation, payment, the participant list and cancellations. A trip with 150 people at 300 € is 45,000 € moving through one organiser who is currently doing it by hand.

0.99 € per matched rideCarpool fee

Charged to the passenger, never to the driver, because the whole board collapses if offering a seat costs you something. It also fixes the trust problem: the seat is paid for, so people stop not showing up.

season 2 onwardRegional partners

Ski areas, rental shops and huts pay to reach people who are going there tomorrow. Delivered as an offer inside the feed attached to a specific ride, not as a banner.

14.99 € once per seasonSeason Pass

December to April. Powder alerts and extended stats. A small line, not the model.

The logic is that these people already spend money on the mountain. They buy a season pass, they split fuel in a group chat, they wire 280 € to a club treasurer. None of that needs to be created, only handled properly. That is also why a percentage of a trip beats a subscription: it scales with something that is already moving.

Innsbruck and Salzburg first, then the alpine regions that have exactly the same problem.

How it is built

Stack

Next.js App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase with server-side sessions.

Gates

Lint, typecheck, unit coverage at 80% minimum, production build and mobile end-to-end runs in CI.

Design

A custom design system, not a component library: warm paper instead of another dark UI, four screen-print spot colours, all text pairs checked against WCAG AA.

Accessibility

Keyboard focus, focus traps in dialogs, reduced-motion support and touch targets were treated as requirements, not polish.

Who is building this

I am Philipp Fuchs, 17, from Saarbrücken, Germany. I am still in school: Gymnasium am Schloss, Abitur expected 2027, currently averaging 1.4 on the German scale where 1.0 is the top mark.

At 16, I founded my own business, navigating the extensive legal approval process required for minors in Germany. I provide motion design, video editing and web design services. Pistl is the product I build on the side.

Aug–Sep 2026

Korea Tech & AI Founders Program, a cross-border founder track. German cohort in Saarbrücken, Korean cohort in Korea.

Aug 2026

Silicon Valley Technology and Management Program at San José State University, in the Bay Area.

Jul 2026

Bocconi Summer School, Entrepreneurship Lab in Milan.

Nov 2025–Jan 2026

ODDO BHF Future Pioneers. Built an AI-native multi-agent equity research MVP with an international team and pitched it to the bank's senior management in Paris.

2024, 2025

Techstars Startup Weekend, on the podium twice: 2nd place in 2025, runner-up in 2024.

Pistl is not the first product I have tried to build. PeakBuddy was an earlier ski-app concept I worked through at the Bocconi entrepreneurship lab, and FixItNow was a tradesperson-matching platform I dropped once I understood the marketplace problem. Pistl is the first one I have taken far enough to hand someone a link.

I build with heavy AI pairing. What I own is the product thinking, the architecture rules, the design direction and every call about what does not get shipped. The commits are public, so judge the decisions.

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