Live since March, 4,000+ gyms, $0 revenue
I train BJJ and kept failing to answer a simple question: where can I actually roll this weekend? Gym schedules live in Instagram bios, stale Google listings, and DMs nobody answers. So I built MatDrop around my day job. First commit January, live since March.
Where it stands today: 4,000+ academies across 39 countries, with real schedules, drop-in fees, and open mats where gyms publish them. Also a lineage tree, because BJJ people care who promoted whom.
Revenue: $0. It's free while I figure out what gym owners would actually pay for. I sent the first events newsletter this week. Total circulation: 1 (me).
Building it solo, posting the real numbers as they come, including the bad ones.
the 'who pays' debate above is worth having but i think it's a step early. right now matdrop is a catalog of 4000 gyms with a demand side of basically zero (circulation: 1, your words). gyms don't pay to be listed, there's no pain in that. they pay the second you can say 'we sent you 8 drop-ins last month.' so the money isn't really blocked on which side to charge, it's blocked on the demand flywheel not existing yet.
and the demand is literally your origin story: someone traveling who needs to roll this weekend and can't find where. that's the acute, time-sensitive pain. i'd stop worrying about pricing and go make that one use case undeniable in a handful of high-density bjj cities, enough that you can point to real drop-ins you actually drove. once a gym sees bookings coming from you, the willingness to pay and the thing to charge for both show up on their own.
catalogs die when they're a shelf nobody pulls from. you've built the shelf, the next job is making people reach for it.
The first thing I would look at is who actually has money in that room. The practitioner uses the app, but the gym owner is the one who would pay, and those are two different people with two different problems. Every time I ignored that gap I ended up with something people liked and nobody paid for.
I am in that exact trap right now, on purpose, so take this as a warning and not advice. I built a tool for creators and priced it at $4.99/mo because that felt fair for the audience. The audience is right, the price is right, and the math is still bad: I need hundreds of individuals to make what twenty businesses would pay without blinking. Your 4,000 gyms are businesses. That is a much better room than the one I am standing in.
The 20 gym test someone mentioned above is the thing I would do this week. Not to verify schedules, but to hear one gym owner say the words "I would pay for that". If nobody says it in twenty conversations, then the answer is a cut of the drop-in fee, not a subscription.
Great story! Building in public is tough but rewarding.
I built a similar niche SaaS — an AI CRM for fitness coaches. Also early stage, focusing on solving a real pain point.
What's your monetization strategy? I'm still figuring out what gym owners would pay for.
Keep posting updates, the community loves transparency! 👏
The "$0 revenue" despite real traction hits close to home. I've got products with genuine feedback and zero sales too. Curious — did you try monetizing early or is this the first time you're thinking about it? I made everything free recently just to get reviews/downloads first, wondering if that's the right call or if I'm just delaying the hard question.
Seconding the manual-validation angle. I built a B2B SaaS and the single biggest unlock was doing the first 10 customer onboarding calls myself before automating anything — you learn which features are real vs. which are just nice-sounding. For MatDrop, that might look like personally DMing 20 gym owners in one city and asking if they'd pay $X to be featured in the newsletter. If none say yes, the model needs rethinking, not more dev.
This feels like a marketplace demand problem more than a database problem. If gym owners are the payer, I’d try selling one tiny outcome before building more: “get 10 qualified visiting drop-in leads this month” or “fill your next open mat.” The events newsletter is probably a good wedge, but I’d make the first version brutally manual: pick one city, DM 20 gyms, promote 3 open mats, and see if anyone cares enough to pay for being featured.
Love seeing people start to expand into the combat sports niche. Building something in the space as well (an app that helps fighters cut weight correctly). All the best to you!
Something I haven't seen in the thread: before picking between a claimed-listing fee and a booking take-rate, I'd price what it costs you to keep 4,000 academies across 39 countries actually current every month. That number quietly decides which model is even available to you.
I ran into this on a previous project, a carpooling app. Route optimization done, server done, and I felt way ahead. Then I started wiring in map services and SMS verification, watched the spend ramp, and realized I'd been thinking at scale technically but not economically at all. I had no idea what my planned revenue model could actually cover.
Concretely: 5-10% of a $25 drop-in is about $2 a booking, so a take-rate needs real repeat travel volume before it covers anything. A claimed profile at $15/mo gets to the same place with a couple hundred gym owners instead of thousands of bookings. Both are reasonable, they just need very different amounts of traction to clear the same cost base.
What does MatDrop cost you a month right now, data upkeep and your own hours included? That's the number I'd want on the table before making anyone prove it with a card.
4,000+ gyms with zero revenue is such a strange spot to be in — congrats and ouch at the same time. I'm curious what the gym owners say when you talk to them: do they see it as "nice free tool" or "thing I'd panic about losing"? Feels like the answer to that decides everything about charging.
The lineage tree might quietly be your best growth lever and it's buried in
the third paragraph. BJJ people don't share directories, but they absolutely
share "here's my lineage back to Helio" — that's identity content. If every
practitioner can generate/share their own lineage card (with a link back),
your users become the marketing.
On monetization: I'd guess the money isn't the practitioners, it's claimed
gym profiles. You already have their schedule data — gym owners will pay to
control it, add photos, and capture drop-in requests once travelers are
actually showing up through you. Directory → claimed listings → booking fee
is a well-worn path (that's how most "where do I X this weekend" products
end up making money).
