I'm Building the BJJ App I Wish Existed

I train BJJ. And every week, the same thing happens.

My coach spends time building a curriculum — threading techniques together, planning progressions, picking the right sequences for each belt level. Then class ends, everyone slaps hands, and 90% of what was just taught evaporates into the parking lot.

I go home and scroll YouTube for 45 minutes looking for the armbar he just showed us. I find some version of it from a different instructor with different grips and a different setup. Now I'm confused. Or worse — I don't look at all, and the next time I see that technique is when he teaches it again in four months.

This is the problem I keep running into. Not the teaching — my coaches are great. It's the bridge between what gets taught and what I actually retain.

The Market Is Three Disconnected Tools

Right now, if you run a BJJ gym, your software stack looks something like this:

Gym management (Gymdesk, Kicksite, Zen Planner) — handles billing, scheduling, maybe attendance. Zero curriculum features. No content delivery.
Instructional content (Submeta, BJJ Fanatics, AOJ+) — great libraries, but completely disconnected from your gym. I'm watching Gordon Ryan, not reviewing what my coach taught in fundamentals class.
Student tracking (Marune, BJJ Buddy, Kimura App) — isolated personal logs with no connection to the coach.

Three categories. None of them talk to each other. None of them solve the actual problem: getting what happened in class into the student's hands before they forget it.

What Matside Does

Matside is a mobile app (Flutter, iOS + Android) where coaches build and deliver curriculum, and students get structured review and progression tracking.

The core mechanic is simple: after class, a coach taps through a pre-built curriculum to tag what was taught. Takes less than 60 seconds. Students immediately get a recap — "Today you covered: armbar from closed guard, triangle setup, hip escape drill" — with linked reference videos for each technique.

That's it. That's the product thesis. The app that puts a coach's curriculum in every student's pocket within minutes of class ending wins this market.

Everything else builds on that:

A technique library organized by position, type, belt level, and custom tags
Belt progression tracking with real multi-criteria logic (not just attendance counters — coaches define their own promotion requirements)
Class scheduling with attendance that doubles as a learning log
A student dashboard with streaks, milestones, and progress visualization

Why This Matters Beyond Convenience

BJJ has a roughly 90% dropout rate before blue belt. People quit because they feel lost. They can't see their own progress. They don't know what they're supposed to be working on. They train three times a week for eight months and still feel like they're drowning.

I've watched it happen to training partners. Visible progress drives retention. If a student can open their phone and see "28/40 classes, 10/15 techniques mastered, 4/6 months" toward their next belt — that changes the psychology. That's not a student who quits because they feel like they're going nowhere.

And for parents in kids' programs — which represent around 40% of revenue at many academies — the app replaces the constant "how's my kid doing?" texts with a real progress dashboard.

The Business Model

Coaches pay. Students are free. SaaS subscription at three tiers ($29, $49, $79/month), positioned below full gym management platforms since Matside complements rather than replaces billing tools.

All features included at every tier. No nickel-and-dime add-on pricing. The only difference is scale — number of instructors, student capacity.

Payments run through Stripe. No in-app purchases, no Apple/Google tax on the core subscription. Web-based checkout for subscriptions, Stripe handles the billing lifecycle.

Where It Stands

Pre-implementation. The MVP spec is written. Tech stack is locked: Flutter with BLoC/Freezed, Firebase backend (Firestore + Cloud Functions + Auth + Storage), Stripe Billing for payments. The architecture decisions that matter — the ones that are hard or impossible to change later — are made.

I'm building this because I live the problem every time I step on the mat. I know what students need because I am one, and I'm tired of the notes-app-and-YouTube workflow that everyone at my gym runs on.

More updates as this thing takes shape.