You might be deciding whether to hire your first employee or keep working with contractors.

You might have a product people enjoy using, but still be figuring out who will pay for it.

Or you might be weighing a funding round against the time, ownership and commitments it would involve.

These decisions are connected.

A hire changes your costs and runway. A pricing decision changes what growth you can afford. A partnership can bring customers while also creating new demands on the product.

Building SportsTech should make room for those connections.

I’m Marcos, a SportsTech founder with over 18 years of experience in marketing, growth and go-to-market. I want this publication to help people work through the practical decisions involved in building a SportsTech company.

That includes:

• Validating the opportunity and deciding what to build

• Working with co-founders, hiring and leading a team

• Winning customers, developing partnerships and retaining users

• Choosing a business model, setting prices and understanding margins

• Managing cash, costs and runway

• Deciding how to fund the company and preparing for that path

• Establishing company foundations and keeping execution focused

The SportsTech context matters too.

A consumer training app, software for independent coaches and a product sold to federations can have very different buyers, product requirements and routes to revenue.

I’d like to understand your context before deciding what to cover next.

What has taken up most of your attention recently? Which decision are you trying to make? What have you already tried?

The survey starts with three essential questions. You can add more context through the optional questions.

Share what you’re working through

Your answers will help shape upcoming articles, practical tools, founder conversations and focused workshops where there is a clear need.

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Marcos

“We can sign if you add this integration.”

It sounds like progress. A customer wants your product and is explaining what would get the deal over the line.

Then you look at the work: an integration, a bespoke report and weekly help from your team. Your next prospect wants a different version of the same thing.

You are adding customers, but your business is becoming harder to operate.

If this sounds familiar, the decision deserves more attention than another demo or a revised proposal. You need to understand which parts of the deal create a repeatable business and which parts create a separate delivery project.

After years building and operating across sports, entertainment and B2B software, the question I would put on the table is:

What exactly are we committing to, and can we deliver it again at a cost that makes sense?

What the bigger contract leaves out

Imagine a SportsTech startup helping padel operators analyse bookings and test offers for quiet court hours. Two operators want to buy.

Operator A uses a booking system the startup already supports. An operations manager will own implementation and use the results.

Operator B has a custom system. It needs a new connector, different reports and more support. Nobody has yet confirmed who will act on the recommendations.

Here is a simplified first-year comparison:

Hypothetical example. The last row excludes acquisition costs, infrastructure, other direct costs and overhead. It is not profit.

Operator B brings 2.5 times the revenue and takes six times the estimated delivery effort. It still leaves more revenue after that labour.

That can be a worthwhile deal. But the additional 200 hours have to come from somewhere. If they delay other implementations, keep the founder out of sales or push back a feature existing customers need, the contract has a wider cost.

There is also an adoption question: who will turn those reports into decisions? A customer can pay and still never build a workable routine around your product.

Before judging the opportunity, change the proposal. Price implementation separately. Confirm the adoption owner. Narrow the reporting scope. Agree what the standard subscription includes.

A difficult opportunity may need a better commercial package before it needs a rejection.

Six questions to answer before you sign

Use these questions on a live opportunity. Write the answers down with sales, product and whoever will deliver the work.

1. What happened that made the customer want to buy now?

A new venue, a deadline or a recurring operational failure gives you something to investigate. General enthusiasm for innovation tells you much less about urgency.

2. What must the customer already have for our product to work?

For the padel example, that could mean usable booking records, access to a supported system and someone authorised to run an offer. Agree how missing inputs will be resolved before committing to a timeline.

3. Who will own the first useful outcome?

Name the person and the action. “The customer will review the dashboard” is vague. “The operations manager will use the booking analysis to select a quiet period and run a test” gives both sides a clearer responsibility.

4. Which promises go beyond our standard offer?

List integrations, reports, training and manual work. Put a scope, owner and price against the material exceptions. Check what sales has implied as well as what the contract says.

5. What evidence suggests we can deliver this repeatedly?

Look for comparable customers who reached value, used the product in the intended workflow and required a sustainable amount of support. Separate proven patterns from estimates and things you hope will become easier.

6. What will we postpone if we accept?

Name the work. A trade-off that stays abstract is easy to overlook when the customer is ready to sign.

If one answer is unknown, make establishing it the next commercial step. A short implementation review may move the deal forward more usefully than another product demonstration.

Use your customers to make the next decision better

Once you have reviewed the opportunity, compare it with recent customer relationships. Include an account that adopted successfully, one that needed unexpected support and one that stalled or left.

