No one buys a TV because it runs on electricity

Back in December I wrote about how I built and shipped Rinkflow solo to iOS and Android. Since then I've been deep in the other half of the job: marketing and go-to-market. Rinkflow generates a complete, age-appropriate hockey practice plan in under sixty seconds, and when I started selling it I led with what I figured was the cool, cutting-edge angle, the part people would find impressive: it's AI-powered. I'm an engineer, so of course that's the hook I reached for. And it was quietly costing me the exact customers I wanted most.

I figured this out slowly, the hard way. Over a few months I cold-emailed several hundred minor hockey associations across Canada and got on the phone with about fifteen of the people who actually run them. The replies and the calls kept surfacing the same kinds of clarifying questions, and eventually one director just came out and said it:

While not AI driven, we are looking for consistency and purpose in the practice planning that takes place.

I had to read that a couple of times before it landed. The thing I kept putting front and centre in my subject line was, to the exact person I most needed to win over, a reason to delete the email.

I'd handed everyone the wrong ruler

Here's the part I'd missed. I knew what "AI" meant inside my own product. It assembles a practice from a curated library of real drills that real coaches have validated. But I don't get to decide what "AI" means in the buyer's head, and to a coach-development director, "AI-driven" sounds like unpredictable. Press a button and who knows what comes out, maybe something it just made up on the spot.

What I hadn't realized was that by promoting the app as "AI-driven" I was inviting people to bring all their own experiences and biases with AI and apply those assumptions to my product. One test user even tried to feed a bunch of their old practice plans into one of the plan generator's input fields, thinking they were training the app on that data, when really the field just wanted a description of what the coach was hoping to get out of their next practice. In retrospect that's completely reasonable. I hadn't explained the product clearly enough.

Positioning decides who you're up against

The fix itself was simple. I went back through the marketing site and the rest of the materials and rewrote the offer around the clear benefit the product actually provides. But the lesson is bigger than one cold email. If I lead with "AI," I'm suddenly standing in a lineup next to every AI tool that buyer has ever been burned by. If I lead with "you got handed a team in September, it's Sunday night, and you've got thirty minutes to plan a practice," there's nobody else in the lineup at all.

The flip side is admitting who the product isn't for, which is harder than it sounds. The experienced coach with his own system and his own binder of drills is the most flattering guy to get a reply from, but he's also just not my customer. When he tells me it doesn't do anything he can't already do, the right answer is to agree with him and ask him to send it to the brand-new coach down the hall who's drowning. Saying no to that kind of interest feels awful, but going broad is exactly how you end up getting compared to everything and picked for nothing.

You're not buying the electricity

AI was never the mistake. It's the engine, and Rinkflow couldn't exist without it. But nobody buys a TV because it runs on electricity.

The Rinkflow software was the half of this project I already knew how to do. The other half, the cold emails and the video calls and the long pile of polite no's, was a crash course in product and sales I could only get by going out and knocking on doors. You can ship the entire stack by yourself and still have basically everything left to learn about why anyone would actually pay for it. It's a stark revelation for someone with an engineering background like mine — I can build almost anything and launch it into production, and marketing and distribution are pillars that matter just as much. Luckily there's never been a better time to go deep on those skills and keep experimenting.