Magnus Midtbø Sells 97 Products. Climbing's Top App Has 4,530 Ratings

Key Takeaways:

Magnus Midtbø's YouTube channel showed 3.68 million subscribers and 721,538,991 lifetime views on September 1, 2026, the largest climbing channel on the platform
His brand Rúngne listed 97 products in its public Shopify feed the same day, from $15 liquid chalk to $159 utility pants, with zero subscription plans attached to any of them
He also sells a 255-page autobiography at $39 and co-founded the course platform Altitude Climbing with Till Gross, where he teaches Bouldering Blueprint alongside courses from Adam Ondra, Dave MacLeod and Hazel Findlay
The top App Store result for "rock climbing" on September 1, 2026 is Mountain Project at 4,530 ratings. The whole visible category, KAYA at 1,296 and Crimpd at 100, is smaller than a single mid-sized app in almost any other hobby
Climbing is one of the rare audiences that already keeps score in a public, standardized vocabulary, which is the hardest part of a subscription product and the part he would not have to build

A climber spends most of a session sitting down. Bouldering runs on a work-to-rest ratio almost no other sport has. The attempt lasts fifteen seconds. The rest between attempts lasts three to five minutes, twenty times an evening, three evenings a week, in a room where the phone is already out of the pocket because somebody is filming. That is ninety minutes a week of a customer sitting on a mat with a phone in their hand, thinking hard about the exact thing your channel is about. Magnus Midtbø is the person 3.68 million of them watch. He was a real competitor first, a World Games bronze medallist in 2013 and an 8B+ boulderer, before he retired from the circuit in 2016 and became the most-watched climber alive. He then did the thing almost no creator manages: he built real businesses. They just are not open during the rest interval.

What Does Magnus Midtbø Actually Sell?

He sells physical climbing gear, a book, and courses. On September 1, 2026 the public product feed at rungne.com listed 97 items across chalk, chalk bags, tops, bottoms, outerwear and accessories, and not one of them carried a subscription plan. His 255-page autobiography sells at $39, the e-book at $19, and Altitude Climbing sells one-time courses. Nothing in the catalog recurs by itself. The catalog is good. Rúngne's Magdust chalk at $24 and Magball Pro at $18.90 are the products a climber genuinely uses up and rebuys, and the Highballer pants at $149 are the kind of margin most creator merch never reaches.

But look at what every one of those objects has in common. They all sit in the bag. Chalk gets dipped into between attempts and remembers nothing about the attempt, which is the same structural gap a skincare brand hits when the second bottle carries no record of the first. The pants know nothing. The book was written in 2021 and says the same thing to a climber on their first day as to one on their thousandth. The courses are the closest thing to a product that improves someone, and a course is still watched once.

Why Is a Graded Sport the Easiest Audience to Build a Product For?

Because the scoreboard already exists. Every boulder in every gym on earth carries a grade, climbers already speak in that vocabulary, already know their own number, and already want it to go up. Most creators building a subscription product have to invent a metric and then persuade an audience to care about it. In climbing that work is finished before the first line of code. This is the part worth taking from Magnus Midtbø even if you have never touched a wall. The hard problem in a habit product is not the content. It is the number. Duolingo had to teach the world to care about a streak. A finance app has to teach you to care about a savings rate. The metric gets invented, marketed, then defended, and most of them never take. But some audiences arrive pre-scored: chess has Elo, golf has a handicap, running has a 5K time, powerlifting has a total, language has CEFR levels. Climbing has V grades, printed on tape on the wall and argued about in every gym in the world. When an audience already keeps score, the core loop is pre-installed. You are not asking anyone to adopt a new unit of progress. You are offering to hold the one they already keep in their head, which is a far smaller ask than a product that has to start by explaining itself. It is also why GothamChess could build a business on a rating that his audience checks obsessively without him. The number was never his invention. It was his opportunity.

Who Owns "Rock Climbing" on the App Store?

Almost nobody. On September 1, 2026 the top App Store result for "rock climbing" in the US was Mountain Project at 4,530 ratings, published by Adventure Projects Inc. and on the store since 2011. Behind it: KAYA at 1,296, Stōkt at 956, Redpoint at 565, and Crimpd, the best-known training app, at 100. Every one is free to download.