Look at buying conditions, time to first value, delivery hours and repeated use over comparable periods. Mark missing data rather than inventing a clean pattern.

Then speak to the people involved. Ask what they did before your product, why they changed and what happened after buying. Let them explain the work your team did not see.

Michele Hansen’s Deploy Empathy provides a useful method for reconstructing those experiences. Its sample interview follows a customer’s previous solution, switching obstacles and eventual adoption. Deploy Empathy

Use what you learn to write a customer profile specific enough to change tomorrow’s sales activity. For our hypothetical startup, that could be:

Priority accounts: Independent padel operators with two to eight venues, a supported booking system and at least six months of usable booking records.

Buying and adoption conditions: A current utilisation problem, a named budget owner and a manager able to run and evaluate an offer.

Standard offer: Booking analysis and an agreed test workflow. Custom connectors and bespoke reporting are scoped separately.

The numerical boundaries are illustrative. Your own account records and product requirements should determine them. Add measured limits for implementation effort and time to value as your evidence improves.

This is the practical job of an ICP: give the team concrete account characteristics and qualifying conditions it can use to allocate effort.

There is an instructive example in Getting Real: Basecamp describes initially focusing its marketing on design firms. The chapter also explains how Campaign Monitor’s focus helped clarify features and distribution. My application to SportsTech is that customer choice should inform the work your company repeatedly delivers. Getting Real

Keep the exception deliberate

You may still choose Operator B. The connector could serve a segment you want to enter. The deal could provide important cash. The implementation could teach you something worth learning.

Make that decision explicit: why this exception matters, how much effort you will invest, what the customer will pay and when you will decide whether to pursue similar accounts.

Ryan Singer’s Shape Up describes setting an “appetite”, an investment limit, before designing a solution. Applying that discipline to an unusual customer request is my recommendation. Shape Up

For this deal, write one sentence:

We will invest ___ hours in ___ because it should enable ___. The customer will provide ___ and pay ___. We will review the result on ___, and we will postpone ___ to make room.

Then put the agreed commitments into the proposal.

Before your next sales call, take one active opportunity and answer the six questions above. Decide whether to proceed, change the terms or establish a missing condition.

That is a useful result even if you never create a more elaborate segmentation framework.

Have a deal like this in your pipeline?

I work with SportsTech founders and leadership teams turning traction into repeatable growth.

If your product is already in market and a new opportunity is pulling sales, product and delivery in different directions, get in touch through GTM Sports.

Send a short description of three things: what the customer wants to buy, what you would need to change, and what accepting the deal would delay. That gives us a concrete starting point to discuss the commercial decision and whether my support fits.

Sources and further reading

• 37signals — Getting Real: Hire the Right Customers. Customer focus, product choices and distribution.

• Michele Hansen — Deploy Empathy: Sample Customer Interview. Understanding previous workflows, switching and adoption.

• Ryan Singer — Shape Up: Set Boundaries. Defining an investment limit before committing to a solution.

These sources inform the method. The SportsTech example and numbers are illustrative; the six-question review is my practical synthesis.

Imagine opening the commercial review with twelve paying customers. That sounds like a useful starting point. Then you look more closely. Three bought a bespoke project. Four arrived through the founder’s former colleagues. Two needed weeks of unpaid implementation. One has already stopped using the product. The remaining two look like the customers you actually want more of.

This is a hypothetical company, but it raises a very practical question. Which of those twelve relationships should determine the next quarter?

I would resist putting them into one growth curve. Each customer has taught the company something. They have not all taught it the same thing, and they may not represent the same business.

Our first two playbooks examined market evidence and the people involved in a buying decision. Once a product is in market, the next job is to understand the evidence already sitting inside the company. A signed contract answers whether someone bought. It takes more work to establish whether you can find another suitable customer, sell a comparable offer and deliver value without rebuilding the process.

Start with the customer rather than the dashboard

There is a reason to do this before increasing acquisition. RevenueCat’s 2026 subscription app report describes a market where nearly 15,000 new subscription apps now launch each month, compared with roughly 2,000 three years earlier. This is evidence about the wider app market, not a count of SportsTech companies. For a consumer product, however, it is a useful reminder that shipping another app does not give you a reliable route to demand. RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2026.

For a business selling software to operators, the equivalent question is more local. Can you identify the next twenty organisations with the same buying situation as your strongest customers? If the answer depends on knowing everyone personally, that needs to appear in the growth plan.

