Track My Academy started in Chennai in 2024 with one sports academy that was buried in paper registers, missed fee payments and attendance confusion. A few of us, all students, decided to build something better as a late-night side project between study sessions. Our hypothesis was simple: sports academies were buried in admin work and needed better tools. That turned out to be true, but it wasn't the useful part. What we actually learned was that finding product-market fit has less to do with proving your hypothesis than with finding out which problem you're really solving.
This is an account of that process as a student team of about seven people in Chennai: 100% bootstrapped (no investors, no grants) and incubated at VELS Innovation Council. It wasn't tidy or linear. If you're a founder, CTO or product manager building for a niche, traditional industry, we hope some of it saves you time. (For the engineering side of the same story, see From MVP to Scale: How We Built Track My Academy.)
What Product-Market Fit Looks Like in Sports Tech
Marc Andreessen's 2007 essay The Only Thing That Matters gave us the classic description of product-market fit: in a great market, the market pulls the product out of the startup.
In sports tech that needs a caveat. Academy owners and coaches aren't typical software buyers. They aren't searching for software. Many run their academies on WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets, and they aren't unhappy enough to go looking for something else.
In traditional industries, the real signal is retention and word of mouth more than inbound pull.
You see it when an academy director who rarely checks email recommends you to another academy without being asked. You see it when coaches push back on the idea of going back to the old register after using the product for a few weeks.
The real competitor is the status quo
There are plenty of academies and coaching centres in India, from large organised setups to small informal ones, and most of them still run on paper, spreadsheets and chat groups. That's a big opportunity and a real obstacle at the same time. You aren't really competing with other software. You're competing with the way things have always been done, and that way is free, familiar and good enough most days.
The Journey
The false start: building everything
Our first design tried to do everything: attendance, payments, performance analytics, parent communication, inventory and scheduling. We assumed breadth would be our moat.
It wasn't. When we walked academy owners through it, the reaction was polite confusion. They kept telling us, in one form or another, that it was too much for what they needed. The few things they cared about were buried among features they would never open.
Lesson 1: A long feature list is not the same as delivering value.
The cut: three workflows
Before building the MVP, we cut the scope down to three things:
- Student enrolment, with parent contact details
- Attendance that a coach could mark in a couple of minutes
- Fee tracking
We also went mobile-first rather than just mobile-friendly. Directors and coaches weren't sitting at desks. They were on the ground with a phone in their hand, often on a patchy connection.
The conversations changed once the product got smaller. Early users stopped asking "how do I use this?" and started asking "can you add this?". That second question is a much better one to hear.
Lesson 2: Solve one problem very well before you solve several problems adequately.
Finding the wedge
Our first attendance screen was a simple present/absent list, and coaches did use it. What made academies stick, though, was what attendance became: scan-in check-in by QR code, biometric or mobile, with real-time alerts to coaches when a player was absent. Attendance stopped being a register someone filled in after the session and became something the academy could act on while it still mattered. Coaches knew straight away who was missing, and the confusion over who had actually turned up went away.
Fee reminders were the other big driver. Chasing fees was the task owners hated most: it's awkward, repetitive and personal. Once invoices and reminders went out automatically and owners could see at a glance who had paid, the product stopped being a nice-to-have. Scan-in attendance with absence alerts is what coaches came to rely on every day; fee reminders are what owners didn't want to give up.
Lesson 3: Your wedge feature may not be the one you expected, or may only become the wedge once you get the details right. Let usage tell you what it is.
Word of mouth
Growth began to come from referrals. We had no formal referral programme and no incentives. Academy directors talked to each other at tournaments and association meetings, and new conversations started that we hadn't started ourselves.
Lesson 4: With product-market fit, selling gets easier. That's not because you've become better at selling. It's because people bring you into conversations you didn't start.
The Signals That Told Us It Was Working
Looking back, no single metric settled it. Several moved together.
- Retention flattened. Early cohorts churned steadily. Later cohorts dropped off a little in the first weeks and then stayed. The product had become part of how they ran the academy each day.
- Feature requests converged. At first every academy asked for something different, which is a sign you haven't found the core. Over time requests clustered around a few themes: better reports, support for multiple locations and branches, and finer control over fee plans.
- Usage became daily. We watched daily active users as a share of monthly active users. For an operations tool, daily use is what matters. A product used once a month is easy to drop.
- Payment friction fell. Early on, getting academies from trial to paid took a lot of follow-up. Later, more of them converted without being pushed, and more chose longer billing periods.
- The "what did you use before?" test. New customers struggled to remember what they had used before. "WhatsApp, I think?" became a common answer.
Lesson 5: Product-market fit isn't a single moment. It's a threshold, and you notice it when several of these signals move at once.
What Worked and What Didn't
What worked
Going deep in one city first. We started in and around Chennai. Partly that was necessity, since a small team can't be everywhere, but it turned out to be one of our best decisions. Staying local meant:
- Academies talked to each other, so word of mouth built faster
- We could visit in person when something went wrong
- We went to tournaments and met coaches, so we understood the market better
That local density made it much easier to grow to more academies through 2025.
Building for the user while selling to the buyer. Directors sign up and pay, but coaches use the product every day. We designed for coaches first: simple screens, mobile-first and little training needed. Directors became champions because their coaches told them it worked.
