Building the product was the easy part

Developers love to believe that building the product is the hard part. We tell ourselves that if we make something robust, with nice UI, good UX and scalable, users will just show up. But it doesn’t work that way.

Building Onpadel was going to be hard, but I knew how to do it. What I didn’t know was how to get a tournament organizer to use it, what was I supposed to say to them? how should I present it? why would they choose it over just keeping on doing what they’d always done?

No amount of clean architecture or robust code makes a user abandon a tool they’ve been using for years. That’s not a technical problem: it’s a trust problem.

So when I launched the product, I got to work. I reached out to organizers and clubs directly through WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and email. I went to tournaments, introduced myself in person, and even offered the first tournament free, with 24/7 support.

That’s when I understood that convincing them wasn’t simply about showing them better software. Many preferred to stick with the tools they already knew, even when they were more awkward. There was distrust, too: why would they trust a new platform? why pay for something they’d been solving for free with paper, Excel or WhatsApp?

I understood that showing features wasn’t enough. I had to show them what they gained from the change, how much time they could save, and why my product was worth it. Before selling them software, I had to demonstrate the value of adopting a different approach.

This was one of the most important lessons the project left me: there’s a part of product engineering that goes well beyond the code and the technologies you use. Marketing and distribution don’t come after you build the product: they’re part of the work from the start.

I still enjoy building products, but today I see the process differently. With AI making it easier and easier to develop software, I think marketing, distribution and the ability to understand the user are going to matter more and more.

In a world where building software is increasingly accessible, another question appears: why would someone pay for your product if they can build something similar on their own and have full control?

Getting people to hear about it, trust it and find value in using it is still another challenge… but that’s a story for another post.