Pull your most recent customers, cancellations, lost opportunities and active evaluations into one working file. Ten or twenty records are enough to begin if that is what you have. They are not enough to establish a universal conversion rate. Keep the sample size visible.

For each customer, record what was purchased, who paid, why they acted then, how they found you and how long the decision took. Add the first useful outcome, the work required to produce it and what happened afterwards. An account with six months of use tells you something different from one that signed last Thursday.

Include costs that sales usually leaves out. A padel operator may pay the same monthly fee as another operator while requiring much more support. A training app subscriber may arrive cheaply through a race community but disappear when the event finishes. An elite team may pay well and still require a level of custom reporting that you cannot offer to the next fifty teams.

Those are different growth questions. Revenue alone will not separate them.

Explain the win before you repeat it

Ask the customer to reconstruct the purchase. I would use a short conversation built around these questions:

• What was happening when you first started looking for a solution?

• What were you using before and why did that stop being sufficient?

• What nearly prevented the purchase?

• What made the first month useful or difficult?

• What would make you continue paying at the next renewal?

These are questions I would use for this review, rather than a published interview script. The principle of learning from past behaviour is central to Michele Hansen’s Deploy Empathy. Her preview also distinguishes interviews about buying, staying and cancelling. Those are separate research jobs, so I would recruit for each rather than interview only happy customers. Deploy Empathy preview.

Keep the founder’s explanation beside the customer’s explanation. If you believe you won because of the prediction model and the buyer says you were the only provider willing to clean their data before the season started, investigate the difference. Perhaps service is an important part of the offer. Perhaps the product is solving the wrong part of the problem. You will not discover that by asking for a testimonial.

A lost deal deserves the same care. Separate a competitor win from a decision to do nothing, a budget deferral and a technical obstacle. They lead to different responses. Another demo will not repair an unavailable integration; a discount may not change a decision that has no internal owner.

Put each relationship in its proper place

I would sort the evidence into four working groups. These are management categories, not a maturity score.

Customers to reproduce. The buying situation is identifiable, the offer is reasonably consistent and the customer reaches useful value at a delivery cost the business can support. Renewal is either observed or still explicitly unknown.

Customers to learn from. There is promising use or payment, but one important part of the process remains uncertain. You may need another buying cycle, a renewal decision or a delivery comparison before committing more resources.

Customers that need redesign. They pay and may be satisfied, but their economics depend on hidden founder work, repeated exceptions or services priced as software. The relationship may still be worth keeping. Its scope and price need attention before it becomes a template.

Relationships to keep outside the growth forecast. An unpaid test, one-off event or warm introduction can be useful. Give it a specific purpose. Do not count it as evidence for a recurring motion until the relevant customer action happens.

The uncomfortable part is that a prestigious account can land in the third group. A smaller customer can land in the first. The exercise is useful precisely because it separates the commercial pattern from how good the logo looks on a slide.

A small example with a different investment decision

Consider a hypothetical company selling booking and retention software to racket sport operators. It has eight single-site customers and four larger groups.

The single-site customers buy a standard package, set up within days and need limited ongoing help. The larger groups pay more, but each has negotiated different reporting, approval and migration requirements. Their contracts look stronger in the revenue report. Their contribution after delivery may be weaker.

There are at least two reasonable strategies. The company can focus on the standard package and improve acquisition among single-site operators. Or it can deliberately build an enterprise offer, price implementation separately and invest in the capabilities larger groups need.

What I would avoid is selling both as one undifferentiated product and asking marketing to produce more leads. That transfers an unresolved business decision into the acquisition budget.

Write the decision in operational terms. Which package gets promoted? Which prospects get qualified out? Who can approve an exception? Which delivery work must be measured? If nothing changes outside the presentation, the audit has not done its job.

Check whether another person could reproduce the result

Take one recent win and give the record to someone who was not involved. Could they explain who should be approached next, what buying trigger to look for, what was promised and which customer action moved the deal forward?

You are not trying to remove the founder from the customer relationship overnight. You are checking how much of the process exists outside the founder’s memory. A warm introduction can remain part of the motion. Its availability, cost and limits simply need to be understood.

For a consumer product, run the same exercise by acquisition cohort. Compare people who arrived through a coach, a training community and search. Look at whether they paid, completed a useful activity and returned when the next relevant activity occurred. Avoid comparing a race cohort after six weeks with a general fitness cohort after six months.

Seasonality matters here. A decline in sessions after the competitive season may be expected. A team failing to use the product during the weeks it was purchased for is a different signal. Define the job and its cadence before interpreting the graph.

