Kinetic Web App
Kinetic
Kinetic is a web app for organizing one game of padel or football: create it, share a link, let people vote on the hours they can play, close it as a group, and keep track of who paid. It began as a social network for sport and was cut down to five things after nobody in the room could say what would make someone open it.
87%
OF PORTUGUESE PADEL CLUBS SIT BEHIND ONE BOOKING PLATFORM
4
QUESTIONS, MAXIMUM, BEFORE THE GAME EXISTS
0
ACCOUNTS NEEDED TO CREATE, VOTE, CLOSE OR PAY
Challenges
The booking layer is taken. The coordination layer is not.
Court booking in Portugal is already consolidated: AirCourts, with half a million registered users and 1,500 courts, was bought by Playtomic in 2023, and the group now sits behind 87% of Portuguese padel clubs with €110M raised to defend it. Competing for court inventory means competing with the company that owns the inventory. What nobody owns is the layer above it, which is getting eight people to agree on when the game actually happens.
A new product also has nothing to show: no logos, no testimonials, no download count. Everything persuasive has to come from the product itself, and it has to persuade two very different people. The admin already has the group, the venue and the players, and only wants the weekly poll to stop. The guest opens a link pasted in a group chat and will not do more than write a name and mark the hours they can play.
Process
Making a stranger trust a pasted link
The whole funnel is one link in a group chat, so the page it opens has to do what a landing page does: say what the game is, who called it, and what single action is being asked for, above the fold. Creation asks at most four questions and guesses the rest. Nothing, not creating, voting, closing or marking a payment, requires an account, and the account only arrives at the one point where losing a browser would lose every game ever run.
Where there is no social proof, the design has to manufacture confidence. Every state reads from shape, weight, icon, label and position before colour, so a colourblind guest is never guessing: the three-way vote separates can, if needed and cannot by icon and by fill. Six surveyed competitors (Monzo, OKX, Deezer, Clubhouse, Gojek, Public) only lift a pill for the chosen option. Kinetic fills it solid, because here the choice is a commitment and not a tab. And browser chrome with a real URL went into all 31 screens, because a link you can see is a link you can trust.
Outcome
One link, three gates, no account
The funnel ships short on purpose: open the link, mark the hours, and the game climbs the steps of state as a group until someone closes it and the payments are marked off. Five things survived the scope cut, which are create, share, vote, close and keep a light history. Everything else designed over the previous six weeks, discovery, maps, groups, matching, chat, in-app booking and in-app payment, stayed cut until real usage asks for it.
What is still open is on the table, not hidden. The desktop has been with the founder since September 9th and nothing is wired yet. Ten product questions are unanswered, among them pricing without accounts, who may mark a payment done, and whether an admin link separate from the invite link is enough. Three of them are already baked into the design as best guesses and labelled that way. The venue photography is still a placeholder, waiting on whoever runs the game to bring their own.
