josem

MatGoat (https://matgoat.com/en/): a software for managing BJJ and martial arts academies that it's both easy to use and have everything they need like assistance tracking, payments, communications, etc.

It's going quite well so far with growing MRR each month.

Lately, I've been trying to focus more on marketing, and sales. I might try ads soon as well.

A software for managing BJJ and martial arts academies that it's both easy to use and have everything they need like assistance tracking, payments, communications, etc.

It's called MatGoat[1], and it's going quite well so far. Nowadays I'm working more on the marketing/sales side.

[1] https://matgoat.com/en/

Keep working on MatGoat (https://matgoat.com/en/) - management software for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and other martial arts' academies.

I train BJJ and kept hearing the same pain points from academy owners regarding attendance tracking, communications, missing payments, etc.

So I built a tool for martial arts academies in 2024 with belts progression, automated payments, attendance tracking, and a tablet check-in system. Nowadays I'm still onboarding new academies every week and working a bit more on the marketing side to keep growing.

https://josem.co/

Amazing to see such a long tenure in that competitive market. Thanks for sharing!

I wonder, apart from the normal exposure/distribution on App Store, what are the main strategies you've used for marketing?

Building MatGoat (https://matgoat.com) - management software for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and other martial arts' academies.

I train BJJ and kept hearing the same complaints from academy owners regarding attendance tracking, comms, missing payments, etc.

So I'm building a tool for student tracking with belts progression, automated payments, attendance-based promotion criteria, and a tablet check-in system.

Focusing on Spanish-speaking markets first since it's completely underserved. Currently onboarding early academies, and will market it in the US/UK soon.

Author here :)

I’m sorry this article felt that way. My intention was not so much saying that you cannot be in touch with that human side if you’re not a parent. It was more about celebrating the good parts of parenting when it comes to how they change you.

That said, I can understand how this could be seen how you shared it, thank you for your thoughts!

Author here :)

No, it's not AI-generated. I write for fun, and I don't see the point of using AI to do it.

The image, like many others I use to illustrate my articles, was obtained from pexels.com.

Thank you for the feedback!

Thank you! :)

Thank you, you’ve made my day with this comment!

Hey!

Author here :)

It was more a metaphor from that moment when I was writing in fact in silence and the lack of any external input / voice telling me whether something I'm doing is good or bad but I know what you mean, perhaps using "isolation" would have made the article clearer, thanks!

Thank you!

I built a basic first version that a company started to use in 6 months during weekends and early mornings and then another 6 months to get to the current version.

I think it could be done faster but I also have a family so I took my time :)

Hey, I'm Jose, the author of the article.

Thanks so much for this comment. Let me know if I can answer any questions.

Finding the time is hard, yes. In my case it was important to have small goals I could accomplish each week so I wasn't overwhelmed with all the things I needed to do.

A lot of Jiro's values are in Japanese society too, so you can get an idea of those ancient values that define that society from the documentary. That was what I was trying to emphasize with my comment.

But yes, I agree, the circumstances were very important and without them Jiro wouldn't be the way he is.

Thanks for the response!

I have watched the documentary, and I strongly recommend it. It shows some values in Japan that are being loosing in new generations there and in other countries.

That said, Jiro is an example of many things in their craft but his life also have a lot of drawbacks, like he barely saw his sons when they were children and if a social event comes up he tries to spend as less time as possible to get back to work.

Yes, same here. I haven't created the service, but I discovered it while I was checking the code of a prototype made with Foundation (http://zurb.net/zurbwired2011/projects/zurbwired2011/frame/p...) and I thought it could be useful.

Glad to help!

Self-discipline is a must, it doesn't matter the project you are working on, the motivation goes down from time to time.

Anyway I think you are young, really young actually, so keep starting projects, one way to keep them interesting is to see those projects as solutions to problems and if that helps you out with something real that would be perfect (like a to-do lists manager).

If you can't keep working on the same project for too long, well, don't worry, you've learnt english and you are smart enough to know some things at 15 (many proffesional developers didn't know how to program at that age, and even later). So try to study more, learn new things and eventually you'll start to create things.

To be more productive try to exercise, that will help you to be more self-disciplined and it'll give you more energy.

I think most contributions to open source projects come from a necessity, so you can start to create web apps, a todo list, a chat, whatever you want, and eventually when you start to use open source projects (usually gems if you use RoR) to build something you'll probably see some features that would be cool to have.

Even some whole open source projects are created because someone needed something and after googled it didn't find it.

If you can make money and/or help someone while you are building those real projects would be awesome, if not, create new things from scratch, and eventually you'll create your open source projects or at least you'll make pull requests because you needed something for that project.

I hope this helps, thanks for sharing your story :)