The decision I would make this week

Spend a morning rebuilding the evidence behind your last ten customers. Then choose one of four responses: pursue more of the same buying situation, reshape the offer, fix adoption or test a different route to suitable buyers.

Assign one owner and one date to the response. Leave uncertain renewal and acquisition economics marked as uncertain. You can make a useful decision without pretending the company has a statistically stable model.

The next stage of growth should be based on the customer relationships you can support and reproduce. That is a more demanding question than whether the company has traction, and a much more useful one.

I work with SportsTech founders and leadership teams on these commercial decisions, from diagnosing current traction to building a repeatable motion. You can discuss the challenge with me at GTM Sports. Subscribe to Building SportsTech for the next playbook.

One of the most misleading sentences in B2B SportsTech is: “the club loves it.” A club is not one customer. It is a collection of people with different jobs, incentives and levels of authority and they rarely move at the same speed. The performance analyst may use the product every day. The head coach may become its strongest supporter. The sporting director may approve the project. Finance may control the budget, while procurement can still stop everything at the last minute. If we put all of them under the label “customer”, a promising opportunity can look healthier than it really is.

That is why I use a simple buyer map. It separates the user, the champion, the decision-maker and the budget owner. In a small organisation, one person may play several roles. In a league, federation or large club, the four roles may sit in different buildings. Either way, the map forces a founder to see the buying system rather than the person who happened to take the first call.

Why SportsTech buying is unusually easy to misread

Sport creates access. Founders often know coaches, analysts, athletes, club executives or federation staff. That access is valuable, but it can create false confidence. The person willing to meet you is not necessarily the person who can buy. A coach may want better performance data. The head of performance may need to standardise the workflow. The sporting director may approve the initiative. Finance may release the budget. IT may block the implementation. Legal may delay the data agreement.

If you build only for the enthusiastic user, you can end up with a product people love and organisations cannot buy.

The four people hiding inside “the customer”

The user

The user experiences the workflow. They know where the friction is and can tell you whether the product fits the reality of the job. Users help you understand adoption. They reveal what must be fast, simple and reliable. They also reveal why a technically good product may fail after purchase. But users often describe features rather than business consequences. You need their insight without treating every request as a buying signal.

The champion

The champion wants the project to succeed inside the organisation. They make introductions, explain internal politics, protect the initiative when priorities change and help translate your product into the language of the organisation. A real champion takes action when you are not in the room. Someone who says “send me a deck” is a contact. Someone who invites the budget owner, helps shape the business case and tells you what procurement needs is behaving like a champion.

The decision-maker

The decision-maker can approve or reject the purchase. In a small club, this may be the CEO or owner. In a league, federation or enterprise supplier, approval can involve several people. The decision-maker may care less about the feature set and more about risk, strategic alignment, implementation effort and credibility.

The budget owner

The budget owner controls the money. This role is often discovered too late. A team agrees that the product is valuable, but nobody knows which budget should fund it. Innovation pays for the pilot, while operations would need to pay for the contract. Marketing benefits from the data, but IT owns the platform. If the budget source is unclear, the opportunity is not qualified.

The hidden roles

Four roles form the core map, but enterprise SportsTech sales often include three additional forces:

• Blockers: IT, legal, procurement, security or data protection.

• Beneficiaries: teams that gain value without using the product directly.

• Influencers: trusted advisers, league partners, investors or existing vendors.

These roles do not all need separate messaging. They do need to be visible.

Map a live opportunity, not an imaginary account

Do not create a generic organisation chart. Start with one live account. For each person, record:

• Role and function.

• What outcome they care about.

• What risk they perceive.

• What evidence they need.

• Their influence over the decision.

• Their next action.

Then ask five uncomfortable questions.

1. Who feels the cost of the current problem?

The person with the most pain is not always the user. A commercial director may feel missed revenue while a CRM manager experiences the manual work.

2. Who can make this a priority?

Budget does not move because a problem exists. It moves because someone gives the problem priority relative to everything else.

3. Where does the money come from?

Name the budget, its owner and its timing. “The club” is not a budget.

4. Who can quietly stop the project?

Many deals do not receive a formal no. They disappear in security reviews, data questions or internal handovers.

5. What happens after a successful pilot?

If the pilot sponsor and renewal buyer are different people, involve both before the pilot begins.

The same message will not work for everyone

The same product should not be presented in the same way to everyone. For a user, lead with the workflow: less manual work, faster analysis, clearer decisions. For a champion, lead with change: why the organisation can implement this now and how they can build internal support. For a decision-maker, lead with outcomes, risk and strategic fit.

