About Konia

Matthias Perrot racing in a Triathlon Club de Geneve trisuit — Matthias Perrot, founder of Konia, racing in Geneva. Photo by @laura.grateloup

Group chats were never built for clubs

I am Matthias Perrot. I race triathlon and I train with Triathlon Club de Genève.

Spend enough time around endurance clubs, any sport and any size, and the same picture keeps coming back. Club life runs on a group chat and a handful of spreadsheets, and neither was ever designed for the job.

A coach posts Tuesday's session. By the evening it has scrolled past a photo gallery, a debate about tyre pressure and someone's holiday plans. People ask where and when. The coach answers the same question four times, and two members still turn up at the wrong pool.

None of that is anyone's fault. It is simply what happens when you run an organisation inside a messaging app: everything is a message, and messages scroll away.

The same four sticking points

Different clubs, different sports, the same list.

Trainings

Who is coming, where it starts, which coach is taking it. All of it lives in a message that has already scrolled away by the time anyone needs it.

Club races

Who is racing, who is driving, where you meet and at what time. Spread across a chat, a spreadsheet and a handful of phone calls the night before.

Club news

Announcements land between conversations. The people who most needed to read them were away that evening, and nobody scrolls back a week.

Results

Times and places get posted once and then vanish. A season goes by and the club has no record of what it actually did together.

So I built the app I wanted to use

Konia puts all of it in one place: the training schedule with who is coming, club races with the travel already sorted, a news feed that stays readable, and results that stay put.

It does the same for the part nobody volunteers for: renewal dates, who has paid, and a reminder that goes out before a membership lapses.

Clubs keep their group chat, and they should. It is good at what it is for. Everything that matters just gets somewhere better to live.

Konia is used today by triathlon, running, cycling and swimming clubs, and it is still shaped by the same question every time something is added: would this have saved someone a message?

Matthias Perrot

Founder of Konia

Triathlon Club de Genève · Geneva, Switzerland

Why Konia exists