I build software I wish existed

Every Monday and Wednesday I’m on the hockey field at HC Tilburg. Weekends are match days. I coach a team. And for years I managed lineups, substitutions, and match notes with a combination of paper, WhatsApp groups, and half-broken spreadsheets.

It’s not that there weren’t any apps. There were plenty. Generic sports apps that kind of worked for football but felt wrong for hockey. Apps that wanted €15 per month for features I didn’t need. Apps that required everyone on the team to create an account before you could do anything useful.

I just wanted something simple. Pick your lineup, drag players into positions, track a match. Offline, because hockey fields don’t have great wifi. That’s it.

So I built it.

The itch

That’s the whole story, really. TeamHockey started because I was frustrated. Not because I did market research or spotted a gap. I was standing on a field, in the rain, flipping through a notepad trying to remember which substitution pattern I planned, and I thought: this is stupid. I have the skills to fix this.

I spent years managing digital projects for clients and running an e-commerce business. I was decent at it. But somewhere along the way I noticed that the work I enjoyed most was building things for myself. Not because a client asked for it. Not because there was a deadline. Because I had a problem and I wanted to solve it.

Why own problems are better problems

When you build for a client, you’re guessing. You do your research, you interview users, you make personas — but you’re still guessing. When you build for yourself, you’re not guessing. You know exactly what’s annoying because you’re annoyed by it right now.

I know what a hockey coach needs during a match because I am one. I know which screen needs to load in two seconds because I’m the one standing in the rain trying to check it. I know the substitution timer needs to be loud because I can’t hear my phone over 22 players and a handful of parents on the sideline.

That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from user interviews. It comes from being the user.

Small and independent

red spark is just me. No team, no investors, no board meetings. I work 50% on an e-commerce business, and the rest of my time I build my own software. It’s not a startup. It’s not going to be a startup. It’s a workshop.

I build things, I ship them, I improve them based on what I notice when I use them myself. If something works, great. If nobody cares, that’s fine too — at least I have a tool I actually use.

This is heavily inspired by people like Pieter Levels and the folks at 37signals. Build for yourself. Ship early. Stay independent. Don’t raise money for something you can build on a Tuesday evening.

What’s next

TeamHockey is live on TestFlight. King of the Pitch is too — an app for coaches who end every training session with a match. It turns those end-of-training games into a season-long competition: track which team wins, and next time the app builds balanced teams based on the rankings. Different teams every time, always competitive. I’m working on more tools for coaches and sports teams, all coming from the same place: problems I run into myself.

I’ll write about the process here. What I’m building, what works, what doesn’t. No polish, no strategy — just notes from someone making things.

If you’re a coach or a player and you’ve felt the same frustration with the tools available: I’m building for you. Or rather, I’m building for me — and I think we want the same things.