Hi, I’m Benjamin.
Physicist, climbing teacher and routesetter in Vienna. This is why I built ClimbSync.
Vienna, Austria · Climbing since 2019
I was never much of a social butterfly. I liked being around people, but making the first move was always the hard part. Climbing fixed that. For me, bouldering gyms turned out to be one of the easiest places in the world to meet people: you keep showing up, you start trying the same problem as the person next to you, and before long you have a crew. So somehow even an introvert like me ended up with a big pile of climbing friends.
I fell hard for it. I was doing a master's in quantum physics at the time, and climbing slowly took over everything else. I started teaching it, and then I couldn't stop: indoors and outdoors, trad and multipitch, every discipline I could get my hands on, bolting new routes on rock, setting in gyms, and even trying to help establish the sport back where I grew up in Ghana. The more I did, the deeper into the community I got.
There was a catch, though. All those friends came with about five different group chats, spread across three apps, a handful of loosely traded phone numbers, and a lot of “we should climb again soon” that never actually happened. Overwhelmed by the options, I would usually just go on my own and hope I ran into someone, or write into the one chat my closest partners were on.
“How hard could that be to build, I thought.”
Then the idea hit me. If we were all in one place, sharing a simple calendar where you could say where you were climbing and when, most of this would just disappear. No group-chat gymnastics, no awkwardness over messaging someone you haven’t spoken to in a year. You see someone is at a gym on a day that works, and you tap join. How hard could that be to build, I thought. That naive weekend project turned into a year of doing nothing else. I put my job and my studies on hold, and for a long stretch even climbing took a back seat. Everything went into making this real. What started as a bare shared calendar has slowly grown into something I hope becomes the home for the social side of climbing.
It’s early. There are bugs to fix and a long list of things I still want to build, and for now I’m doing all of it myself, with no outside funding. If ClimbSync is useful to you, tell me what works, what doesn’t, and what’s missing. If you like it, share it with the people you climb with. It’s just me right now, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
And if you’d like to help in another way, you can buy me a coffee.
Want to talk about ClimbSync?
Have questions, feedback, a partnership idea, or an interest in helping build it? Get in touch.