Async-first support. We couldn't offer round-the-clock phone support, so we invested in short how-to videos, in-app guidance and messaging support. Customers preferred it. Coaches are busy during the hours a phone line would be open, and async support let them ask a question late at night and have an answer by morning.
What didn't work
Bottom-up adoption. We assumed individual coaches would sign up and bring their academies along. That didn't happen. Academies have clear hierarchies and the director makes technology decisions. A coach using the product without the director's buy-in caused confusion, not adoption.
Copying international tools. We spent time on features modelled on US youth-sports platforms such as TeamSnap and SportsEngine. Hardly anyone used them. Our market's needs were different: attendance, fee collection and parent communication mattered far more than league management. International products are useful reference points, but they're a poor blueprint.
Complicated pricing. Our early pricing combined per-academy, per-coach and per-player charges. It confused people and slowed every sale. We moved to a small set of plans based on academy size and the features needed, which is far easier to explain. We made a little less per customer, but deals closed faster and more often.
Lesson 6: Failures teach you more than successes, as long as you write down what you learned and change course quickly.
A Framework for Niche Markets
Here's the sequence we'd follow again. The stages overlap and loop back, and the timings are rough.
Stage 1: Problem discovery
Goal: Confirm the problem is real and painful enough to pay to fix.
- Interview a broad set of potential customers, not just friendly early adopters
- Watch the work in person: we spent days at academies watching how they actually ran
- Measure the pain in terms of hours, money and frustration
Test: Can you describe the problem in one sentence that makes prospects nod? Ours was: "Academy owners spend hours every week on admin that does nothing to improve training."
Stage 2: Solution validation
Goal: Build the smallest product that solves the core problem.
- Put an MVP in front of a handful of early customers, ideally paying something
- Instrument everything: product analytics for key events, plus session recordings to see where people get stuck
- Check in with each early customer every week
Test: Do customers use it several times a week without being reminded?
Stage 3: Feature-market fit
Goal: Work out which features drive retention and which are distractions.
- Run cohort analysis by feature usage
- Cut or hide features few people use
Test: Can you name the two or three features that predict whether a customer stays? Ours were scan-in attendance with real-time absence alerts and automated fee reminders.
Stage 4: Channel-market fit
Goal: Find acquisition channels that bring in customers who stay.
- Try several channels: direct outreach, sports associations, tournaments, content
- Track retention by channel, because customers from different channels aren't equally valuable
- Put more effort into the channels whose customers stick around
Test: Is there at least one repeatable channel where acquisition cost is comfortably below customer lifetime value?
Stage 5: Preparing to scale
Goal: Grow customers faster than you grow the team.
- Make onboarding self-serve with videos and guided setup
- Build a knowledge base and in-app help
- Turn sales from a series of one-off efforts into a repeatable process
Test: Could you double the number of customers without doubling the team?
Lesson 7: Product-market fit is a process, not an event. Don't try to skip stages.
After Product-Market Fit: New Problems
Finding fit was hard. Keeping it while you grow is harder.
More sports and more features. Through 2025 Track My Academy grew from the academy that inspired it to more academies, and the product grew with them. On top of attendance and fees it now covers player reports parents can view on their phone, training plans per batch, performance insights, Android and iOS apps, parent communication that replaces WhatsApp groups, and certificates and ID cards. Every sport has its own vocabulary, schedules and performance measures. We've settled on a sport-agnostic core with configurable, sport-specific layers on top rather than separate products.
Larger customers. Bigger organisations bring more revenue per account, along with longer sales cycles and requests for custom work. We're careful here. We've watched other startups lose their fit by chasing a few large deals that pulled the product away from its core users.
The platform temptation. Merchandise, tournament management, equipment rentals: each is a real opportunity and each is a distraction. Our test is whether it makes existing academies more likely to stay. If it doesn't, it's a new product, not a feature, and we treat it as one.
Lesson 8: After product-market fit, the biggest risk is no longer solving the wrong problem. It's losing focus.
Conclusion
Product-market fit isn't a box you tick. It's a threshold, and crossing it brings a new set of problems. For founders building in traditional or niche industries, here's our advice:
- Solve real operational pain, not aspirational wants. Academy owners didn't want "data-driven insights". They wanted to know who had turned up and to stop chasing parents for fees.
- Go deep before you go broad. Own one city, one segment and one core workflow first.
- Build for daily habits. Products people use every day become hard to give up. Products used once a month are easy to drop.
- Let customers show you the way. Your vision matters, but what customers actually do matters more.
- Expect a slow build. In traditional markets, product-market fit is quiet and built on relationships. It won't look like a hockey stick. It looks like steady progress that compounds.
Sports technology in India is still early, and we're excited to keep building for the coaches, academy owners and athletes we work with. If you run an academy, try Track My Academy or book a free demo; if you're working on product-market fit in a niche vertical, book a free consultation with TrackMy Tech and we'd be glad to compare notes.
TrackMy Tech Pvt Ltd is a product and technology company based in Chennai, incorporated in 2026. Track My Academy, our flagship platform for sports academy management, is live and used by coaches every day. Learn more about it here.