The Signal
I attended two events recently.
One was focused on sport innovation - KTPs, translating research into elite practice, building the connective tissue between science and sport organisations. The other was a broader sports forum where the same word, “sport,” was being used to describe fan engagement platforms, betting infrastructure, athlete health monitoring, and performance science tools, often in the same sentence.
Both rooms were full of smart people, using similar language but discussing very different problems.
That’s the thing nobody says clearly enough about sports tech: sport is not a category. It’s a collection of entirely distinct ecosystems.
And if that’s true - and I think it is - then product-market fit, as a concept, is doing a lot of work it isn’t equipped to do.
The Four-Fits
Chris Peploe put out a framework recently that I think gets closer to the real question than most PMF models do. Before market fit matters, he argues, a sports tech product needs four things: problem fit, proof fit, workflow fit, and ecosystem fit.
It’s a better map than the standard PMF framing, and it names something most founders underestimate: that solving a real problem is the entry condition, not the destination.
But when I sat with it, the brain juices flowed and a few thoughts emerged.
The first is the buyer-user split. Workflow fit addresses how practitioners work but in sports tech, the person experiencing the problem almost never controls the budget. A product can pass all four fits and still stall because the decision-maker has completely different success criteria from the end user.
The second is commercial fit. Ecosystem fit gestures at it, but pricing model versus how sports organisations actually procure is a distinct problem. Annual SaaS, project-based, outcome-linked, equipment-bundled - the wrong commercial structure kills adoption even when everything else works. Sports organisations are notoriously illiquid outside pre-season windows.
The third is timing fit. Sport operates against hard seasonal rhythms. A product can be right on all four dimensions and land at the wrong point in the organisation’s calendar. In other sectors, timing is a sales problem. In sport, it’s closer to a structural one.
The deeper issue: most of these fits are evaluated at the point of sale. But proof fit and ecosystem fit in particular are only testable through sustained deployment. There’s a sequencing problem.
And then there’s Women’s Sport
This is where it stops being a product question and becomes a structural one.
I came across an infographic this week posted my Michelle Colson that made the point concisely.
The gap it maps isn’t a funding gap or an awareness gap. It’s a structural conditions gap. Physiology overlooked in the research base. Financial strain that shapes how and when athletes can engage with technology. Multiple roles - athlete, student, part-time worker - that determine when, where, and how any product actually has to work.
Women’s sport is not a sub-segment of sport. It operates as a different ecosystem with different structural conditions at every level of the four-fit framework.
Workflow fit looks different when an athlete has three hours between shifts, not a dedicated training environment. Proof fit requires an evidence base that, in many cases, doesn’t exist because so little published sports science research focuses exclusively on female athletes. Ecosystem fit involves institutions that are still forming, governance structures that were never designed for this growth stage, and commercial infrastructure that’s being built in real time.
The most dangerous assumption in sports tech right now is that a product which achieves fit in men’s elite sport scales naturally into women’s sport with different marketing. The conditions are different. The problems are different. The buyers and users are often even more separated.
The Question underneath the Question
When sport innovation events talk about ecosystem development and research translation, they’re usually describing one ecosystem. When sports tech forums talk about the market opportunity, they’re usually describing another. And when investors talk about the growth story in women’s sport, they’re often describing a third - the commercial and media opportunity - while the performance infrastructure question goes largely unaddressed.
None of those conversations are wrong. They’re just not talking to each other.
Which means the most precise question a sports tech founder can ask isn’t “does this solve a real problem?”
It’s: for whom, in which conditions, with what evidence, and through which ecosystem?
The gap between those two questions is vast. And in women’s sport specifically, that gap has a structural cause - not a motivational one.
The Takeaway
The next time you hear ‘sports tech’ used as a single category, push back on it - even just in your own head. Ask which sport, which ecosystem, which athlete, and which structural conditions. Because sport isn't one market. It's a set of ecosystems with different physics that needs unpacking.
I would love to know your thoughts on this Issue by commenting below.
Thanks for reading! Nic x
Good piece Nicola - The timing fit observation probably deserves more conversation. Sport operating against hard seasonal rhythms isn't only a structural problem but can be a clear sign that commercial capability in sports tech needs to be built differently from most B2B sectors. Most companies, of course, understand the seasonality.....but still approach procurement conversations at the wrong point in the calendar because their pipeline management likely doesn't account for it systematically.
The buyer-user split points, I feel, at the same root cause. Knowing that the performance director experiences the problem and the sporting director controls the budget is a product insight. But knowing how to run two different conversations with two different sets of success criteria, and keep both moving toward the same decision is, for me, a commercial capability question. The four-fits framework describes what fit looks like but we might need to address who inside the company is developed enough to find it.
An interesting follow-on question could be if the the framework changes if you think about fit as something developed through the quality of the commercial relationship over time, as opposed to being evaluated at the point of sale?