Rating counts are roughly installs multiplied by years on the store, so they measure distribution rather than quality. Read this shelf against that. Mountain Project has had fifteen years and it sits at 4,530. When we ran twelve niche searches through the same endpoint last week, the top result for "chess" returned 814,702. Climbing's entire visible category is a rounding error next to one board game. Two things can explain a number that small: nobody built it, or nobody wants it. Climbing fails the second test comprehensively. It is an Olympic sport with a global gym industry and a single creator carrying 721 million lifetime views. The demand is loud. The shelf is empty. That is a vacancy, not a wall.

Somebody will own the climbing session. It should be a climber.

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The Course Platform Is the Tell

Altitude Climbing is the most interesting thing Magnus Midtbø has built, because it proves he already senses the gap. He co-founded it with Till Gross and stocked it with the sport's actual authorities: Adam Ondra on lead climbing, Dave MacLeod on technique, Hazel Findlay on fear of falling, Alex Megos and Patrick Matros on training, and his own Bouldering Blueprint. A course still delivers everything on day one and then waits. It cannot know that this is week three of a project, that Tuesday's session was cut short, that the climber has been stuck at V5 for four months, or that they have not been in a gym since August. A curriculum is the raw material of a training product, not the training product, which is the distinction Proko ran into with drawing: the surface carrying the daily practice is the business, and it was the one thing not being sold.

What a Magnus Midtbø Product Would Actually Do

It opens on the mat, not on the couch. It knows the session: which problems, how many attempts, which ones went, at what grade, in which gym. That logging has to take four seconds between attempts or it will not happen. It knows the body, because climbing injuries are boring and predictable and finger pulleys go when volume jumps too fast. It sets the week from the last four weeks rather than from a template, because the difference between a climber who reaches V7 and one who stalls at V5 is almost entirely how their volume was structured. And it answers in his register, the specific, unprecious, faintly amused Norwegian voice that 3.68 million people already accept advice in. At $9.99 a month, that is $120 a year from a customer who already pays $90 a month for a gym membership and $180 for shoes. It compounds while he films, and unlike a chalk order it accumulates a record that makes the next month better than the last, which is the entire difference between repeat purchase and recurring revenue.

If Your Audience Already Keeps Score

This section is for creators with 50K or more followers in a graded discipline: chess, golf, running, lifting, languages, poker, music theory, competitive anything. One tell identifies you. Your comments are full of numbers you never taught anyone, because your audience brought them. Run one test. Write down the metric your audience uses to describe itself to a stranger. If that metric exists without you, is standardized, and is something people want to move, you are not in the business of inventing a habit. You are in the business of holding a record somebody is already keeping badly, in a notes app or in their head. Whoever holds it owns the relationship, and in climbing that is currently a route database and a handful of independent developers your audience does not follow.

What Creators Can Learn From Magnus Midtbø

A great physical catalog is not recurring revenue. Ninety-seven products with no subscription plan is ninety-seven separate acquisitions, every month, forever. The chalk sells again and knows nothing. Courses are the curriculum, not the product. The lessons are the hardest content to make and the easiest thing to be beaten on, because a course cannot tell you what to do tonight. An empty App Store shelf in a loud category is the whole opportunity. Fifteen years of the leading climbing app produced 4,530 ratings. That is not a market anyone has won. When the scoreboard already exists, build the ledger. It is the rarest advantage in consumer software and most creators sitting on it never notice they have it. Magnus Midtbø has spent fifteen years teaching people to be better climbers, and built a chalk company, a book and a school out of it. The number his audience actually cares about, the one written on tape at the bottom of the wall, is recorded nowhere he owns.

Every influencer will have their own business.

We build, launch, and run it. You keep the business and the revenue. See how we run apps forever, or who we are.

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Hero photograph of Magnus Midtbø at the 2010 European Championships in Innsbruck by Svíčková, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Product photography from Rúngne's public product feed. App icons and rating counts retrieved from the Apple iTunes Search API on September 1, 2026.

Magnus Midtbø Sells 97 Products. Climbing's Top App Has 4,530 Ratings

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