Two of my co-founders are engineers. Early in the build they asked why a coach couldn't get what Slingshot does from a stopwatch and a good eye. That's the right question to ask before you commit to hardware, so we answered it.
We were on a group call, the four of us: Ryan, Kai, Joaquin, and me. The plan was for me to brief everyone on where youth sports wearables were heading and walk through the v1.6 feature set we'd been building toward for weeks.
I opened with what I thought were the strongest features. The Session Load Score, which turns a session's exertion into one number. The jump counter, which tracks vertical and explosive efforts session over session. I expected the team to rally around them.
Ryan cut in first. "Why couldn't a coach just use the eye test for this?" Kai went sharper. "Why not a laser?" He wasn't proposing a feature. He was saying the whole thing could be done with a cheap measuring tool and a stopwatch. That's a different kind of question than "change the algorithm." It's a co-founder asking whether the category needs a dedicated device at all.
Kai kept going. Catapult already ships parent-facing PDFs. STATSports has the enterprise dashboard. Any coach with a CSV export and a free ChatGPT account can make a parent summary in under a minute. So what were we actually adding?
The research wasn't thin. The thesis was real: Catapult's enterprise pricing and STATSports's D1 focus leave an empty price band below $150, and the youth and private-training market lives in that band with nothing built for it. The data backed it up.
What I hadn't done was put that thesis in terms two engineers would find compelling. To Ryan and Kai, a market gap isn't a feature. A deliberately simple v1, one clean Session Load Score, a jump counter, a parent-facing summary, sounds underbuilt until you connect it to the business reason simple is the right call.
So I pulled up the research I already had.
Why v1 is deliberately simple
I walked the team through what the research actually said: why the gap exists, and why a simple product is the right answer to it.
The pattern that mattered was retention. Private trainers lose clients between months three and six, and the reason is almost always the same. Parents stop seeing their kid's progress. The progress is usually there. It just isn't visible. No product at our price makes a kid's development into something a parent sees every week.
A trainer running fifteen clients a day doesn't want a dashboard with forty metrics. A parent paying for premium private training doesn't want a CSV. The trainer needs one number a parent understands without explanation. The parent needs a weekly summary they can show their kid and believe.
v1.6's feature set wasn't the problem. Session Load Score, jump count, movement zones. They're the right features because they're the simplest ones that answer the retention problem. Complexity is a v2 conversation. We can add metrics later. We can't add them now and still ship something a trainer will actually use this summer.
When I framed it that way, the conversation changed. The same features that sounded underbuilt fifteen minutes earlier became the obvious starting point once the business reason was on the table. v1.6 stayed. The features stayed. What got sharper was how we explain them.
Ryan and Kai asked the right question, and they asked it early. We kept the feature set. We sharpened the reason it's the right one. A trainer either agrees this summer, or we're wrong about the gap.