Circulation: 1 made me laugh. Subscribe link? Genuinely curious how the
events angle develops — events feel like the retention hook a directory
otherwise lacks.
"Breadth isn't demand" is a good way to put it, 4,000 gyms across 39 countries proves you built something comprehensive, not that anyone's willing to pay for it. Taking a transaction fee on booked drop-ins instead of charging for listings makes sense too, that's where actual value changes hands, listings alone are just data. Curious how the 20-gym pilot goes, that seems like the real test of whether this becomes a business or stays a nice directory.
Skipping the monetisation thread since it's well covered, the line that actually stood out was that only single digits of the 4,000 have a real schedule.
That says freshness is the product, and it's also your cheapest experiment: instead of verifying schedules broadly, look at which gyms and cities your travellers are already searching for, and hand-verify only those (a weekly one-tap WhatsApp "confirm this week's open mat?" to those owners beats any scraping).
You'd concentrate real data exactly where demand already exists, which is also where the first paid drop-in will happen. Do you have search-by-gym data yet to tell you where that demand is concentrated?
You already have the asset most founders never get: supply. Gym owners won't pay for a listing, they'll pay for a paying visitor, so take a cut of a booked drop-in before you try selling any subscription. Ten gyms saying yes to that experiment will teach you more about monetization than a year of free listings.
Honestly 4,000+ gyms feels like a much bigger milestone than 0$ revenue right now Solving the discovery problem first seems like the right foundation before worrying about monetization Curious, what's the feature gym owners ask for the most? That might end up being the thing people actually pay for
the $0 with 4000 gyms isn't a failure, it's the classic directory trap: the person with the pain (a traveler who needs a mat this weekend) isn't the person you're trying to charge (the gym owner). and gym owners won't pay for a listing on faith, they pay once it clearly drives paying drop-ins.
so i wouldn't monetize the listing. monetize the drop-in booking. you already have the schedules and the drop-in fees, which is the hard part. add "book and pay your drop-in here" and take 5-10% of the transaction. now you earn exactly when real value changes hands (a traveler actually shows up and pays), the gym gets a booking it wouldn't have had, and nobody has to be argued into a subscription.
directories struggle to charge because they sit next to the money. marketplaces do fine because they sit in the middle of it. you're basically one "pay here" button away from being the second thing.
This solves a problem that feels obvious once you say it out loud. I'd be curious to know what percentage of the 4,000 academies have verified/current schedules versus data that's scraped or manually added. Keeping that fresh seems like the biggest moat if you can crack it.
The contrast between 4,000 gyms and zero revenue immediately raises an important question: are these gyms active users, listed locations, data sources, or potential customers? Each interpretation tells a completely different story about traction. If thousands of gyms are already represented in the product, the next challenge may be turning that coverage into a reason for gym owners or members to pay. What behavior currently proves that people receive value from MatDrop, even before revenue: searches, bookings, profile claims, messages, or repeat visits?
The interesting challenge isn't helping practitioners find places to train—it's identifying the reason gym owners would see MatDrop as essential rather than another directory. I'd keep validating whether your long-term value comes from attracting more drop-ins, strengthening gym operations, or serving the wider BJJ community in a way existing platforms don't.
Drop-ins. Every gym owner I've talked to wants the same thing, more people on the mat. The other two are downstream of that.
That makes sense. The interesting thing to watch then is whether gyms eventually describe MatDrop as a "way to get more visitors" or as "a reliable channel for filling empty mats." The language they use will probably reveal whether it becomes a directory or a growth tool.
The 4,000-gym database is less valuable than one verified schedule that produces a drop-in. Let 20 gyms claim their profile, confirm this week's open mat, and add a booking link; charge only when a traveler books. If bookings happen, transaction fee versus subscription becomes a real decision. If not, directory breadth isn't demand yet.
That's mostly the plan already, I just started at the other end. Built the practitioner side first because the pain was mine. Gym owners are who'd eventually pay. And yeah, breadth isn't demand. 4,000+ listings and the ones with a real schedule were single digits last time I counted. Gyms can already claim their page, bookings don't exist yet. Something like your 20 gym test is probably the first real paid experiment.
Bookings not existing yet is useful; don't build them for the test. Let 20 claimed gyms verify one schedule, send each traveler as a manual email or WhatsApp referral, and charge only after the gym confirms a paid drop-in. That isolates willingness to pay before payment plumbing can hide the signal.
Congrats on sticking with it and sharing the real numbers. One thing I immediately wondered about isn’t the size of the database, it’s whether the value is strongest for practitioners or gym owners. BJJ practitioners clearly benefit from finding accurate schedules, but revenue probably depends on identifying who feels the pain strongly enough to pay for solving it. Validating where that willingness to pay actually exists could end up being just as important as expanding the directory itself.
I specialize in independent product validation for early-stage SaaS. I evaluate products from a genuine first-time user’s perspective, uncover where trust, clarity, or usability break down, and produce professional walkthrough videos alongside structured findings that founders can use to improve onboarding, product adoption, and marketing. Want us to talk about that?
That's the right question and my current answer is gym owners. A practitioner saves ten minutes, an owner gets a paying drop-in. Which one pays for the tool feels obvious, but I haven't made anyone prove it with a card yet. On the validation offer, I'll pass for now, thanks for looking though.