The conventional startup wisdom is to find product-market fit through rapid iteration with end users. In enterprise SaaS — especially in regulated sectors like sports governance — that playbook needs adaptation.
Start with the Gatekeepers
In sports, the buyer is rarely the user. Federation CEOs and Sports Authority Directors control procurement. But their operations staff — register managers, competition coordinators, IT leads — are the people suffering daily with broken workflows.
We spent our first six months running paid discovery workshops with operations staff at three federations. We documented their workflows in painful detail. We prototyped solutions and showed them in the next workshop. We never talked budget. We just solved problems.