The pivotal moment in building Rinkly came when a beta coach told us: "This looks great, but I'll try it when I have time to get everyone set up."
That's when we realized: we were building the wrong thing.
We had sketched out a beautiful onboarding flow: coaches sign up, invite their skaters, skaters create accounts, parents get access, everyone connects, and then, finally, you can start scheduling. It looked great in Figma. It would have been a disaster in reality.
That coach never came back. We'd created a commitment hurdle so high that "later" became "never."
The Friction Trap
Traditional scheduling platforms follow a pattern that seems logical: build your network first, then unlock the tools. After all, what's a scheduling platform without people to schedule?
But this creates three invisible problems:
The coordination tax. Before you can do anything useful, you need everyone else to act. You send invites. You wait. You follow up. You explain. You're managing adoption instead of managing your schedule. Your brain keeps track of who's joined, who hasn't, who needs reminding - cognitive overhead before you've gotten any value.
The commitment barrier. When setup requires convincing others, "I'll try this tool" becomes "I need to coordinate a group project." Most people abandon tools that demand social effort before delivering personal value. The platform disappears into the mental category of "things I'll do when I have time" - which means never.
The loss aversion paradox. Every day you don't use the tool, you're losing potential benefits. But you can't use it until others join. You're stuck watching time slip away while waiting for coordination that may never happen. Eventually, staying with your old system (even if it's imperfect) feels safer than risking the setup investment.
We were building a social network when coaches needed a tool they could use right now.
Worse: we'd made the first impression of our product not "this makes my life easier" but "this requires work from me and others before it maybe helps."
That's backwards.
The Local Profile Insight
What if coaches didn't need to wait for anyone?
What if a coach could sign up, create profiles for their skaters, and start scheduling sessions in the next five minutes? No invitations. No coordination. No waiting.
The insight was simple: treat profiles like contacts, not accounts.
When you add someone to your phone contacts, you don't wait for them to "accept" being in your phone. You just add them. You control that information. It exists to help you do your work.
That's what local profiles are: roster entries that live in your workspace. You create them, you control them, and they're immediately useful. They're not social network accounts waiting to be claimed - they're your working data.
But here's what makes them powerful: they're not limited either. These local profiles can:
- Appear on your schedule and calendar
- Have sessions assigned to them
- Track attendance, progress, and payment status
- Store private coaching notes and preferences
- Be visible to other coaches when you collaborate on sessions
- Eventually be "claimed" by the actual person if they want their own access
The coach gets immediate value. The parent or skater gets optional access when it makes sense. Nobody's held hostage.
You start working immediately. Connection becomes an optional upgrade, not a prerequisite.
Not a Social Network (On Purpose)
Here's the difference that changes everything:
Social networks optimize for growth. They need you to invite people, because more users = more value for the platform. Your success metric is how many connections you make.
Rinkly optimizes for getting work done. We need you to schedule sessions, because that's the actual job. Your success metric is how many kids are on the ice.
When a coach creates a local profile for "Sarah, 8, beginner freestyle," they're accomplishing real work: putting Sarah on Thursday's 4pm session, noting she's working on waltz jumps, tracking attendance. That's valuable immediately - no network required.
Later, if Sarah's parent wants visibility? The coach can share access. The parent clicks a link, sees Sarah's schedule, gets notifications. No signup friction, no password to remember unless they want one. The value was already created; the parent is just joining something that already works.
Another coach wants to collaborate on a session with Sarah? They automatically see Sarah's profile in that shared session context. Not because Sarah "connected" with them, but because the work naturally brought them together.
The tool serves the people doing the work. It doesn't hold the work hostage until a network forms.
This flips the traditional model: instead of "build your network, then you can work," it's "do your work, and network effects happen naturally when useful."
How It Works in Practice
Here's what this looks like from a coach's perspective:
Day 1, 20 minutes in: You've signed up, added your rink, and created profiles for your current roster. You schedule this week's sessions. You can already see your calendar filling up. The tool is working. You got value before investing in coordination.
Day 3: One parent asks "when's Emma's next lesson?" Instead of texting back, you send them a link to Emma's schedule. They click it, see the calendar, bookmark it. Done. They didn't need to create an account or remember a password. The information is just... there.
