About

I started paddling at a young age – when I grow up, paddling was a big part of our community and our local club was starting to achieve great results with athletes wining world titles and participating in the olympic games.

I’ve never achieved success as an athlete, but that never stopped me from loving the sport – after years as an IT consultant, travelling the world, I knew I wanted to get back out there, back in the water, doing left/rights early in the morning.

By then, I was also curious about the coach role in athlete development and how the correct execution of the training program would impact on the athlete performance! I started GoPaddler as a tool for athletes to get instante feedback on their performance during the session, to ensure they kept within the defined training zones, specially in terms of cadence/stroke rate (something that their existing tools were not providing them).

As I brought features into the app, I understood I had connected two of my life passions in a single project – sports and product development! It become addictive to me to bring new features to the tool and go out there, test them, and finding myself increasingly more focused on paddling and less on the sports watch: I had my own personal coach telling me when to start, stop, give more or less!

At every step of the way, I had the support of our club coach, who understood what GoPaddler could bring to the table – accurate data for all the athletes at a very low cost! He influenced me into move pass the app and into the coach landscape, allowing him to oversee athletes execution – we started by allowing him to organize the team and have access to analytics; We moved on the planning the sessions for each team; We invited other coaches and introduced the heart rate monitor; We later realised that having an impact during the sessions was the way to go, so we moved into real time visualisation and control over the devices!