"Surfing shouldn't be a guessing game. It should feel like the drive home after a session — clear on what worked, and clear on the one thing to fix next."
RideGuide is a surf-coaching app that turns a clip you upload — a phone video from the beach — into a maneuver-by-maneuver breakdown. Bottom turn. Cutback. Snap. Floater. Re-entry. Air.
We built it because every other way of improving makes you review the footage yourself. Which is, uh, the hard part. We flipped that: you hand us the clip, we hand you the notes.
Because watching your own surf footage is brutal. And nobody has time to scrub through the same wave thirty times before sunrise.
Every maneuver we can see gets a name, an approximate timestamp, a short critique of what went well and what was off, and one specific fix.
MP4, MOV or WebM — a wave or two, filmed on a phone. Short and steady beats long and shaky.
No card, nothing to buy. Paid packs are coming later.
You upload. We sample. You hit Analyze. We write the notes. You surf better.
Under the hood, RideGuide samples your clip into evenly spaced still frames, each labelled with its moment in the clip, and asks an AI model to read them the way a surf coach would: name each maneuver it can identify, note what went well and what was off, and give one actionable improvement. It finishes with a short session summary — your strengths, and the single biggest thing to work on next.
Every analysed session is private: only you can open its page, and it never shows up in the community feed. Sharing a session with a coach or your crew isn't switched on yet. If a note misses the mark, "Re-analyze" runs it again from scratch.
The people behind StudyBuddy, and a student surfer who wanted the same idea pointed at surf footage instead of homework.
RideGuide started as a question: StudyBuddy takes a PDF and hands back practice tests, so why can't the same thing take a surf clip and hand back coaching notes? One of us surfs, and knows the problem first-hand — reviewing your own footage is slow and awkward, and nobody tells you what to look for.
So we pointed the same machinery at video. It samples frames from the clip, reads them as a coach would, and writes up each maneuver with one thing to fix. It is early, and we say so: the notes are a good read, not a perfect one, and we haven't formally measured their accuracy yet.
Everything you see here is solving a very real problem for one very specific surfer — and along the way, a student co-founder is learning how software actually gets made.