For a budget owner, lead with the economic case, the cost of the current approach and the size of the commitment. This is not about inventing four value propositions. It is about expressing one value proposition through four relevant lenses.

How to use the map in discovery

Ask questions that expose the process without making the conversation feel like an interrogation:

• Who else is affected when this happens?

• Who would need to support a change?

• Which team normally pays for this kind of solution?

• What would need to be true for this to become a priority?

• Has the organisation bought something similar before?

• What usually slows a decision like this down?

• If a pilot worked, who would approve the next step?

Do not wait until the proposal to ask these questions.

What I would check in the next sales call

Take your five most active opportunities and map the roles. If you only know the user, the next step is not another demo. It is stakeholder discovery. If you have a champion but no budget owner, build the economic case together. If innovation owns the pilot but operations must own renewal, bring operations into the design now.

If the decision process remains invisible, reduce the probability you assign to the deal. A pipeline is not just a list of interested organisations. It is a set of buying processes you understand well enough to move forward.

Where a good deal often stalls

Consider a fan-engagement tool introduced by the digital team. The user wants better campaign data and the champion wants to modernise the fan experience. But the decision-maker is protecting a wider CRM programme and the budget owner sees the tool as an optional marketing expense. More enthusiasm from the digital team will not solve that gap. The founder needs a different commercial case and probably a different conversation.

Use this on one live deal

Write four names beside the opportunity: user, champion, decision-maker and budget owner. If you cannot name someone, turn that gap into the next question you ask. Do not let “they” remain a stakeholder in the CRM.

I publish Building SportsTech for founders trying to turn good products into buying decisions. If you need help untangling a live buyer map or stalled pipeline, GTM Sports is here: GTM Sports.

One pattern keeps coming up in my conversations with early-stage SportsTech founders.

The product exists. There is a vision. Sometimes there are even a few early customers or pilots.

But one question is still surprisingly difficult to answer:

Who should we actually sell to first?

And that question is broader than it looks.

For some SportsTech companies, the answer might be clubs, leagues or federations.

For others, it could be gyms, sports retailers, brands, wellness operators, employers or hospitality businesses.

And for many consumer SportsTech products, the real opportunity may sit with athletes, fans, runners, parents, coaches or specific sports communities.

Founders often start with an assumption about their ICP. Sometimes that assumption is right. Sometimes it is simply inherited from how they originally imagined the product.

So I built something to help pressure-test it.

SportsTech Finder is a free market discovery tool for SportsTech founders.

You tell it:

1. what you sell

2. where you want to grow

3. who you think you sell to

And if you don’t know your ICP yet, that’s fine too. You can simply ask the tool to help identify the most plausible ones.

SportsTech Finder then researches current public market signals and returns five opportunities worth investigating, including:

1. why the opportunity may fit

2. the buyer or audience to target

3. a commercial or acquisition angle

4. the public evidence behind the recommendation

The objective isn’t to tell you that these are qualified leads.

They aren’t.

The objective is to give you a better starting point for GTM research than a blank spreadsheet, a generic list of famous sports organisations or an ICP based mostly on intuition.

It works for both B2B and B2C SportsTech.

And I’ve deliberately kept it simple:

Free. No signup. No email required.

→ Try SportsTech Finder at sportstechfinder.app

This is still an early version, so I’m particularly interested in where it gets things wrong.

If you’re building a SportsTech company, run your product through it and tell me:

Would you actually investigate any of the five opportunities it gives you?

That’s the feedback I’m looking for.

Need deeper GTM support? → gtmsports.tech

Subscribe now

When I look at an early-stage SportsTech roadmap, I can usually see where the team feels safest. It is in the product column. There is another integration to complete, another dashboard to tidy up, and another feature that would make the demo easier to sell.

I understand the attraction. Product work leaves evidence behind: a screen, a release, a ticket moved to done. A week spent speaking with potential customers may leave you with nothing quite so presentable. Sometimes it leaves you with an uncomfortable answer: the problem is less urgent than you thought, the person who loves the product cannot buy it, or the budget belongs to a department you have never met.

Those are not wasted weeks. They are often the cheapest weeks in the life of the company. Before adding more product, I would want evidence in four areas: the problem, the customer’s current behaviour, the buying system and the commitment someone is prepared to make. Interest is encouraging. Evidence changes what you do next.

