Why we chose the Elk Valley, and the Ghostriders, for our Canadian launch.

A nationwide Canadian launch would spread a young product thinly across a country the size of a continent. Fernie does the opposite. Within a few blocks there are independent cafés, restaurants and bars, accommodation and tourism operators, shops and local services, rental and guiding businesses, a hill, a rink, and a calendar of festivals and events running through the year.

Almost all of them share the same commercial reality. They live on reputation, on recommendation, and on whether people come back. They also serve two audiences at once: a year-round resident population who know them well, and a much larger visitor population that turns over constantly. That combination is exactly what Revilicious is built to read, and it is unusual to find it packed this tightly into one place. It gives us both halves of the product, customer insight for independent businesses and feedback intelligence for events and experiences, inside a single market we can get around in a day.

The Ghostriders play twenty-five home games this season, and the same building fills again and again with the people we need to reach: residents, visitors in town for the weekend, the owners of the businesses we want as customers, the organizers who run other events in the valley, the volunteers, and the people whose word carries weight locally. That is repeated exposure across the whole winter, in front of a defined audience, in the market we have chosen.

The club offers more than a logo on a jersey. It sits at the centre of a network of local sponsors, suppliers and partner businesses, which is a route into precisely the businesses we want to talk to. It is also one of Fernie’s most visible recurring live experiences in its own right, which makes it directly relevant to the events side of what we do. There is room to work together through Revilicious.ca, local outreach, content, demonstrations and potentially feedback projects, and we intend to use it.

The first job is recognition. An overseas software company has to become a familiar name before a café owner will try it, and a season of visibility in a building most of the town passes through does that faster than advertising cold into a market where nobody has heard of you.

Then early customers. We want independent businesses, accommodation and tourism operators, venues and event organizers across the Elk Valley actually using Revilicious.ca, and telling us where it earns its place and where it falls short. What we’re measuring is concrete: enquiries we can count, businesses we work with directly, and Canadian case studies with real numbers behind them. Those results decide how, where and how quickly we expand across the rest of the country, and we would rather learn that from one market properly than from ten badly.

The timing helps. After more than twenty years in the Kootenay International Junior Hockey League, the Ghostriders move this fall into the British Columbia Hockey Conference, the province’s new sanctioned Junior A league, approved by BC Hockey in April 2026. Twenty-two clubs across four divisions, playing for the Mowat Cup, with a six-team Kootenay Division that keeps the rivalries close: Fernie alongside Beaver Valley, Columbia Valley, Grand Forks, Kimberley and Nelson. A first season in a new league draws more attention to the building, which does our visibility no harm at all.

Fernie has been a second home to our founder for twenty-five years, since long before Revilicious existed. That is how we knew the shape of the place before we ran any numbers on it: which businesses live on the visitor season and which on the locals, what a recommendation is worth here, how quickly word travels, and how much of the town’s life runs through the rink. There was a Ghostriders game on that first trip back in 2001, which is a pleasing symmetry rather than a business case.

It matters commercially for one reason. We are not planting a flag in a market we have only read about. We expect to be in the Elk Valley for a long time, and to be judged here on whether local businesses find Revilicious genuinely useful.