Week 2: Another coach at your rink asks if you want to partner on a group session. You add them to the session, and they immediately see all the participants. No "can you invite everyone to my platform?" No duplicate data entry. You're both just looking at the same session. Collaboration happened because it was easy, not because you planned for it.
Month 2: A parent asks "can I get notifications when the schedule changes?" You enable their access. They claim their profile, and suddenly they're getting calendar syncs and updates. But here's what didn't happen: their data didn't migrate, nothing broke, you didn't lose history. The profile they're claiming has been working for you for weeks - now they're just taking ownership.
The coach never stopped working. Each step added convenience, but none of them were blockers. Value came first. Coordination came later, when it made sense, in small optional steps.
This is how humans actually adopt tools: try it, use it, see value, invest more. Not: invest heavily upfront, hope it pays off later.
The Benefits We Didn't Expect
Once we removed the network-first requirement, several advantages emerged that we hadn't anticipated:
Privacy becomes natural, not complicated. When you don't require everyone to create accounts, you've automatically solved the privacy problem. A coach can manage their roster without exposing anyone's information publicly. Parents who don't want another account don't need one. Kids who are too young for accounts are never in that awkward position of "you need to sign up." The default state is private; sharing is opt-in.
Adoption compounds instead of stalling. In network-first platforms, if two people don't sign up, everyone suffers. In local-first design, if two people don't engage, everyone else continues working fine. The tool's value doesn't decrease when someone opts out. This means coaches actually recommend Rinkly to other coaches - because they're not asking them to convince their entire roster first.
Real-world complexity fits naturally. A parent might have view-only access to one kid's schedule, shared management of another, and no access to a third (different family situations). A skater might train with three coaches who all see different subsets of information. These messy real-world scenarios aren't edge cases - they're just how the permissions naturally shake out when people control their own workspaces.
Collaboration happens spontaneously. Two coaches discover they're both working with the same skater? The profiles just work across both contexts. No "let me add you to my network" or "did they accept your invite?" The infrastructure is already there; collaboration is just pointing two people at the same data.
People invest gradually, matching their confidence. Start with skepticism? Just add your roster and see if you like it is 5 minute commitment. Seeing value? Share a schedule link with a parent - no risk to them, convenience for you. Fully committed? Claim profiles, enable payments, integrate your calendar. Each step is optional, and earlier steps don't become waste if you don't continue.
Not a Social Network, Never Will Be
This is a commitment worth stating explicitly.
Rinkly will never have:
- Discovery features designed to grow the network
- Metrics that measure how "connected" you are
- Feeds showing what other coaches are doing
- Growth mechanics that reward inviting more people
- Any feature that works better when more people join
Rinkly will always have:
- Tools that deliver value to a single coach working alone
- Privacy-first defaults where sharing is always opt-in, never required
- Collaboration that emerges from work, not from networking
- Respect for people who want minimal platform engagement
- Features that work identically whether you have 3 users or 3,000
If you can accomplish your actual work without requiring others to join, the platform is serving you - not itself.
We're optimizing for coaches who schedule sessions, not for user growth metrics that look good on a dashboard. Those are fundamentally different goals, and platforms that try to serve both end up serving neither well.
The Lesson
The best product decisions often look like removing features, not adding them. But really, you're removing barriers.
We didn't build a network. We removed the requirement that you build one before you could work.
We didn't build complex onboarding. We removed the friction between "I want to try this" and "I'm using this."
We didn't build social features. We removed the assumption that your productivity depends on everyone else's participation.
What remains is a tool that matches how your brain wants to work:
You see value immediately. You make small commitments that compound naturally. You control your workspace and share on your terms. You collaborate when it emerges from work, not when a platform orchestrates it. You invest more as your confidence grows, not before.
This isn't altruism - it's alignment. When coaches can start working in five minutes and see immediate value, they stick around. When they can recommend Rinkly without requiring others to change their behavior, they actually recommend it. When the tool works whether someone has three skaters or thirty, adoption happens naturally.
Humans don't adopt tools that demand heavy investment before demonstrating value. They adopt tools that respect how they actually think, decide, and act.
That's not a social network. That's a tool designed around human psychology, not platform growth metrics.
And it turns out, when you build for how people actually work instead of how you wish they'd behave, they show up and stay.
That's what we learned from letting coaches create local profiles. Not that we built a clever feature - but that we finally stopped fighting human nature and started working with it.