Four kinds of evidence worth collecting

Compliments are not evidence. “This is interesting” is not evidence. A friendly club executive accepting a demo is not evidence. Even a pilot can be weak evidence if nobody defines what happens after it. Useful market evidence changes the probability that a customer will act. For an early-stage SportsTech company, I would look for four kinds of evidence.

1. Problem evidence

The problem must be specific, recurring, and important enough to deserve attention. Ask about the last time it happened. What triggered it? Who was involved? What did the team do? How much time, money, risk, or frustration did it create? What happened when they did nothing? A problem described in general terms is still a hypothesis. A problem reconstructed from recent behaviour is evidence.

“Clubs struggle with fan engagement” is too broad. “Our membership team exports three lists every Monday, manually removes duplicates and still cannot identify which lapsed members should receive an offer” is usable. The second statement gives you a workflow, frequency, owner, and consequence.

2. Behaviour evidence

Important problems create behaviour. Customers build spreadsheets, hire agencies, add people to a process, tolerate bad software, ask an intern to do manual work, or simply accept a costly outcome. The current workaround tells you more than an opinion about your proposed solution. If nobody is doing anything, one of three things may be true: the problem is not important, the organisation has accepted it, or the person you are speaking with does not own the consequences.

Your job is to understand which one.

3. Buyer evidence

The person who uses a product may not be the person who wants it. The person who wants it may not control the budget. The person who owns the budget may still need procurement, IT, legal or data approval. In sport, this distinction matters because organisations are often small in headcount but complex in decision-making. A performance analyst can love a product and still have no path to purchase. An innovation manager can sponsor a pilot without owning the operational budget required for renewal.

You need to identify at least four roles:

· User: who works with the product.

· Champion: who wants the change to happen.

· Decision-maker: who can approve the purchase.

· Budget owner: whose budget pays for it.

Sometimes one person fills several roles. Do not assume it.

4. Commitment evidence

The strongest evidence involves a cost to the customer. That cost does not need to be a full annual contract. It can be time, access, data, internal introductions, a signed pilot agreement or payment. The useful question is: what did the customer agree to do next? A prospect who says the product is exciting but will not introduce the budget owner has given you weak evidence. A prospect who shares data, schedules a technical review, and agrees a decision date has given you stronger evidence.

A simple scorecard for the next decision

Score each category from zero to three.

Problem

• 0: We believe the problem exists.

• 1: People confirm it in general terms.

• 2: Several people describe recent examples and consequences.

• 3: The same pattern appears across a clear customer segment.

Behaviour

• 0: We do not know what customers do today.

• 1: They say they would like a better solution.

• 2: They use a workaround or pay for an alternative.

• 3: The workaround is frequent, costly, and owned by a named team.

Buyer

• 0: We only know the user.

• 1: We have a possible internal champion.

• 2: We understand the decision process and budget source.

• 3: We have tested this map in several real opportunities.

Commitment

• 0: Positive feedback.

• 1: A follow-up meeting or demo.

• 2: Access to data, stakeholders, or a structured evaluation.

• 3: Payment, a signed pilot, or a commercial decision with a date.

The maximum score is 12. The purpose is not to create a scientific valuation of the company. It is to expose where confidence comes from. A score of nine built mostly on compliments is weaker than a score of six built on repeated behaviour and a paid test.

What I would do before touching the roadmap

Before committing to another product sprint, write down the assumption that could still make the product commercially irrelevant. Then run a seven-day evidence sprint: Day 1: choose one narrow customer segment and one problem. Days 2–5: conduct ten conversations focused on recent behaviour, the current workaround and the buying process. Day 6: score the evidence and compare patterns.

Day 7: make one decision. Continue, narrow the segment, change the offer or stop the planned feature. The output of the week is not a longer list of requests. It is a better decision. Product progress matters. But before adding more product, make sure you are reducing commercial uncertainty as well.

A pattern I would watch

A team hears that coaches want faster video analysis and immediately starts building a richer dashboard. The useful question is what coaches did after the last match when the analysis arrived too late. Did they stay late, ask an analyst to export clips, use a different tool, or simply move on? The answer tells you far more about urgency than a positive reaction to a demo.

Before Monday’s product meeting

Pick the assumption on the roadmap that would be most expensive to discover was wrong. Then define one customer action - sharing data, introducing the budget owner, accepting a paid test - that would give you meaningful evidence this week.

If this is where your company is stuck, I work with early-stage SportsTech teams on customer evidence, positioning and GTM. You can find the details at GTM Sports. And if you want the next playbook, subscribe to Building SportsTech.