CoachMe · a coaching marketplace that did not know who it was talking to

A marketplace that did not know who it was talking to

CoachMe was a marketplace for sports professionals, coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and the athletes looking for them. When I joined as a freelance product designer, the MVP was already live and already struggling. The problem was not a missing feature. It was that the home screen did not know who had just opened it.

There were two people using this app, and they wanted opposite things. Professionals were there to sell their services. Athletes were there to find someone to trust with their training. The MVP treated them almost the same on first load. An athlete opening the app for the first time landed on a browse screen with no orientation, no recommendations, and no fast way to filter by the things that actually mattered to them, their sport, their goal, their level. The app asked a beginner to behave like an expert before it had earned a second of their attention.

Onboarding as the matching engine

The fix was not a cleverer algorithm. It was a better first conversation. I designed a short onboarding flow that opened on first entry and asked athletes what they were training for, what kind of support they needed, and where they were in their experience. Low friction, a few steps, easy to finish.

Those answers were not stored as preferences and forgotten. They fed the home feed directly, surfacing the right professionals, the right recommendations, the right featured coaches before the athlete had to search for anything. For the ones who did not yet know what they were looking for, the flow gave them enough structure to find out.

Professionals got the opposite onboarding, built around making their profile complete and visible, nudging them to fill in exactly the fields athletes would later filter by. Two people, two first experiences, one system underneath.

One dashboard per role

Onboarding was only the first meeting. The returning experience had the same underlying problem, state scattered everywhere. Athletes could not see their upcoming sessions, their progress notes, and their messages from a coach in one place. Professionals were running their bookings out of a pile of notifications, with no single view of their schedule or their clients.

The unified session dashboard pulled that together, one surface per role. For athletes, the next sessions, the recommended next step, the messages that needed a reply. For professionals, the day's schedule, the client history, the booking requests, the earnings at a glance. The point was simple. Opening the app should feel like arriving somewhere with a purpose, not landing somewhere you have to reorient yourself every time.

Two years, two versions

The engagement ran two full years, across two major releases. The first version was about stabilising the core, fixing the home screen, shipping the onboarding, and settling a coherent visual language. The second went further, expanding the tooling professionals had, refining the athlete journey against how people were really using it, and evolving the brand so it could stretch into new coaching niches, fitness, nutrition, mental performance, without the design system fragmenting underneath.

The numbers moved. Support load dropped between twenty and thirty percent from the first version to the second, which is the clearest signal you can get that an interface has started to explain itself. And the professionals changed how they used the app. They stopped treating it as a place to be listed and started running their bookings and their clients through it every day. On the vendor side of a marketplace, that shift, from passive listing to daily tool, is what product-market fit actually looks like.

What design can do, and what it cannot

CoachMe was a self-funded startup with a small, committed team. The design did its job. Users grew, engagement improved, the matching worked. What did not hold was the business underneath it. The monetisation, the sales velocity, the commercial path, none of it scaled the way the team had planned.

CoachMe shut down in 2025.

I keep this one on purpose. A well-designed product can grow a real user base and earn genuine engagement, and still close, because design cannot substitute for a business model that works. Those are two separate problems, and knowing where the first one ends is part of what makes a designer senior rather than just good. Shipping something people genuinely used, and then watching it close for reasons that had nothing to do with the screens, taught me more than a clean success would have. Both kinds of ending are real, and I would rather tell you about this one honestly than dress it up.